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Oracle Sun Microsystems The Almighty Buck The Internet News

Oracle Could Reap $1 Million For Sun.com Domain 183

Posted by timothy from the inherit-the-sun-reap-the-whirlwind dept.
joabj writes "Last week, Oracle announced that it is decommissioning the Sun.com site, which it acquired as part of the $7 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems. So what will Oracle do with the domain name, which is the 12th oldest .com site on the Internet? Domain brokers speculate Oracle could sell it for $1 million or more, if it chose to do so."
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Oracle Could Reap $1 Million For Sun.com Domain More

Oracle Could Reap $1 Million For Sun.com Domain

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  • The Sun King will pay big bucks

    • You do know "the sun king" has been dead for almost 300 years, right? And France hasn't had a king at all for more than 150 years...

      • And France hasn't had a king at all for more than 150 years...

        Are saying the Burger King isn't a real king?

        Royal with Cheese baby!

        • There's no Burger King in France since 1997.
    • King of France? Rupert Murdoch and his "the Sun" newspaper empire might likely be interested..

  • Dr. Evil: Here's the plan. We get the warhead, and we hold the world ransomed for.....One MILLION DOLLARS!!
    No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over nine billion dollars a year!
    Dr. Evil: Really?
    No.2: Mm-hmm.
    Dr. Evil: That's a number. Okay then. We hold the world ransom for.....One hundred..BILLION DOLLARS!!

  • Many domains are worth more. (Score:3)

    by Pharmboy ( 216950 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @09:31PM (#35538768) Journal

    I just don't see them selling it off right now. It isn't like Larry is broke and needs the bucks. And it isn't like the market for domain names is at a high point. He would get more selling the Sun name, domain, and some minor IP to someone as a set. He has already carved all the white meat off that turkey, which is the customer base and some software.

    • They wanna make sure it (the domain) doesn't come back. They wanna make sure those pesky hippies with their open-source sandals and well-engineered hemp shirts go somewhere else, somewhere that is NOT ORACLE. Because to have the PRIVILEGE of being served by an Oracle web server, you should be wearing an Armani suit, a silk tie and matching pointy italian shoes.

      • Hah! Dead on there.

        As one of those pesky hippies who works for a company that owns about 1500 Sun servers, allow me to say that Larry can go fuck himself. When they increased our support contract to $8M/year, we told them to take a hike. We are replacing all of our Sun software, most of our Solaris instances, and much of our Sun hardware in less than two years.

        I mourn Sun, but they're dead now. Nobody is going to pay more than pocket change for the sun.com domain. Filthy dirty fucking Oracle.

        • The Chicago Sun. The U.K. paper "The Sun", etc. There are plenty of companies who would want it and would pay more than pocket change, although the economy won't support a premium price right now.

          Maybe Oracle can make it one of those cheesy ad farms, complete with Google ads on both sides, top and bottom, complete with BizRate ads "Looking for a great price on sun?"

          • That's the Chicago Sun-Times. They NEVER call themselves just "The Sun", always "The Sun-Times".

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            Well as an advertising site, they could donate it to NASA (possibly also other space agencies as a joint effort) and sponsor the creation of a web site based all around information about this solar system and promote the peaceful exploration and development of the rest of our solar system. Thus attempt to start creating a better public image.

            So would this be worth more to Oracle in terms of marketing than the sale price of the domain.

            • Haha, Oracle, donate. Yeah.

            • Well as an advertising site, they could donate it to NASA (possibly also other space agencies as a joint effort) and sponsor the creation of a web site based all around information about this solar system and promote the peaceful exploration and development of the rest of our solar system. Thus attempt to start creating a better public image.

              "Nah!"
              - Theodoric of York

            • Well as an advertising site, they could donate it to NASA

              Donate, or sell it, either way this would be the best possible place for it.

          • Why would they care? Is www.thesun.co.uk too hard to type in?

        • Re:Many domains are worth more. (Score:5, Funny)

          by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @10:34PM (#35539142)

          ...Larry can go fuck himself...
          ...Filthy dirty fucking Oracle...

          I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

          • ...Larry can go fuck himself... ...Filthy dirty fucking Oracle...

            I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

            I personally find it a bit like gas mask porn. I'm glad it's out there; I believe in the freedom of speech; I really hope the users are happy and fully satisfied. However, I have no personal need to ever see this particular newsletter.

