When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems four years ago, it quickly and ruthlessly started tearing out the unprofitable stuff.
Sun was a company run by engineers, a Xerox-PARC-like outfit where a cool idea about the next big thing was all it took to get a budget. But Oracle is run by the accountants. Inside Larry Ellison's company, either the numbers add up, or your project dies.
As it turns out, many of the key ideas behind today's hottest trends were thought up by Sun engineers, but Sun was forced to watch as other companies -- Amazon, Google, and so on, and so forth --- reaped the rewards. Oracle wasn't going to let that happen again.
Except that it has.
As WIRED reported today, the Java development platform is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, as hot web companies grow out of their mid-2000s programming tools and look for something that can help them more effectively juggle tens or even hundreds of millions of users. Invented by Sun, Java is now overseen by Oracle, and yet, as those big web companies embrace Java in such a big way, Oracle is on the outside looking in.
When it was founded back in 2006, Twitter's programmers used Ruby on Rails. But as the service grew, it became clear that Ruby wasn't the best way to juggle tweets from millions of people across the globe. Now Twitter runs on Java, as do large parts of Google, FourSquare, and Linkedin.
Inside these companies, there are thousands of servers running the Java Virtual Machine, or JVM, a piece of software the executes programming code. And the JVM is built by Oracle. But it's available under an open source license, which means the company is fostering one of the hottest trends on the internet, while missing out on licensing fees.
Take LinkedIn. It uses the free JVM, but that doesn't help Oracle's bottom line. "We don't actually use many Oracle Java tools other than Java itself," says Jay Kreps, a principal staff engineer with LinkedIn. "They seem to target enterprise development, which has a pretty different set of needs."
Oracle clearly likes licensing fees. It launched a high profile (and, amongst developers, unpopular) lawsuit against Google, saying that the search giant should pay Oracle copyright licensing fees after building a copy of the Java virtual machine. Oracle lost that case, but it's appealing the verdict.
LinkedIn's Kreps, like others we've interviewed for this story, thinks that Oracle has done a pretty good job managing its Java open source project since it shelled out $7.4 billion for Sun back in 2010. "To their great credit, Java's only gotten more valuable under Oracle's stewardship," says Jonathan Schwartz, the former CEO of Sun Microsystems.
Oracle has actually opened up Java even more -- getting rid of some of the closed-door machinations that used to be part of the Java standards-making process. Java has been raked over the coals for security problems over the past few years, but Oracle has kept regular updates coming. And it's working on a major upgrade to Java, due early next year. But it's hard to tell how much dough Oracle actually makes from the platform.
To be sure, Oracle does have a financial interest in Java. The company makes a lot of money selling an expensive and widely used Java middleware server called the Oracle Weblogic Server. And it makes money licensing Java to companies such as IBM so they can ship it with their servers.
But the widely used open source JVM is not a big money maker. Oracle can make some money from companies that want bug-fixes for obsolete versions, but that's about it. We asked Oracle for a comment on its Java plans on Friday, but by press time Tuesday night, the company still couldn't find anyone willing to discuss this.
For David Blevins, the CEO at Java developer Tomitribe, Oracle's limited financial opportunity is nothing but a good thing. "If it was a bigger money-maker for them, they would lock it down like crazy," he says. "It's almost to our advantage that it isn't a primary path to their revenue stream."
So, at least one small part of Oracle is run like Sun.
