I still know a lot of Sun people, and so avidly watched yesterday's press conference where the muck-mucks from Oracle described how they plan to assimilate the Sun assets...at least the ones they think will make enough money to justify the trouble...
What they didn't talk about is their plan to subjugate Sun culture.
Most of the people I know who are still at Sun are active participants on a site I helped to create: Blogs.Sun.Com. Back when we set it up, the rules of play were revolutionary, but pretty simple (my paraphrase): "Don't defame people. Don't disclose confidential or trade secret information. We hired you because you are smart...Don't screw up."
Sun was the first large tech company to create an employee blogspace. The right to blog was a huge perk of working for Sun for the past nearly six years and brought many Sun people satisfaction. Heck, it made some careers as people discovered it was cool to be passionate about your job. It was cool to expose a little of your life online and discover your voice. It was cool to mix life and work in writing...but alas, no more!
As part of this next phase of assimilation...Oracle recently made available the new rules for blogging. If you work for Snoracle starting now, you must obtain your manager's permission before each public posting that relates to work. In theory that means before every tweet. Remaining Snoracle employees have until May to migrate their personal blogs to a non-Oracle-owned hosting service...but if even after such migration, anyone who mentions work on a personal blog forfeits their editorial self-determination, as Oracle believes the blog then becomes Oracle property subject to their draconian rules.
This isn't the only act of cultural imperialism we'll hear about as Oracle teaches Sun that "resistance is futile", but for me its a particularly poignant reminder that the party is truly over.
Are these public anywhere? And also doesn't this ultimately result in less "control of message"?
Posted by: Andy | January 28, 2010 at 07:39 AM
Sad indeed - my employer is much closer to the blogs.sun.com rules that you mention, and being trusted to write online without corporate control feels very good. And probably makes a noticeable difference to the bottom line in the end (though you could argue that that didn't help Sun buy Oracle, but there were other things I guess).
Feels like the end of an era, really.
Posted by: Bertrand Delacretaz | January 28, 2010 at 07:47 AM
No I think they are internal corporate policy statements. Maybe somebody brave who is leaving anyway will post them?
Posted by: Danese Cooper | January 28, 2010 at 08:00 AM
You have misread the policy. You must obtain manager approval *for the account as a whole*, not for each post. This is sensible if you are blogging on company time and infrastructure.
The Oracle policy is actually pretty close to the Sun policy: "Don't screw up."
Posted by: Justin Kestelyn | January 28, 2010 at 08:22 AM
Justin: Actually I've not read the policy (maybe you'd like to post it?). My blog is a reaction to hearing my Sun friends try to parse it...and they are reading it very closely. I notice you're not refuting the claim that they can't mix work and play on their personal blogs anymore (or that blogs posted by Oracle must be about work only).
At Sun, the decision to write on blogs.sun.com was a personal one entirely. Your manager couldn't stop you from doing it.
Posted by: Danese Cooper | January 28, 2010 at 08:29 AM
I will be posting the policy shortly, yes.
It is true that Oracle discourages *purely* personal blogging on company infrastructure - yes, the line is often blurry. However Oracle makes no such claims upon what you blog about on *public* infrastructure. Again, this is pragmatic and reasonable, IMO.
This doesn't mean you can't use first person on an Oracle blog! It just means that if you want to maintain a blog about hiking or cooking, you need to use public infrastructure.
Posted by: Justin Kestelyn | January 28, 2010 at 08:39 AM
So where will the precious Google Juice for all those blogs.sun.com pages end up? Redirects to the Oracle home page, or will they put up a redirect or link to the blogger's new site?
Posted by: Don Marti | January 28, 2010 at 08:46 AM
Don: Excellent question! I would expect Oracle to purge anything that didn't match its' policies in the name of "saving storage space" or something the like after April 30th.
When I left Sun in 2005 I was gifted a .zip file with all my content so I could re-host, although my b.s.c blogs didn't disappear (which I counted as a sign of Sun's integrity and commitment to independent thought and voice). I believe Linda Skroki (the last Sun manager of b.s.c who was sadly caught in the last layoffs) anticipated that Sun people would want to migrate all their Pre-Assimilation content in light of Oracle's policies, so I think that was still possible until at least this week. Hopefully most took advantage of it. I notice Jonathan's parting blog mentions that he'll be re-hosting his blog in the near future...hopefully with all its historical content intact.
