Oracle kills Sun.com after starvation diet

Goodbye to one of the web's oldest domains

Oracle is killing Sun.com, the online home of Sun Microsystems and one of the oldest dot-com domain names.

An entry on the Oracle's OTN Garage says that sun.com will be decommissioned on June 1.

The closure comes after Sun's new owner, Oracle, moved most of the content on BigAdmin, OpenSolaris.com, and some sections of Sun Developer Network to the Systems Admin and Developer Community of OTN.

That apparently leaves just a hardware compatibly list, which OTN Garage said engineers are "working on a solution" for. Once that's been relocated to the happy fields of Redwood Shores, Sun's domain will be turned off.

Sun.com is listed as one of the web's 100 oldest dot-com domains, registered four years after Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Vinod Kosla founded the company. Their vision was for a powerful variant of the then-new PC in business and government, running non-Intel hardware and a variant of Unix for its operating system.

Oracle closed its acquisition of Sun last year - 24 years after the domain was registered. The database giant has spent much of the last year winding down the former giant's corporate operations and online presence, and borging the operation of various Sun open-source projects.

The move has not always gone smoothly for Oracle.

Oracle's refusal to give up control of the OpenOffice project resulted in a fork, as everybody but Oracle joined the new Document Foundation developing LibreOffice.

Oracle lost the developers and code assets of Project Hudson following a falling out with the community that began when it started moving Hudson off Sun's old servers and on to Oracle servers. Again, Oracle had claimed only it could run Hudson. Hudson is now called Jenkins and sits on GitHub servers.

As for OpenSolaris, that stopped being a meaningful operation when project members suspended operations because they were being ignored by Oracle and after Oracle informed them that the open-source project as envisioned by Sun was dead. ®