Oracle kills Sun.com after starvation diet
Oracle is killing Sun.com, the online home of Sun Microsystems and one of the oldest dot-com domain names. An entry on the Oracle's OTN Garage says that sun.com will be decommissioned on June 1. The closure comes after Sun's new owner, Oracle, moved most of the content on BigAdmin, OpenSolaris.com, and some sections of Sun …
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So can I buy it?
If it's no longer being used I assume they are going to put it back in the pot - how much I wonder?
Reply to post: ouch
Now you're making me feel really old :(
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Thanks for the reminder of how old I am.
I hate you. I really do.
Re: Reply to post: ouch
It's older than Megan Fox as well.
Surprising (to me) to see how many of those oldest name are still around. (intel, hp, ibm, amd to name a few). dec.com redirects to hp.com now..
and all the URLS will break
Every web page, every HTML documentation page that points to some bit of the Java API, is now broken. Nice
That's already started to happen.
Find any link on Google to docs.sun.com? Follow it, and you'll end up at some Oracle catch-all page, rather than the information you wanted, with no obvious way to find the new link (if Oracle even bothered to retain the information, that is.)
Shame that so many old domains are out of use
dec.com is vaguely still in use by HP.
Octopus.com is up for sale, auctioning having reached almost 50,000 dollars before the auction was suspended a couple of weeks ago because someone started a domain ownership dispute with ICANN.
Mentat.com is just not there, looks like it's owned by someone that's most likely waiting for a cash-in. That's the tragedy with most of the decent single-word domains in the world, some 'investor' (I use that word layered with the most sarcastic venom I possibly can) has usually bought them up, slapped a cheapass portal and some ads on them and a big banner "domain for sale". So now nobody can use them. Bastards.
Well, they _can_...
They just have to dig a little deeper in their pocket for 'em. Hey-ho. First-come-first-served.
B'sides, you didn't really think they'd sit unallocated for long before some Joe Normal just happened to trip over 'em, did you?
Will there be an anniversary?
For the day the Sun.com died?
Not to mention MySQL
Anyone noticed the fork "MariaDB"?
It's a community-driven fork of MySQL started by a group of users who were concerned about MySQL's well-being since Oracle now owns it.
The beauty of open source, if a company takes over the code base, and you don't like the direction they're taking the project, you're free to fork it and go it alone.
Forking
@Stuart Longland:
Or by the sound of things, fork the code and leave Oracle to go it alone.
Or
Or by the *sound* of things, just... fork Oracle and go it alone.
Why ?
To keep a domain registration costs under $20 per year so why kill the domain - just have a redirect to the Oracle home page. (Unless they are thinking of selling the domain name to the Sun newspaper (a low end rag in the UK).)
Already redirecting
They've already done that - www.sun.com redirects to www.oracle.com/us/sun/index.html.
Re: a low end rag in the UK
but is that Aussie Rupert, owner of said, red top rag lower than Larry?
@Duncan Macdonald
Probably Oracle's desire to totally eliminate any traces of the-company-formerly-known-as-Sun from everything that is under their control. This is what usually happens when a company gets taken over, the management would probably say "to build loyalty". The small outfit that I joined just before it was taken over by Sun had to quickly eliminate all traces of its former name, by order from the top. But their former domain name is now registered to myself - it's not valuable, but just good to keep for sentimental reasons.
Sad
sun.com has been such a contstant. It's been my "test the connection" URL for 15 years.
domain
I bet Oracle will keep the sun.com domain registered to them. They wouldn't want someone to buy it and use it for anything, they seem intent on completely wiping the Sun name from history.
I noticed "java.sun.com" started re-directing to an Oracle URL some time ago.
SOP
Many years ago there was a lovely supercomputer company called Thinking Machines. Sadly, along with most of the other supercomputer startups of the time, they didn't survive. But as they failed their assets were sold off. Sun got most of the hardware expertise, plus the compilers, some of which surfaced in a limited manner. The service division was sold off, and the last functioning component, which was the data mining software operation, still called Thinking Machines, was bought by Oracle. So curiously Oracle now owns essentially all of the old Thinking Machines.
Thinking Machines had domain names, tmc.com, thinkingmachines.com, and think.com. Oracle kept the last of these. It is now their K-12 education site. Nary a trace of the once glorious supercomputer company that made arguably the sexiest machines on the planet.
Lovely (64-bit) jubblies
I always got a smile out of thinking how much incoming sun.com traffic was from proper UK geezers wanting to check out gorgeous Courtney from Croydon (34-26-32) and her in-depth knowledge of large-scale symmetric multiprocessing on SPARC...
Listing
Is it time to have historic URL listings, like the UK has for old buildings? That way, Oracle would have had to get the conservation officer in before they could change anything on the Sun website.
They are already sort of doing this
The internet wayback machine is housed on the Sun campus.
Sun Campus
Which one, the Menlo Park one that Oracle have just sold to Facebook? Or Santa Clara?
Humans!
Don't people get sentimental over the funniest little things...?
I include myself very much in the above ;-)
WTF is a Database company...