            Just saying. (BTW; I once heard that the gas mask fetish was really popular in the UK in the 50s & 60s following on from the long nights of the london blitz; can't find a citation though).

        • Would you mind telling us what you're replacing it with? RHEL, Ubuntu Server, *BSD, other?

          And how have you replicated those nice Solaris features (containers, that debugging thing, the new copy-on-write filesystem), or if they are missed at all?

          • Migration in general is going to RHEL. It's been my experience that containers just never caught on in the enterprise world. (I run 'em at home, we've got a few in our lab, but they were stillborn for us and most other companies I talk to.) Dtrace is very handy once in a long while, but only when things go wrong--which they shouldn't.

            And that leaves zfs. Rumour has it that RedHat is going to be releasing an incompatibly-licensed ZFS to their customers. I hope it's true, because it is the single greatest ste

        • Rupert Murdoch might want to buy it to go with www.thesun.co.uk [nsfw], the top selling "newspaper" in the English speaking world.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nurb432 ( 527695 )

          i mourn Sun, but they're dead now. Nobody is going to pay more than pocket change for the sun.com domain. Filthy dirty fucking Oracle.

          A lot of us feel that way about Oracle and what happened. However i do think the domain name is worth far more than pocket change, regardless of its history.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheLink ( 130905 )

        So are they going to get rid of "com.sun.java"?

        I remember not long ago Oracle changed certain things from Sun to Oracle and broke stuff: http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/07/28/2121259/slashdot.sourceforge.net [slashdot.org]
        http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/applications/3258504/oracle-breaks-sun-support-document-links/ [computerworlduk.com]

        Seems Oracle thinks changing names is more important than getting technical stuff working right.

        FWIW I recently had problems after updating "Oracle Virtualbox" so much so I had to go back to an older versio

      • It doesn't have to be used for computers. If they don't want a competitor to get it, they can sell it to something completely different. It would be a great domain for astronomers or ham radio operators to store their sun spot data, or maybe sun worshipers can use it as a holy site. Is Sun Ra still around?

    • Caldera might be interested. They shat all over SCO, why not do the same to Sun?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by EdIII ( 1114411 )

      The domain on its own is worth hardly anything without the IP. Any party that is serious about the domain will want no problems with trade marks or IP claims against the use of the domain. Now I hardly think that is going for only a million dollars.

      Of course, a business that had nothing to do with computers, software, databases, etc. might not have to worry about trade mark claims as their business might not constitute dilution of the mark (as in the case of Mr. Nissan with Nissan Computers), but I seriou

      • I think sun.com is worth zero dollars on its own for precisely this reason.

        The internet is full of links to sun.com from all sorts of web pages that will never be removed. Anyone who owns the domain gets literally millions of link referrals for free.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          The internet is full of links to sun.com from all sorts of web pages that will never be removed. Anyone who owns the domain gets literally millions of link referrals for free.

          Invalidation of those links would hurt people who have purchased Sun's products....

          In many cases, those would be links to documentation, downloads, help references, etc.

      • While I can't think of an application for the domain (except the newspapers I mentioned earlier) it wouldn't be unheard of for another company to change their name to Sun, if they can get the domain and trademarks. Perhaps Levono or some other computer company that is large but not recognizable enough or wants the "street cred" to take it to the next level. Asus, Gigabyte, Biostar etc.

        Maybe AMD will buy it to start a computer company of their own, to be more direct (thus more competitive) in the server ma

  • NBA (Score:3)

    by lyinhart ( 1352173 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @09:36PM (#35538800)
    Eh. They should probably sell it to the owners of the Phoenix Suns NBA team. They'll just redirect it to their official website.
  • I mean buying domain names for much more than what they are worth worth? I havent visited sun.com in like ever.. nor will i ever

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tnk1 ( 899206 )

      Even if no one cares about Sun Microsystems, or has a paper named The Sun, or some other existing product or service with "sun" in it, its still a three letter .com domain. That is worth mucho dinero. And then massive extra credit points for being a common English word.

      If there isn't a site already for the domain, someone will create or rename their site "Sun (\S+)" just for the domain. No one is going to forget a web site called www.sun.com.

