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What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems?

Posted by timothy on from the ask-the-oracle dept.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."

2 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So where does this leave Open Souce? by joe_bruin · · Score: 4, Informative

    While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.

    Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.

    Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
    Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
    SPARC - Their CPU line
    Java - Maybe you've heard of it.
    OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
    VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
    NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE.
    OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server
    High Availability Cluster

    Honorable mention:
    NFS - The Network File System
    vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
    MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers

    So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.

  2. That comparison chart is really wrong by tlambert · · Score: 3, Informative

    That comparison chart is really wrong; I think it was done by someone who either never actually used DTrace, didn't know how DTrace works, or just hasn't used it well enough to be familiar with it.

    DTrace instruments by placing an INT 3 (on other platforms, it's an illegal instruction) at the probe point and remembering where that was done. The trap handler then has a code path that knows about this, and shunts it over to DTrace for a probe lookup.

    Pretty clearly, whoever wrote that chart has only used fbt (Function Boundary Tracing), and is not familiar with the fact that the trace points can pretty much be put at any instruction location where the instrumentation would not involve reentering the trap handler. This means any instruction, and it's done *without* using break points.

    I really don't have time to fix this for them (and I doubt I'd get edit rights if it started making DTrace look relatively better anyway), but someone involved in the project should actually take a real look at the software they are trying to compete with before they so casually (and incorrectly) dismiss it.

    -- Terry