VizWorld.com

I found this after I came back from GTC, and it’s so absurd that I feel I have to debunk it.  During Oracle’s regular shareholders meeting, Larry Ellison went on the record with this remark:

“You’re going to see us buying chip companies,” Ellison, 66, said yesterday at Oracle’s annual meeting in San Francisco. Acquiring chipmakers would extend Oracle’s push into computer hardware, initiated in January with its purchase of Sun Microsystems Inc., a server manufacturer.

Not too surprising.  As the line between Software, Hardware, and Firmware becomes smaller, it makes sense for Oracle to follow in the steps of companies like Apple and try to bring some of that expertise in-house.  In fact, Oracle began this already in their acquisition of Sun Microsystems.  However, this statement has led some analysts to believe that Oracle may acquire Intel, AMD, or NVidia.

That’s simply ridiculous.  Oracle has $23.6B in cash and short-term investments.  Intel’s just too big to be bought, having a market cap 5times that ($108B).  AMD and NVidia are at least affordable, with market caps of $4B and $7B respectively, but still big enough to be painful.  AMD and NVidia both have completely different markets from Oracle, a merger just doesn’t make sense.

The merger of Sun and Oracle made some sense, as Sun generally provided all of the server and storage systems for Oracle.  Sun owned StorageTek, and provided some pretty significant HPC and Networking assets that really fit into the Oracle “Total Solution” business.  Buying a CPU manufacturer (or a GPU manufacturer) doesn’t offer the same type of cohesion, and where Sun was going down, both AMD and Nvidia are regularly reporting record grown each quarter.

If anything, I expect we may hear about some official strategic partnerships and possibly some stock-transfer, but simply acquisitions are out of the question.

via Oracle Plans to Acquire Chipmakers, Industry-Specific Software – Bloomberg.

Hardware amd, intel, nvidia, oracle

This bit of news only impacts a tiny portion of the readers here, but bears repeating.  As Oracle slowly works its way through the massive collection of Sun projects, they’ve been killing them off one by one.  First there were questions of how Oracle would treat open-source competitor MySQL, then the death of long-time open source project OpenSolaris, and now Sun GridEngine is on the block.

Oracle has “absorbed” Sun GridEngine internally and renamed it “Oracle GridEngine” (OGE) and placed it under a new license that restricts it to only 90-days of free usage in a “trial” arrangement.  From the 6.2U6 EULA:

As selected in your Entitlement, one or more of the following Permitted Uses will apply to your use of Software. Unless you have an Entitlement that expressly permits it, you may not use Software for any of the other Permitted Uses. If you don’t have an Entitlement, or if your Entitlement doesn’t cover additional software delivered to you, then such software is for your Evaluation Use.

(a) Evaluation Use. You may evaluate Software internally for a period of 90 days from your first use.

So you have to be granted an “Entitlement”, which basically means special exception or paid license, to use it beyond that.  It looks like this was done first back in June, and is just now being noticed by the community at large.  Folks are already talking about forking the project into something like “Open GridEngine”, but there are questions about licenses, patents, and general legal safety of such a project.

So, why do you care?  Well, SGE is used by some VFX shops as a queue controlling system.  It’s a pretty nice project, and (at least it used to be) free.  The open nature of it makes it ideal for use on massive renderfarms without custom software or expensive queue-ing solutions.  If SGE is going away, I doubt they’ll wind up buying it from Oracle and instead switch to other options.  SGE is also popular in several university environments (like TACC) because of budgetary constraints, who will now have to find some other option.

What do you think? Do you use SGE?  Will you buy OGE?

… and SGE goes 90-day trial license … « scalability.org.

Science hpc, oracle, sun

A sad day for virtual worlds as two worlds are winding down.  First off is an announcement from There.com that while they are growing in membership, they are drastically declining in revenue.  Sadly, they’ve made the decision to close the doors on March 9th, less than 6 days from now.

But, at the end of the day, we can’t cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There’s nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can’t support itself doesn’t work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were “directionally correct” and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.

We’re very sorry to announce that There.com will be closing to the public at 11:59 PM on March 9th, 2010.

Second is the announcement that Oracle has decided against investing any more development resources into Project Wonderland.  ThinkBalm looks into it and wonders just how long Wonderland can stick around without any further investment.

While Yankelovich said that Wonderland supporters — particularly in the education sector — have stepped up to donate hardware and other resources to the project, these donations aren’t enough to fund substantial new development, marketing, and project coordination. Sid Banerjee of Indusgeeks summed it up this way: “While no big company is backing Wonderland, it would be difficult for Wonderland to compete as an enterprise grade platform. Though we still believe it can thrive as an open source platform for the education sector.”

But while these two products are winding down, not all is bad.  LindenLabs and Second Life are still reporting record growth, and SAIC did just buy Forterra OLIVE, so hopefully users of these virtual spaces will welcome newcomers transitioning from these two dying spaces.

Science deadpool, oracle, there.com, virtual worlds, wonderland