Posted by: Danese Cooper | January 28, 2010 at 08:57 AM
I have posted the policy here:
http://blogs.oracle.com/otn/2010/01/the_oracle_social_media_partic.html
Posted by: Justin Kestelyn | January 28, 2010 at 10:17 AM
Hello everybody!
I was working as a Sun Campus Ambassador till last week. Last week they closed the entire program and as a result I am out of Sun/Oracle now.
I had a blog at http://blogs.sun.com/gautam and it wasn't removed though my e-mail id had been deactivated. Will my blog be now taken out because of the Oracle policy. If yes, is there any way to save the entire blog structure so that I can re-host it somewhere else?
Posted by: Gautam Muduganti | January 28, 2010 at 11:07 AM
Gautam,
I saw that Justin from Oracle just told you it was probably an oversight if your content was still hosted after you'd left. I am trying to post a comment that again makes the point that this was Sun's standing policy. So far as I know they *never* pulled down content, believing that the right thing to do was not to break all the trackbacks and links in the world...
My overall point is that open blogging became a way of life at Sun, but at Oracle it seems to be purely a marketing activity, directed solely at the greater glory of the company and its products. Sad.
Posted by: Danese Cooper | January 28, 2010 at 11:25 AM
ya, I just now realized that I can see my blog but cannot login into blogs.sun.com :(
Posted by: Gautam Muduganti | January 28, 2010 at 11:43 AM
Yeah, I don't quite understand why they would change anything about blogs.sun.com. Cheap advertising for the quality of life as a Snorcle employee. A perk that they don't have to pay much for, unlike, say, health insurance.
Posted by: Russell Nelson | January 28, 2010 at 06:35 PM
Just some comments to help with clarity. Yes Linda and the blogs team added a export feature to BSC last August. And yes the policy was to leave your blog content up after you left Sun.
Posted by: KitchenSink | January 29, 2010 at 02:58 PM
@Gautam: The policy when I was still at Sun (got kicked out a year ago) was that an employee blog would be maintained after the person left and thereby becoming a former employee. My blog (robogeek) is still there. Of course Oracle may change that policy. But I can't imagine it would be terribly useful to delete blogs of people who've left. I know my blog has a lot of useful info in it, theoretically so do the others.
Posted by: David Herron | January 29, 2010 at 08:23 PM
hello....
Posted by: d singh | May 07, 2010 at 07:12 AM
Danese,
more than 2 years at Oracle, and former Sun employee, corporate blogging experience at the 2 companies.
No manager permission needed, this is not true!, Justin Kestelyn provides the complete social media policy.
For me no difference between blogging at Sun and blogging at Oracle.
Jaime Cid : http://jaimecid-oracle.blogspot.com
Posted by: Jaime Cid | June 21, 2010 at 03:07 PM
to clarify this: you must obtain your manager's permission only if you want to provision an account at blogs.oracle.com, only the first time!, as you need your manager's permission to provision an e-mail account, or credit card, or internal applications account, ...
i you start your blog at Blogspot, WordPress, ... no manager's permission needed at all
Jaime Cid : http://jaimecid-oracle.blogspot.com
Posted by: Jaime Cid | June 21, 2010 at 03:13 PM
I'm confused... Can anybody post the REAL differences in the blogging policies of SUN and ORACLE?
Posted by: David | June 21, 2010 at 10:43 PM
"anyone who mentions work on a personal blog forfeits their editorial self-determination, as Oracle believes the blog then becomes Oracle property subject to their draconian rules."
That seems like a pretty harsh policy...
Posted by: RT Heating | January 31, 2011 at 08:58 PM
I used to be a fanatical Sun user, and I bought a lot of their hardware. I started off on a sparc 1 pizzabox hooked to a spectrometer, and worked my way up to being the head of a department with many many servers, all Sun.
Now Sun is dead to me. Oracle won't be selling me anything. I'm done with them after what they've done to me in the last year. I don't need this crap. I'll figure out some other way.
Posted by: Phil | February 28, 2011 at 05:40 PM
Thanks for the article. It was a real eye opener!
Posted by: free ipad 2 | March 24, 2011 at 04:47 AM
Oracle Censors Blogs.Sun.Com is awesome. It is impressive and useful. It helped me alot. cant express the advantage i am having after using it.
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I started off on a sparc 1 pizzabox hooked to a spectrometer, and worked my way up to being the head of a department with many many servers, all Sun.
Posted by: φωτοβολταικα | April 15, 2011 at 08:44 AM
Yes Linda and the blogs team added a export feature to BSC last August. And yes the policy was to leave your blog content up after you left Sun.
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