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Oracle Buys Sun
bruunb writes "Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. 'We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,' said Oracle President Safra Catz."
Well well well. I can see this working well for Oracle - they use Java a great deal... and it should be good news for Sun's open source projects like Netbeans - which would, I think, be maintained under Oracle.
I guess it's a little sad to see Sun unable to continue by themselves, but the writing was on the wall and I think Oracle will keep all the Sun products working, but of course the big question is what does this mean for MySQL?
1s - free
0s - $10 per 0, minimum 100,000 0s
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
This is a big surprise.
Wonder if Solaris will become their main development platform again.
Dual Opteron < $600
Seems oracle.com is down :(
Somehow i did hoped IBM would go and buy SUN, if this is really definitive .. how do IBM and Oracle play together ?
Is this the end of MySQL?
This doesn't bode well for some good hitherto lesser known products from Sun. Personally I'm a bit worried about Lustre.
Maybe this isn't out the of realm of conceivability to others, but it was to me...Oracle is a software company (one that runs a lot on Sun hardware), and suddenly becoming a hardware company has got to be a daunting challenge, regardless of who you are or how smart you are.
The implications are staggering across the board. Maybe Oracle decides they don't want to the hardware, just Java and MySQL (...they got it, finally), but then all that Sun hardware and Solaris...? Or maybe they want to make Solaris/Sun hardware the best platform for Oracle products (already the case as far as I know), then what of support for all their other platforms.
Oracle likes to buy a lot of companies, but they've all been, more or less, niche players in specific markets to fill in the gaps of their own offerings. I can't imagine what "gap" buying Sun will fill, other than something will be certainly be filled.
Is 8am too early to start drinking?
I am deeply disappointed by this turn of events.
IBM would have been a much better buyer, if the deal had to be done.
Oracle? Bleah!
Well, I'll bet the suits at IBM are kicking themselves hard, now that Oracle has control of Java.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Oracle+Sun has the power to seriously harm IBM. IBMs big plus was the combination of good hardware + OS + DB + consultants.
Oracle + Sun can now deliver exactly the same.
bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
But SPARC is fucked. Not that it's any great loss, but anyone somehow still heavily invested in SPARC (not too good at reading the writing on the wall, huh?) should be making their transition yesterday. Probably a transition to IBM, which also has a competing database product which is quite credible.
On the flip side, perhaps Oracle will start leasing database-as-a-service boxes based around SPARC, which is about the only thing that could conceivably keep it alive. Why would you buy Sun if you didn't want their hardware? It would be a questionable move at best.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
more likely: will fork furiously and retain aggregate popularity while neither being quite compatible nor actually, ah, storing data reliably.
So, business as usual, then?
Sun = Poorly run company with great products
Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products
I wonder how that DNA is going to come together...
I wonder what will be the next big buyout? Novell seems the next likeliest candidate that would be up for grabs (By Microsoft?).
wake up in the morning... mount coffee/
Oracle was wanting its own OS. Not the worst way to get one and not the worst OS to have.
For anyone with morbid curiosity:
From: Jonathan I. Schwartz
To: allsun@sun.com
Subject: Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:34:16 -0700 (07:34 EDT)
Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
This is one of the toughest emails I've ever had to write.
It's also one of the most hopeful about Sun's future in the industry.
For 27 years, Sun has stood for courage, innovation, a willingness to blaze trails, to envision and engineer the future. No matter our ups and downs, we've remained committed to those ideals, and to the R&D that's allowed us to differentiate. We've committed to decade long pursuits, from the evolution of one of the world's most powerful datacenter operating systems, to one of the world's most advanced multi-core microelectronics. We've never walked away from the wholesale reinvention of business models, the redefinition of technology boundaries or the pursuit of new routes to market.
Because of the unparalleled talent at Sun, we've also fueled entire industries with our people and technologies, and fostered extraordinary companies and market successes. Our products and services have driven the discovery of new drugs, transformed social media, and created a better understanding of the world and marketplace around us. All, while we've undergone a near constant transformation in the face of a rapidly changing marketplace and global economy. We've never walked away from a challenge - or an opportunity.
So today we take another step forward in our journey, but along a different path - by announcing that this weekend, our board of directors and I approved the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation for $9.50/share in cash. All members of the board present at the meeting to review the transaction voted for it with enthusiasm, and the transaction stands to utterly transform the marketplace - bringing together two companies with a long history of working together to create a newly unified vision of the future.