      If I thought that Slashdot had the money to do it, I imagine th

  • I must have this site...but first... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2011 @09:47PM (#35538882)

    What's the IP Address of the Sun?

  • Is there a financial instrument out there that will let me short-sell whatever moron thinks sun.com is worth more than pocket change? It's like dec.com, a historical footnote. Larry should just give it to a computer history society/museum for caretaking.
    • That might almost be a fair analogy - if Digital hadn't been bought out when the WWW was in its infancy. dec.com was gone before most people would have looked for it. Besides, Digital was really only a computer company for the computer industry - except for HUGE successes like the Rainbow. Sun at least has/had Java and Open Solaris driving traffic to sun.com.

    • Larry should....

      Larry: Release the hounds!

  • I remember working in the IT department of a fair-sized company back in '99 and it was a dedicated Sun shop, in fact my boss denigrated Linux and open-source software (of course he called it freeware) any chance he could. He talked like Sun would be around forever...oops.

  • Interesting that Microsoft, established in 1975, doesn't appear on the list of the 100 oldest dotcom registrations. Xerox registered before IBM. Boeing before Adobe. And Microsoft isn't on the list. Did they not recognise the long-term importance of the internet?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No. Bill Gates' first book, "The Road Ahead" published in 1995, famously did not refer to the Internet. The much-hyped Windows 95 OS was released without a web browser (that apparently wasn't a coincidence, Jim Clark and the Netscape crew carefully timed the release of Navigator). But MS made up for lost time. They quickly struck a deal with a small company called Spyglass for rights to their browser, which became IE. They made sure that IE was a "integral" part of Windows that couldn't be de-installed,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Microsoft did not have TCP/IP support until well into the '90's instead attempting to 'standardize' their NetBIOS and trying to win people over with cartoon-like chat programs and 'channels' or 'folders' instead of websites into their own Microsoft Network (MSN) which was not connected to the Internet. Thankfully the industry ignored them and MS has since been trailing in the adoption of the proper Internet in general.

      • Microsoft did not have TCP/IP support until well into the '90's

        Winsock.dll was part of the standard win3.1 install. It's just that MS didn't adevrtise it, same way as the standard C/C++ libraries come bundled with today's visual studio but MS documentation points the reader towards .net and C#.

        • Winsock.dll was part of the standard win3.1 install.

          Try again. You may have gotten Trumpet Winsock as part of your OEM install, but it was *not* part of the Microsoft standard install. Microsoft did not have a generally available TCP/IP stack shipped standard until Windows 95.

          • Yeah, you're right, my memory was faulty. The one I was thinking of was third party (not Trumpet), it provided tcp/ip for win3.11 over radio/GSM/satellite and POTS. I was the technical lead for the largest mobile application in the southern hemisphere at the time, (6000 users spread all over Australia). All I can recall is we got the winsock.dll from a Brisbane based start up, the name of which escapes me now.
    • Microsoft totally missed the Internet. They had their sights set on AOL back when most AOL users didn't care to venture (or realized you could) outside of the AOL garden. It was all MSN all the time. Then they had an "oh shit" moment.

      • Bill Gates's book "The Road Ahead", is, in its first 1995 edition, focused on how the CD-ROM was going to change everything about computers. Remember Encarta? They were really focused on that -- multimedia on discs, that was going to be the future.

        But then, for the 1996 printing, the whole thing was re-written and suddenly CD-ROMs weren't the hot thing. It was all about the Internet.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kenshin ( 43036 )

          Ya, encyclopedias on CD were "the future"... in 1990.

          My school had a Mac with a CD-ROM, and a copy of the Grolier (I think) encyclopedia. It was the most amazing thing at the time.

        • and suddenly CD-ROMs weren't the hot thing

          I used to have a clipping on my cubicle wall from a Time magazine in 1995 where Bill Gates was dismissing the Internet as a fad. Despite the book's change, Microsoft never really 'got' the Internet. Sure, they had some de-facto monopoly power in it, with IE6 and such, but every strategy was how to wrap Windows in the Internet.

          It was then that a couple guys were getting fed up with Altavista (OK, we all were, but they decided to do something better).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Interesting that Microsoft, established in 1975, doesn't appear on the list of the 100 oldest dotcom registrations. Xerox registered before IBM. Boeing before Adobe.

