Oracle Buys Sun - Your Thoughts?

[Ehtyar]

Hi all.

Many of you have likely already heard that Oracle's offer to buy Sun Microsystems for US$7.4 billion ($9.50 a share) has been accepted by Sun. IBM was the original contender, but negotiations fell though shortly before Oracle got serious in the race.

Many saw the acquisition of Sun by IBM as a negative, citing IBMs somewhat colorful history with open source projects, speaking specifically to concerns about how IBM might handle Java and MySQL.

Let us know what you think.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/20/oracle-to-buy-sun-hold-on-to-your-hats/
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/839/1051839/oracle-buys-sun-usd7-billion
http://www.databasejournal.com/news/article.php/3816231/Oracle-Buys-Sun-in-IBMs-Wake.htm
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/20/128246
http://www.osnews.com/story/21338/Oracle_Buys_Sun_Microsystems
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090420/ap_on_bi_ge/oracle_sun

Ehtyar.

[40hz]

I find the whole thing vaguely reminiscent of two aging (but still attractive) movie stars hooking up in their late 60's for one last "film & fling" before they become fond memories.

[attach]

[Ehtyar]

ROFL. Awesome metaphor 40hz.

MySQL is pretty up in the air right now I think. Oracle could do just about anything they wanted with it, some paths making more sense than others.

Databases as several appliances I agree is pretty much a given, and I'd expect Oracle to be looking into other types of appliance to maximize the return on at least the hardware of the Sun buyout.

Not sure what to say about SPARC as a platform, it will be interesting to see what Oracle does with Fujitsu on that front.

Something few people seem to be discussing is OpenOffice. Sun has copped a lot of flack over the years for the way they handled StarOffice/OpenOffice. I suppose OpenOffice, Java, and MySQL all face similar potential fates.

Any thoughts on OpenSolaris anyone?

Ehtyar.

[Lashiec]

This perspective over what future will bring to Sun open source projects sums up things pretty nicely, I think. It did not seem as a good idea to me when I first heard about it, but seems like Oracle is far more involved with OSS than I thought, something that sets a new light over the deal, and means that the most important assets of Sun are safe for now.

I'm kinda worried about the most consumer-oriented products, OpenOffice and VirtualBox. IBM takeover was good news for OpenOffice, because the project really needed a shakeup in the management to end up with many of its shortcoming and idiosincrasies, and IBM involvement in it made it a good candidate for that shakeup, but with Oracle I'm not so sure. I don't know if Oracle will even consider to go forward with it. This, coupled with the resentment towards Sun iron fist ruling over the suite, probably will end up in the creation of an OpenOffice Foundation, which has been discussed several times at OOoCons.

VirtualBox is a real enigma. The package never was meant to compete with heavyweights like VMware, so it's not exactly easy to monetize in its current state. To do that, Oracle would have to devote quite some resources for it, and even then it would take some time to catch up the big names, so maybe they won't even bother.

[Edvard]

I tried OpenSolaris because I do things like that, but I didn't quite get the hang of it.
It may be a proper Unix in the species sense, but that makes it almost, but not entirely, quite unlike Linux (my first love).
From what I've heard around the 'net, the system is quite nice, but I couldn't do anything advanced with it. Not that it couldn't, I was just unfamiliar with the toolset.

That being said, I have no idea what Oracle plans to do, but I seriously don't think they have what it takes to pitch for OpenSolaris in the already chaotic Desktop arena. I think it might be worth their while to re-tool Sparc with a heavy dose of R&D, hopefully resulting in a premier platform upon which they can then push OpenSolaris as the workstation/server brains. That bundled with VirtualBox might make for a mighty platform indeed.

As far as OpenOffice is concerned, there's too much momentum behind it to stop now. Oracle will either embrace it as a precious connection with the OSS community or they'll let it off the Sun leash so they can concentrate on other things. Same with MySQL.

Then again, it's entirely possible that I am completely clueless

[Ehtyar]

:O I forgot about VirtualBox. If VirtualBox goes down the tubes, Oracle will most certainly incur my utterly insignificant and and entirely non-fear-instilling wrath.

Your thoughts on OpenOffice make a lot of sense Lash Man. Even if Oracle decided to drop it, the community would pick it up in a heartbeat.

Your ideas also make a lot of sense Edvard and you express them very well. I think the notion of beefing up OpenSolaris as a server platform, and adding VirtualBox as an enterprise visualization solution sounds like it would add a lot of market value to what Oracle picked up from Sun.

Ehtyar.

[sgtevmckay]

the following words came to mind when I found out:

Ouch
Damn

[kartal]

I always liked Sun and I use open office and virtualbox daily. They are probably two of the best free applications out there.

[housetier]

- more developers of mysql will leave
- more marketing for virtualbox
- we will see oracle rebranding itself, to become "new"

Yes this is all vague, but so is the deal which has yet to be approved. And since oracle is such a large organization they'll probably change course every so often anyway, so my predictions are close to meaningless

[Ehtyar]

Everyone's predictions are meaningless House Man, it's just interesting to get everyone's point of view on this.

Ehtyar.

[Shades]

On SlashDot there was a comment that the (longtime) boss from Oracle has a hate/love relationship with M$. Now he has a hardware platform, an OS and one of the major software development languages in-house. Their core product runs already fine on all those items, so they can now offer complete solutions for mid-size or bigger companies. Same as an M$ based solution, likely cheaper. For some this sounds like a very good deal.

MySQL will be the victim of the take-over. With the free version of the Oracle database (which is kinda nice to work with) there will be no room left for a MySQL. The community edition will not survive, the commercial version likely will, as it is slightly better than the community edition and perhaps the free Oracle database.

As I have some experience with (the enterprise edition of) Oracle 9i it is very clear that those two products never going to interfere in each other market.

MySQL community edition will have its fork, as people still will like a "light" database, but I don't think all those ownership changes lately have done any good to the name and/or fame of MySQL. Postgres is also not that heavy on resources...and is a lot more capable, using the same SQL implementation like the big database players. MySQL is in principal a nice lightweight database with a good read throughput. It's main problem is showing up quickly when writing a lot of data simultaneous into it. The FreeRadius software (authentication server) is a perfect example of showing the limits of MySQL.

But like I said, all those ownership changes made people look for alternatives.