Apparently, some people are waxing sentimental about the now-defunct Sun Microsystems and are troubled by, of all things, a proposal to dump the names of conference rooms at a former Sun facility.
A petition started April 10 on Change.org asks Oracle to maintain the Sun tradition of uniquely naming conference rooms. "Now that Oracle owns Sun, Oracle should preserve this Sun tradition that is both well-liked and widely used by employees on the Santa Clara (Calif.) campus. Removing conference room names will neither make us happier nor more productive," the petition states.
The room names, based on themes like candy or games, gave each building its own identity, and they are easier to remember than simply using numbers, the petition advises. "Humans vastly prefer names to numbers, and our computers are more than capable of handling both names and numbers." One particular conference room was named "Moss Beach," said James Gosling, a Sun alumni and founder of the Java platform. Moss Beach is a community on the California coast about 40 miles from Silicon Valley.
At least 88 people had signed the petition as of Thursday afternoon. "As a shareholder, I don't want Oracle wasting time and effort on this," one signatory said. Another was harsher: "I am hoping that my signature will actually encourage Oracle to ignore this petition and charge ahead with this pointless and ludicrous change. The more obnoxious Oracle's behavior is, the sooner the few remaining worthwhile Sun employees will leave Oracle."
Gosling this week posted notice of the petition on his own Facebook page: "It's just Oracle being Oracle. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things," he said when questioned about the petition.
The petition is not the only place where folks have pined for Sun. A Facebook page, I Miss the Old Sun Microsystems, has more than 6,200 likes. It is billed as a page for "those of us who miss the Good Old Days of Sun, before the Oracle acquisition."
When officially acquiring Sun in early-2010, Oracle inherited Sun's massive talent base. But Sun celebrity technologists, such as Gosling and Tim Bray, who helped invent XML, were quick to depart Oracle. Afterward, Gosling launched a campaign to try to get Oracle to loosen its hold on Java. Oracle also alienated proponents of the Hudson integration server and OpenOffice.org projects inherited from Sun.
Perhaps to smooth things over, any room name change plan should be canceled. It is a simple gesture of conciliation to former Sun employees who want to preserve some of Sun's culture and to other Oracle personnel who may not have Sun roots but admire what Sun accomplished. It's the least Oracle could do to avoid any further alienation of its skilled technologists.
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