...doing buying a hardware and operating system company anyway?
Surely Sun/Solaris had more value as an independant company, rather than being aquired and then brand-obliterated by the fuktards at Oracle?
Re: WTF is Oracle doing?
Actually I don't think Sun had much value, which is why they are no more, but I really don't know what Oracle are up to. They appear to have either cancelled or lost most of the products. They are clearly hell-bent on removing the brands from public view.
That leaves the workforce, I suppose. Presumably they thought that there were a lot of good engineers being wasted on daft ideas and that they could retain enough of them to make the whole exercise worthwhile just as a massive headhunting expedition.
elementary Watson
Open source databases being openly guided/funded/staffed by another Fortune 500 corporation sounded like a loose end needing to be fixed.
Remember?
www.hal.com?
When I worked there before sun, before assimilation,
This had to be the coolest domain attached to my 3 letter email
address. "im sorry Dave......"
Not just web pages
I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure there's a lot of XML that references sun.com. Oracle can expect browser bookmarks and the like to be changed eventually, but the XML will probably live forever.
very sad
Very sad to see Sun go.. It has been a great company, too bad it got taken over by a DBMS company.
US Robotics
Is the one for me - there is nothing that would be more exciting to me(1)(2) than to actually produce robots under that company name. About came unglued when 3com almost sold it to China. Sun is right up there.... spent more time looking through docs than I care to remember during my pizza box/Solaris x86 phase lol. It's hateful to see some of these old school brands fading away and crapola like Facebook/Twitter/Jobs rule the roost.
(1) The passenger transport I was on experienced drive trouble after hitting some NASA space trash just outside this system. It exploded and I was shoved into an iescapepod (as much as Steve would like it, his patents are not enforceable off this planet so ha HA!). I was found by my step-parents and ever since then I await rescue.....
(2). Yes I can be a total geek, however I have sex regularly so it hasn't been that big of a deal since I was a teenager. Helps if you marry a geek lol.
re: WTF is a Database company
A lot of copies of Oracle were running on Sun hardware.
When Sun goes away a lot of IBM, HP, etc salesmen are going to be visiting those server customers and they are also going to be plugging a switch to DB2, SqlServer, etc as part of the deal.
Oracle didn't fancy that
Cease + Desist
In '97 I was sent a cease and desist from Sun for using the suffix "sunsite" in a community domain name.
I find a sick satisfaction that I personally outlived the corporate entity that threatened to destroy me.
What was really funny is that the contact was made via snail mail :)
Oracle know how to profit (screw-up).
OTN is a terrible place to find anything you need. Oracle = fail.
We have given up and are migrating about 80% of our Sun infrastructure at work (about 60 servers) to RHEL on Dell and the rest will move to it once existing maintenance contracts are up.
The RHEL/Dell combo s about 40% of the price and has the features we need, so goodbye and good riddance to ORACLE.
which database?
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Welcome to our nightmare lads and lasses!
As an Oracle DBA, having had to suffer the mess that is Oracle support these days, I still find it amusing to listen to the Solaris admins in my shop bitch about the mess that Sun support is now, since Oracle took it over!
Sad to see sun.com go, like almost all Unix geeks when you need to check a connection out to "da toobs" banging in "ping www.sun.com" was always at my fingertips!
Me thinks...
That the acquisitions aren't over. I'll bet that some Seattle based software company might be interested in the database company that acquired/obliterated a decent OS/hardware company...
So, why do they hate "Sun" brand?
Does anyone have some kind of explanation for Oracle's hate of Sun brand? I mean it really is at pathological levels now.
The breaking of documentation etc. too. People at Oracle, World's second largest sw company can't do some kind of "clever redirect" while BBC News site does it all the time.
Queue ...
... screams from Java developers and server administrators when there XML parsers attempt to locate DTD and schema definitions that for some reason don't have system-local resolution.
In other words: I don't think that Oracle will close off the entire domain, just the usual user-visible parts.
Sun
I always thought the Sun logo was great - very clever.
No whalesong/boutique nonsense here!
A clever logo...
And only *slightly* reminiscent of a swastika too :-)
Oldest domain name?
Anyone know what the earliest continously registered domain name is?
dec.com: 1985
sun.com: 1986
ibm.com: 1986
apple.com: 1987
microsoft.com: 1991
Interesting one there: Apple always ahead of microsoft....
symbolics.com ?
a little research came up with symbolics.com
domain was continously registered for 25 years before being sold off but
also there are a couple that predate dec.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names
Here you go..
>Anyone know what the earliest continously registered domain name is?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names
Looks to be BBN - which is now owned by Raytheon though they haven't killed the BBN references.
ttfn
gg oracle
as if it wasnt painful enough to find relevant support documents allready.
with the move from sunsolve to the oracle support site pretty much every google result that pointed to docs.sun.com became useless since you had to login and search for the damn thing a second time only with an utterly inferior search-engine...
@ Why did Oracle by Sun...
Well... even if you are the worlds third or so richest man, those funky carbon sails on those Americas cup boats don't pay for themselves y'know.
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