Sun

Jonathan Schwartz writes about finance as a technology business

I remember a dinner I had a while back with the CEO of a global financial services firm. As one of his first acts as CEO, he’d cancelled an enormous outsourcing contract, and I’d asked him why - his response has stuck with me. ‘Banking is a technology business. Pure and simple. I can’t win if I don’t have my own team.’

My suspicion that Sun will not continue to support PostgreSQL after purchasing MySQL was unfounded:

From Jonathan Schwartz blog::

What happens to your commitment to PostgreSQL?

It grows. The day before we announced the acquisition, and within an hour of signing the deal, I put a call into Josh Berkus, who leads our work with Postgres inside of Sun. I wanted to be as clear as I could: this transaction increases our investment in open source, and in open source databases. And increases our commitment to Postgres - and the database industry broadly. The same goes for our work with Apache Derby, and our JavaDB.

There is one thing that strikes me in the Sun MySQL thingy - what about Sun’s previous commitment to PostgreSQL, where they say stuff like: “PostgreSQL for Solaris 10 is the open source enterprise database platform of choice”?

Tim Bray comments on the deal and totally dismisses any alternatives:

MySQL, you know, in my experience, it, well, Just Works. Runs great on our hardware and OS. Well, OK, GNU/Linux too. What else is there? For databases, nothing that matters.

I am seeing signs in the sky that Sun is making a comeback.

• Textdrive is switching from FreeBSD to Solaris
• Rumors that ZFS might be ported to Mac OS X
• Tim Brays presence and statements on the RoR podcast from Canada on Rails
• Sun makes smart moves like supporting PostgreSQL

And not one of them is related to Java.

It seems that Sun is using James Gosling to spread FUD regarding any technology that competes with Java. He created Java, and he is a techie and techies have high standards and are always honest - right?

He came out slinging against Harmony a year ago, and now he is at it again with Ruby and PHP:

PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems, but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.

Why on earth doesn’t Sun provide a Java Communications API for Linux?

Good thing IBM does.