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January 28, 2010

Comments

Andy

Are these public anywhere? And also doesn't this ultimately result in less "control of message"?

Bertrand Delacretaz

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.

Danese Cooper

No I think they are internal corporate policy statements. Maybe somebody brave who is leaving anyway will post them?

Justin Kestelyn

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."

Danese Cooper

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.

Justin Kestelyn

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.

Don Marti

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?

Danese Cooper

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.

Justin Kestelyn

I have posted the policy here:

http://blogs.oracle.com/otn/2010/01/the_oracle_social_media_partic.html

Gautam Muduganti

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?

Danese Cooper

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.

Gautam Muduganti

ya, I just now realized that I can see my blog but cannot login into blogs.sun.com :(

Russell Nelson

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.

KitchenSink

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.

David Herron

@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.

d singh

hello....

Jaime Cid

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

Jaime Cid

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

David

I'm confused... Can anybody post the REAL differences in the blogging policies of SUN and ORACLE?

RT Heating

"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...

Phil

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.

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Thanks for the article. It was a real eye opener!

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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.

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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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