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writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer.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."

Comments

Yahoo! + Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Yahoo! + Sun

[Ethanol-fueled]

No, I hope you're joking. Sun's bundling Yahoo Toolbar with java is bad enough. If Oracle were to buy Sun, it would be in their best interests to stop that immediately unless they don't want to be taken seriously. Choice rant from the link:

I find it insulting when applications bundle unrelated crapware like browser toolbars, particularly when the installation selects the extra junk by default...

...software upgrades need to be elegant and streamlined. Bundling in a browser toolbar cheapens the whole experience because it starts looking just like so many other crapware applications that plague the PC industry.

What direction will Oracle take Java?

[goltzc]

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.

Re:What direction will Oracle take Java?

[Unordained]

Have you worked with contractors? It's not about what country they're from -- it's about their contractor status. Of the ones I had, the foreigners were better coders, though poorer communicators. But in all cases, the lack of ownership in the product, of knowledge of the history, business purpose, and architecture of the product, the lack of sense of long-term commitment, of common goal, of responsibility for the outcome (in terms of ongoing maintenance, not just "going live") ... all made my life a lot harder. It's difficult work to get good, solid work out of contractors, and not because they don't mean well. They do. They're great people, sometimes even great coders, but their "wanderer" status has its drawbacks and you have to learn special skills to manage them.

So the GP is correct to worry about the quality of outsourced code.

Re:What direction will Oracle take Java?

[timeOday]

Show me a developer who doesn't think everybody else's code is crap.

Am I the only one?

[More_Cowbell]

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.

Re:Am I the only one?

[blind biker]

NO, absolutely not the only one - that's my hope as well. But the truth is, Sun is a company that gave a lot to the world in which it exists, and monetized very little of it. It's the greatest open source contributor (Solaris, Java, OpenOffice, the SPARC architecture itself, NetBeans, ZFS... and I'm sure missing some, as Sun gave away HUGE amounts of stuff).

Such companies don't usually succeed in a commercial sense. I'm tempted to say that Sun should cease to be a for-profit publicly traded company, and become either a state-sponsored institution, or private foundation, for the development of high-tech.

Re:Am I the only one?

[goltzc]

I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Everytime I see this phrase...

[mooingyak]

It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle

Java will help Oracle colonize the entire solar system.

Slashdot shoud buy Sun . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . 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?

Re:Strange Database Merge...

[AKAImBatman]

So what's left of the database market if Oracle and Sun merged together?

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.

A Strategic Solution

[Hangtime]

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.

Re:Makes sense

[rackserverdeals]

I agree. PostgreSQL is much closer to Oracle than MySQL is. Anyone that thinks MySQL is the best replacement for Oracle likely doesn't know much about Oracle.

It seems that sun has done a bit with PostgreSQL as well. Too bad they bought MySQL. They should have instead invested in making PostgreSQL better, at least developing better replication and clustering. That way, PostgreSQL would have been an even stronger alternative to Oracle.

Oracle used to have Solaris/SPARC as their main development platform, then they switched to Linux. That seems to have been a big blow to Sun. While Oracle still releases Oracle for Solaris/Sparc along with Linux, but the Solaris/x86 versions are always slow. I don't 11g has been released for Solaris/x86 yet.

If I was Jonathan Schwartz, I would have rather put the $1bln they spent on MySQL on PostgreSQL. I don't think it would have even really taken that much either. I'm still just baffled over spending $1bln on a company that I think made $50mln in it's best year!?!?!

Anyway... Oracle developers might not have been too happy about moving away from Solaris because they'd lose DTrace.

I thought I heard something about there being some bad blood between Ellison and Sun but I don't know what that was about.

I still think Cisco should be more interested.

Re:Strange Database Merge...

[Chris Mattern]

Oracle vs. Access

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?

PostgreSQL

[Civil_Disobedient]

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).

Re:So where does this leave Open Souce?

[joe_bruin]

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.