Oracle's interest in Sun is very clear - they aspire to help customers simplify the development, deployment and operation of high value business systems, from applications all the way to datacenters. By acquiring Sun, Oracle will be well positioned to help customers solve the most complex technology problems related to running a business.
To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry, resetting the competitive landscape by creating a company with great reach, expertise and innovation. A combined Oracle/Sun will be capable of cultivating one of the world's most vibrant and far reaching developer communities, accelerating the convergence of storage, networking and computing, and delivering one of the world's most powerful and complete portfolios of business and technical software.
I do not consider the announcement to be the end of the road, not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe this is the first step down a different path, one that takes us and our innovations to an even broader market, one that ensures the ubiquitous role we play in the world around us. The deal was announced today, and, after regulatory review and shareholder approval, will take some months to close - until that close occurs, however, we are a separate company, operating independently. No matter how long it takes, the world changed starting today.
But it's important to note it's not the acquisition that's changing the world - it's the people that fuel both companies. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.
Thank you for everything you've done over the years, and for everything you will do in the future to carry the business forward. I'm incredibly proud of this company and what we've accomplished together.
Details will be forthcoming as we work together on the integration planning process.
Jonathan
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
What we have here on one hand is Oracle, a company that is incredibly well run, but with products that don't cover a complete spectrum, and Sun, a so-so run company with a wide range of product lines. This can go two ways, Suns platform quality goes down while Oracles management goes down with it, *or*, and this is the scenario I hope for, Oracle cleans out the dead wood in Sun management, and adopts the Sun technology in force. I've worked on Oracle machines, and Sun machines. I've also delt with both companies sales forces. If the synergy can be hammered out, this can really shake up the business world.
One suggestion tho, keep both names. Use Sun for the hardware, Oracle for the software.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Ow WOW!
This just blew me out of my chair . . . a bit sad in a way . . . I guess I would have would have rather seen IBM buying SUN
Just - WOW
SARAVA!
I have no experience with Oracle. I'm relatively new to world of open-source software. I love Netbeans and MySQL. I do worry about these two awesome products, specifically MySQL. What good is a free, open-source database to Oracle, of all companies? I worry that developement of MySQL and Netebeans will grind to a halt. I hope not. Netbeans has really become awesome in the last few years. I love VirtualBox, too, but I'm sure Oracle could benefit from it. I really hope they don't start charging for these products.
It remains a functional relational database. It has a BSD-style license with a very stable, nearly bug-free (see Coverity) core. It has modular design (you can write procedures in Java, C, C++, T/SQL, R, Python and others. You can get commercial support from a company (EnterpriseDB) that doesn't have a vested interest in moving you to a very expensive alternative.
Think global, act loco
I wonder how long it will take Oracle to pretty much give the middle finger to HP and Dell hardware partnerships in favor of the soon-to-be-released OracleFire "product-in-the-box" line...
So what does this mean for ZFS licensing?
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Java 8 will replace String with String2, which will treat empty string and null the same.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
MySQL is in a very different niche than Oracle. When is the last time you saw Oracle used as the back end for a Wiki or a large company use MySQL for an enterprise ERP system? It may happen that somebody uses a product outside of its niche, but like a lungfish on land, it just isn't as effective as something that has evolved to better fill that role.
Think global, act loco
Thankfully, I have recently switched myself (and my clients) over to Postgresql.
It was a sad day when Oracle got the rights to the InnoDB engine, but at least MySQL itself was in the hands of Sun.
With Oracle now owning all the rights to what is probably the biggest free competitor, I think the open source world shouldn't put much stock or investment into MySQL.
I've been quite impressed with the performance and straight-forwardness of PostGres, and will continue to happily use it. I was alawys keeping MySQL in the back of my mind, to try out now and then, but with this announcement, I doubt it'll be worthwhile.
Is there any anti-trust factors to this? Oracle, being a dominant database player, and buying up the biggest open source database?
Aside from that, I find this all very sad. Sun was one of the Unix innvators from the earliest days. Even when they grow large, they still seemed like a "cool company." Healey used to personally answer emails I would send him. Oracle seems to be the antithesis of this; major, corporate, gouging, monster... One can only hope that some of Sun's culture and products will survive.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
So will they bury MySQL as a competitor or will we see a version of MyOracle released?