      Of course Boeing registered early. Do you know a major focus of why the Internet was intended? As a communication system in the event of nuclear war. That's why it was sponsored by DARPA. And so a major defense contractor like Boeing got involved because well, government money!

      Besides, Microsoft was not huge in 1975, or for years afterward. The idea that it was formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus is not true.

      And Microsoft isn't on the list. Did they not recognise the long-term importance of the internet?

      It took over 2 decades for the internet to reach any kind of building importance even in

      • Back in the day, if you asked someone what their email address is, you'd get various takes on a blank/concerned/weirded out stare. So, yeah, Internet was available, but by no means mainstream.

      • I'll be completely honest, I thought the Internet would be a fad.

        Then one day all of the terminals in the library, that were setup for DISCUS, were taken except this one ratty looking box in the corner. Gopher? Veronica? OK. Man, I was hooked and felt like a complete ass for dismissing friends who had only a few years earlier been doing the BBS thing as wasting their time with a rich kid's toy that no one would be interested in.

    • The Internet of the NSF backbone days was a very different beast. Companies that appeared on it were usually defense contractors or university computing suppliers.

    • Well, no, they didn't. Until it got forced down his throat, Bill G. was convinced that the Internet was a sideshow. You were going to do all your networking on Microsoft proprietary nets, you see.

  • Whoopee! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2011 @10:23PM (#35539102)
    $1M. Wow. Imagine what Oracle could do if they had $1M dollars.

  • Forget the domain, ask about the IP blocks (Score:3)

    by RedLeg ( 22564 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @10:38PM (#35539156) Journal

    As the TLDs expand, the value of a ".com", even a sexy three letter one with some history decreases.

    Ask instead which (pre CIDR) address block(s) Sun had and Larry E now has. IIRC, they're sitting on at least one "A" and potentially multiple "B"s.

    Since "IPv4" is gonna implode this year (yeah, right, but just go with it.....), the IP space is gonna have much more real value.

    Red

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I think it's a bit different actually. IP4 can be easily eaten into IP6. If you upgrade you just have access to both. Domain names are a different animal, either you have the same domain space as everyone else or you split off.

      The Ip6 address space is exponentially bigger than IPv4 (obviously) but any successful domains in a separated Internet would only have to "better"(in a capitalist sense, which assumes you can buy IPs) than one of the 2^12-1, addresses.

      How often do you type IPs? Domain names get x^

  • I am sure, they keep it as a redirect. for sure in-links are mentioned in old documentation, for which customers may hold the new owner responsible (in the sense of the next buying decision). It makes a very bad impression if you follow a support instruction and end up on a webpage which does not exist (or worse: was sold and re-sold to a porn company).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fatp ( 1171151 )

      ... It makes a very bad impression if you follow a support instruction and end up on a webpage which does not exist ...

      Never mind, it is common on oracle.com anyway.

  • If the domain changes hands, that's going to break a lot of XML files containing xsi:schemaLocation attributes and DTD references pointing to documents within http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/ [sun.com] .

  • to buy son.com . It hosts some kind of search engine. Looks like it's been parked.

  • I assume the domain name is useless as long as Oracle owns the trademark to "Sun".

    angel'o'sphere

  • There are a number of things which tie into the sun.com domain; XVM Ops Centre downloads patches & so on from that site, SFT (Sun File Transfer) uploads Explorers to supportfiles.sun.com; until they get all their customers to stop using those URLs, they can't switch it off. I'm sure there must be a few other things using sun.com as well.
  • By selling their domain they would be effectively destroying the brand and that would be utterly foolish. It would destroy much more capital than the million it's allegedly worth.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mbkennel ( 97636 )

      Larry WANTS to destroy the brand.

      There's little doubt this is irrational control-freakery from the largest shareholder.

  • Reason: redirects.

    Thread over, move along.

    PS: And they don't need the money, want to keep the namespace of Java functions etc etc etc etc etc. Why did this make frontpage?

  • They may be decommissioning it, but that doesn't mean they're going to sell it. There are plenty of domains held by companies which they just hold for the purpose of making sure they have the domains matching their trademarks.

    I'm not sure what the point in decommissioning it is, tbh. They may as well just make it point to the root Oracle homepage and forget about it.

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