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What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems?
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writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer.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."
I say Yahoo and sun should merge. Just think about it, 1. Yahoo makes some cool cloud offerings, 2.sun builds the cloud. 3. ?????? 4. Profits
MySQL is the best alternative to Oracle. They could buy mySQL out for a bargain and start putting the screws to all of us that use mySQL to not pay for exorbitant Oracle licenses. Boy... I can't wait.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I think the two companies have some excellent synergies*. My biggest concern with Oracle purchasing Sun (as opposed to the other way around) is that there would be a culture clash. Sun is a very dynamic environment that fosters great new ideas. But unless those core competencies bubble up through Oracle, the Sun portion of the company would be strangled to death.
Personally, I've always wanted to see Sun purchase Oracle. But I don't think that's happening at this point.
* Warning: Corporate buzzword!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I work at an Oracle shop. Most of my job is writing web apps that obfuscate base Oracle (applications) craziness. On the rare occasion I've had to actually dig into Oracle's Java code I have found my self trying to figure what kind of strange world they are living in. Most of their code seems to not only defy best practices but any semblance of good design.
Maybe its just that the code I've seen has been outsourced stuff that came back in as unclean globs of code but it makes me a little leery to see where Oracle would take Java.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
Am I the only one that hopes Sun changes it's mind about selling itself and succeeds on its own? I know they have made some big strategic errors that have gotten them where they are now, but it is a solid company (imho) with, from what I've seen, superior products. Grossly undervalued for some time now.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle
Java will help Oracle colonize the entire solar system.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
. . . if we can get all those Anonymous Cowards and folks with ridiculous names like mine to chip in $10 each.
The company's direction and strategy could be guided by a Slashdot thread. A potent brew of "Informative, Interesting, Troll . . ."
Hell, maybe we could even patent that business model . . . crowd governance . . . or mod governance?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It would be quite ironic ... MySQL has had to deal with Oracle acquiring InnoDB and then Sleepycat (Berkeley DB) ... multiple times they had to rework MySQL's underpinnings because they didn't want Oracle to own key parts of the platform. If Oracle were to be in control of MySQL they'd be able to "un-deprecate" (reprecate?) those engines.
I'd like to see that, actually -- Berkeley DB is an amazingly robust data store. It worked well with MySQL.
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I don't see anything changing. Right now we have a 3-way fight between three heavyweights: Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Everyone else is unimportant.
However, IBM and Microsoft have other competencies and sources of revenue. Oracle does not. In result, Oracle has been looking for new ways to enter the low-end market. So owning MySQL could be a boon for them, but it wouldn't significantly change the market.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I am so not comfortable with Oracle being in charge of one of the remaining UNIX vendors... Better to see another UNIX license holder get them than that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If they could both bury the hatchet for about 5 minutes, a joint bid by Oracle and IBM would actually make much more sense. IBM would take the Solaris platform and hardware, Oracle would take the ZFS, MySQL, and DTrace. They could then both jointly purchase and spin-off Java into an Open Source project or its own firm with each company taking a stake. Since both rely so heavily on Java and neither would enjoy the other firm owning the platform it makes perfect sense for it to continue as an independent entity.
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So, what's next on your fight card? Space Marines vs. Pee-Wee Herman? Guillermo Jones vs. 6-year-old Timmy from down the block?
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PostgreSQL is still a *huge* player (in fact, they're pretty-much the only open-source, fully-transactional DB available).
Also, Access isn't MS's DB offering... MS SQLServer is the real player. Access is as much a database as a go-cart is a race car (which is to say, kinda-sorta, but not really).
i think their support is crap. every time i call for netbackup support it takes them a week to get back to me. place i work for was scammed into buying netbackup from Sun instead of Veritas years ago.
i'm trying to get the latest media for netbackup and it's insane trying to register just to download it.
we looked at the SL500 a few months ago and it was overpriced. everything Sun sells seems overpriced compared to HP, including the servers.
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.
What?!? Oracle has 3 of the top 5 ERP platforms, 2 of the top 3 middleware platforms, and a few of the top BI platforms. In fact at this point Oracle probably makes as much or more of their revenue from application and middleware licensing than they do from database licensing. They also have a 10,000+ employee consulting arm.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I doubt it, why would they bother with MySQL (unless its part of an 'upgrade' path to SQL Server).
MS already has SQL Server express, and developer edition versions so I'm not sure why they'd want to take MySQL on. I'm sure they're just waiting for Access to die naturally, or only keeping it around for legacy reasons.
And as for Java, they made J++ so this is 5 years too late for them, they don;t want Java now - they're more interested in converting Java devs to C# (and Windows lock-in, obviously)
I don't know if RedHat has the capital,
They don't. They only have about 1.7 billion in assets and less than 700 million in cash. They'd have to get some pretty hefty financing to buy Sun and I doubt anyone is going to loan them money that would amount to 12-15 times their total revenue last year.
I have long thought that IBM or Oracle would buy Sun to control Java. Yes there are innovations that come out of Sun, but hold long can Sparc compete with Intel/AMD and Solaris compete with Linux. Sun just doesn't have the resources to win both of those battles. Java is their trump card, and they don't know how to monetize it. Unless they figure out how to profit off of Java, I see them dieing a slow death.
Think Deeply.
Let me tell you a story. I work in a professional environment in a 10k+ Person Organization. We decided we want to implement Identity Management. We chose the (Open Source) Sun Identity Manager, one of their enterprise products, based on J2EE.
The documentation is horrible, but that's not what it's about. Our development machines run on a JBoss AS with a Mysql Repository. The performance is horrible, and I mean it. It's beyond bad, MySql gobbles up the whole server. It takes 95% CPU time and 2 gb ram for our (rather complex) queries.
On our staging machine (running Oracle as a repository), the same tasks take 10% CPU and we hardly notice it happening.
Needles to say, SUN thought it might be a good idea (for political reason obv) to include Mysql in their documentation as "supported", although no sane person would actually use it.
I kinda forgot what my post has to do with this story. I just read "Oracle + Sun" and it clicked. I'm conditioned to think it's a perfect combination.
When your share of the market is the 23% that doesn't buy anything, then your share of the market doesn't matter. Sorry, no one buys FOSS because of market share, they buy it because people are stupid and like buzz words. People who use FREE software generally are the people who don't PAY for software, so its of little value to anyone.
I really wish you people could it into your thick heads, companies don't want something thats free, they want something they can sell.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
People who use FREE software generally are the people who don't PAY for software, so its of little value to anyone.
it's not free as in beer, you imbecile.
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