Should Sun have done this sooner? Related story from years ago.
considering purchasing sun blades and hardware if the company is now owned by oracle? what does that mean?? more importantly, does this mean the purchasing guy is going to foam at the mouth when looking at the orders for Oracle and the orders for Sun?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Now Oracle looks more future proof and well-placed than IBM, et al, in offering enterprise and end-to-end solutions to new markets for new apps. IBM will sooner or later realize that its legacy business won't hold too much value in the future and in the emerging markets.
I just hope that they let the R&D at Sun continue as it is and not bog it down by mundane bureaucracy or senseless big corporate culture.
MySQL is worth far more to Oracle than to any other company. To anyone else, MySQL is simply worth the present value of its future revenue stream but, to Oracle, it's also worth the impact that it has on its own database revenue streams.
The anti-MySQL ranters who keep posting on /. miss the point that for many, if not most, commercial projects, MySQL is good enough and has a very low total ownership cost. Oracle knows that too, and the mere existence of MySQL puts an effective price cap on Oracle for low-end projects. It's not the number of users who actually switch to MySQL that bothers Oracle; it's the number who threaten to and get a discount as a result.
Look out for some significant changes to MySQL licensing and pricing. It's my guess that databases just got a whole load more expensive.
We are an Oracle Certified Partner for Fusion Middleware and since the acquisition of BEA (remember, remember) we have been in the middle of the "App Wars" which BEA Weblogic won over the OC4J and the Oracle JDeveloper (so far) over the BEA Workbench and Eclipse. Only recently - after months of annoucnements, trainings, roadshows etc. - we slowly started to come out of the trenches, shellshocked and still a bit confused but with a clearer picture of what Oracle's products are going to look like in the forseeable future and what do we see in the early morning light: General Larry, whistle in hand, already on the way up the next hill... You have to give it to them: keeping something like that under wraps is a masterpiece, but I wonder how many of Oracle's partners, customers and employees will follow the general up that hill.
We are entering an era where energy conservation is going to be critical. Niagara2 can provide 32 threads for 72 Watts. This is a great CPU for a hypothetical Oracle on-site enterprise database appliance. Add a hot-failover-to-cloud, and you can have a database that doesn't even stop for upgrades or floods.
Think global, act loco
.
Oracle obviously wants Sun's software stack, but my guess is that Oracle thinks Intel and AMD are doing a fine job on the CPU front. I think that SPARC is most likely toast (or will be sold off as "intellectual capital"). There's not much effort in migrating from SPARC to x86-64.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
But the hardware business becomes a boat anchor. Much of Oracle's expensive direct selling is done in joint bids with hardware vendors like IBM, HP, and Dell. Are HP sales reps going to call in Oracle if the Oracle-Sun hardware sales team becomes another dance card at the party? History says an emphatic "No". So don't be surprised if Oracle sells/spins off the hardware and hardware services business quickly.
... they keep the Open Source. Oracle is a good product and for a production system, I wouldn't trust anything else (I know that is going to get a lot of flak but I have to say what I believe). MySQL is a good DB for small web servers, etc. There is a place for both and I hope they maintain both.
As to Oracle buying Sun instead of IBM. I think in the long run it is better for us the consumer. An IBM/Sun merger would have potentially created a monopoly and if we've learned anything from Microsoft is monopolies suck.
There could have been some really good synegeries between IBM and Sun (just think what may have been with OO) and it is feesable that IBM could have used their powers for good not evil. Myself, I'd just rather not take that chance.
Per-bit, with the 1's stored being stored free, and the 0's being stored at $10.00 each, payable in bunches of 100,000.
At last, InnoDB and MySQL owned by the same company. I guess that's a good thing.
Didn't get that impression last time I attended one of their seminars a few weeks ago.
The multicore stuff Sun is doing is miles ahead og anything anybody else is doing,. I hope Oracle do not axe that.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
On paper, Rock
Why won't anyone play with scissors? :(
Many companies are invested in SPARC not because they fail to interpret financial reports(the writing in the wall you are talking about) but because the solutions offered by Sun on SPARC are much better, or the only ones for certain problems.
Banks, oil industry, CAD, education, research, there are frankly many fields to name.
Yes, Sun got bitten by Lintel platforms, no question about it. They were idiotic in their approach to Solaris in Intel, and reacted too late (now Solaris in Intel is a serious platform, in many circumstances I would not give Linux a second view).
If you have seen the latest Sun offerings in the storage arena (appliances built around Solaris) you would understand that Sun is a real innovator, it is a shame that they are falling like this.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In other news, all Sun software will now start using 2GB of memory and being insanely slow.
