Posts by Mark 122

Zuckerberg: I'm 'quite sure' I own Facebook

That's not what is alleged...

According to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/21/ceglia_facebook/ , Zuckerberg signed a contract, in which he got a $1,000 investment for a website "designed to offer the students of Harvard university access to a wesite [sic] similar to a live functioning yearbook with the working title of 'The Face Book'.

According to the previous article : "The contract, due for completion on 1 January 2004, granted Ceglia a 50 per cent stake. For every day past the due date he would be granted a further one per cent, leading to his 84 per cent ownership claim."

This really could be epic. If he did sign that contract, I can't see how legally he could be allowed to weasel out of it.

Solaris, OpenSolaris, and the Oracle wall of secrecy

Not OpenSolaris in production...

I didn't mean they were running OpenSolaris installations. Just that a large number of Solaris 10 (and 8/9 ... still plenty of legacy systems knocking around still!) admins and developers are also part of, or are observing the OpenSolaris community, and are getting nervous about everything Solaris related, not just OpenSolaris. It doesn't exactly engender confidence, and it's going to take a massive effort to recover the the goodwill and interest that had been developing among the wider open source community.

But then, I suspect that Oracle may be quite happy to see Solaris as nothing more than the bottom layer in an Oracle database machine (which it does admittedly excel at). In that case, if they don't see the need for wider data centre adoption, they don't really need a community or open source project.

Even on the "enterprise" front, things aren't rosy, though. Requests for information and clarification are going unanswered, I know of several managers who have had hardware quotes and support tickets ignored, and there's a near total blackout of information from Oracle.

Some of this may well be due to teething troubles trying to mesh the two companies together, but they've had long enough to think about it by now.

Well done, Oracle.

Oracle are doing a superb job of killing Solaris.

They’ve completely alienated and scared off the community around OpenSolaris (check the -discuss group on opensolaris.org forums over the last few months); killed any lines of communication by clamping down on employee blogs and ignoring open letters from highly influential and important community members begging for *any* kind of information. They’ve forbidden Sun/Oracle employees from heading up the Solaris user groups and booted the meetings out of their buildings; turned Solaris 10 into a 30-day trial, and pushed back the 2010.x release of OpenSolaris with no word as to it’s planned release date, or even if it is being continued as a product. People are having support requests disappear into a black hole, and no one at Oracle is being any kind of help whatsoever - presumably because they’re as much in the dark as the public.

As a long-term Solaris user, admin and community contributor, I find this tragic. I know Sun’s new-found open culture may not have been brought in the big bucks they way they hoped, but if they had kept things closed down they way they used to (and Oracle is now reverting to), they wouldn’t have even lasted the last 5 years or so. Oracle also seem to forget that the community around OpenSolaris is not just free-loading open source geeks - it’s also made up of system managers running large Solaris shops. And right now, those managers are running scared. Shops are fleeing Solaris left and right; jumping ship to Linux, AIX, BSD - Anything is looking a safer bet at the moment.