Oh, wait...
Source IDC 2008:
market share:
"Unix, mid-to-high-end servers ($17.2 billion in 2008)
IBM 37.2 pct
Sun 28.1 pct
HP 26.5 pct
"
Don't give a flying fig about Suns servers?
IIRC Solaris still has the highest market share among proprietary Unixes. And AIX ist only third after HP-UX.
And if you think about Oracle as a database company you've kind of missed the last 8 years or so. They've bought a lot of stuff and are number two behind SAP.
"IBM provides Java and Java products. "
Well I guess Sun does that too.
Regarding virtualization: XVM Server
Should be enough to keep the troll busy ;-)
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Oracle-Sun: Jonathan Schwartz Writes His Toughest Ever Email
http://eclipse.sys-con.com/node/926256/print
"...All members of the board present at the meeting to review the transaction voted for it with enthusiasm, and the transaction stands to utterly transform the marketplace - bringing together two companies with a long history of working together to create a newly unified vision of the future."...
Is Solaris going to become Orifice now?
Oracle President Safra Catz was also heard to remark...
"all your database are belong to us"
Oracle suddenly has a great operating system, great server hardware, a popular database, and the de facto language of server-side business logic (other than COBOL.)
And IBM has built so much of its business on Java.
IBM should have just opened the piggy bank and it would have saved itself the world of hurt it now has in store.
PostgreSQL has seen major improvements. Look at the Coverity open source scans. Coverity identified 90 (potential) coding errors. Each was investigated. There were 57 code fixes, on for every code error that was confirmed by a coder. Not exactly a rotting community. Look at the previously reported scaling on FreeBSD 7.0. This is nearly perfect scaling. That doesn't happen by itself.
Think global, act loco
http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/linux-tech-leadership-contributions.html
"You can catch flies till the cows come home, but wasps are a totally different kettle of fish."
If IBM were to have bought Sun, Oracle's preferred hardware and development language (java) platform would be in the hands of a major competitor. Oracle being able to market hardware helps it compete with IBM. Oracle owning the caretakers of Java gives it an upper hand against IBM who relies heavily on Java. By buying Sun, Oracle now has a good anchor in the open source camp to use as it sees fit. Not only does this make good business sense, its a great strategic fit for Oracle. Everyone else including customers may be potential losers. It's a shame that Sun is likely to go the way of Digital; another great brand swallowed and digested by a larger fish...
Greed is the root of all evil.
Oracle might just drive Sun's x86 platforms harder, starting with their new Intel Nehalem 2-ways. When the big scalable Nehalem EX boxes come out at the end of the year, they'll be able to take on just about all other other RISC big iron.
I love BDB. Oracle bought them and now they've hampered open source involvement. You can't see their source repositories. All you can do is get a zip of their latest release. I don't think any non-Oracle employee contributes to BDB. Read-only open source is barely open-source. I don't want the same to happen to Java, Glassfish, and Netbeans.
I remember seeing Oracle rebranding high-end server hardware recently, and tweaking Oracle to run ultra-fast on that particular configuration. Now they have a hardware platform (Sun's x86 and Sparc lines), a software infrastructure (Java) and a marketing lock (Sun hardware and Oracle database purchases seem to go hand in hand, even now.)
So it's a good move for them. We'll see how well it works out for everyone else. Oracle hasn't been known for developing products that don't require an army of Oracle consultants to get working. If they use the Sun acquisition to build their "database in a box" product, then customers face lock-in on the hardware and software fronts, just like back in the mainframe/midrange days.
It might be the cynic in me talking, but Oracle has been one of the major causes of large-scale IT failures you read about in the industry press. It's helped along by bad requirements and idiotic lowest-bidder consulting firms, but Oracle is sometimes forced to pay large settlements for running a project over budget. That's just a natural side effect of designing products that are so complex that you have no choice but to buy support. Also, you have to wonder what Oracle's going to do with MySQL now...
Oracle consumed J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft and BEA. Let's see how well they digest this one!
hmmm...the "cultures" are so different at Oracle and Sun...will Oracle let stand Sun's culture that is quite unique, I would say...I doubt it...
A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How queries could run for a while.
Adding more memory would help
But performance would still make us yelp,
Still the price was cheap and always made us smile.
But April's news made us shiver
Oracle would our DB deliver
DBAs on the doorstep;
Large checks we'll have to schlep.
I know that our CEO cried,
When the new price he spied.
Our low cost hope now are fried.
The day MySQL died.
(continue on your own)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This was an intellectual property firesale. IBM = idiots. Congratulations to anyone who realized Sun stock was ridiculously undervalued; you deserve the profit you made by buying low.
I'd love to see Sun sell a PCI-e card with Sparc chips on it running Oracle DBs in parallel with the main Pentium running the apps querying the DBs.
--
make install -not war
If it does, then Oracle+Sun is probably an unacceptable concentration in the J2EE and middleware markets. Ironically, Oracle would probably argue that all those MSFT .Net servers out there are competitors in that space too, so Oracle won't totally own the segment.
This is the one thing that might take the deal down.
I think Oracle's underestimated the cost of integration between companies with such dissimilar cultures. Not to mention, by jumping into the hardware business, they've given all of the other hardware makers a very strong reason to steer their customers away from Oracle.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think this is exactly right. Now every time IT installs a MySQL database, the CEO will see 'Oracle'. They will have warm fuzzy feelings because they know Oracle is serious software(TM). They will also see that Oracle doesn't have to be expensive. They will then have the same sort of up sell opportunity that Microsoft had with Access to SQL Server, except of course that MySQL is not as f***ed up as Access. For MS, the upsell occurred as soon as you moved from personal to departmental. With Oracle, the line of division will be (roughly) division and enterprise.
Think global, act loco
Oracle already has Linux (a re-branded RHEL) for it's *NIX platform.
But perhaps they'd prefer something unbreakable. Like Solaris.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Because IBM kept low-balling the buyout price. Its was under $9.50 before IBM bailed out.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I'm sorry ( rant mode )
IBM is possibly one of the most over blown Enterprise companies on the planet. IBM buying SUN would have been a huge dis-service to IT and the evolution of the industry.
Note that IBM has become the new CA. Buy and pillage the corp resources. If it looks shiny and possibly something that will gen new money then brand it Tivoli. If we can milk the old name till it dies a death of agony brought on by starvation and dehydration we will. The best known near dead corpse we know as Rational.
I'm sorry but IBM is possibly a worse choice for buying SUN than Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong Oracle is no poster child of virtue out there. Oracle is definitely going to milk this all ribs and bones cow that is SUN microsystems. But at least the landscape at the end of the pillage will most likely still have a free Java and a free RDBMS. There is zero chance IBM would have left a potential cash flow alone like those two.
OK Here's one to put in the Calender. Google buys Microsoft. Feb 2012. I put one Aussie penny on it. :) :)
But thank the corp gods that IBM did not buy Microsoft, Err I mean Sun. If you have dealt with IBM GSA you are then invited to tell me I'm wrong on this :)
Does this merge mean that the Sun logo, and more important its company culture, will be throw away, and Sun will became just a division of Oracle (operating systems, hardware), or will the two companies remain formally separated? I hope the second ipothesys...
What I'm surprised about is that no one (especially the Slashdot editor) has yet linked the story from a few days ago predicting this.
I have two questions for you:
1) What happens to ZFS now? Is it more or less likely now to see it come to Linux (the kernel) one day?
2) In general, is this a better outcome than IBM buying Sun?
You might trust them, but having to deal with them in the past, I don't.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Solaris has been a declining percentage of new Oracle deployments for some time. Sun's hardware business has been declining, and while you can run Solaris now on non-Sun hardware, it's not most people's first choice. There are still big customers on Solaris, so it's going to be supported. But I'd be surprised if it went to being the primary platform for Oracle, because that's not where the customer base has been going.
With their recent blade announcement, Cisco could easily fit Red Hat's OS and middleware stack along with NetApp's storage offering to become a true datacenter powerhouse.
I feel a bit sorry for HP who have to work all that much harder now.
Its just the all-buying, VMware-owning EMC that I can't figure out.. Where do they want to be and what do they need to buy to get there?
- mipe -
This will be Oracles 'beachfront' for low cost, state of the Arta services.
Think global, act loco
Yes.
Sun is really in the software business already - that's where all their value-add is. Nobody would buy a sparc to run Linux (well, maybe the Niagaras for SSL webservers, but probably not even that). They were transitioning, maybe too slowly, to a Apple-style model where they sell hardware with nice but mostly industry-standard designs as a mechanism to licence their software.
And the benchmark numbers for Nehalem are crazy. The processor wars are all over but the screaming - the only folks left standing in two and a half years will be Intel and some ultra-low-power MIPS chips for portables and the cheapest of the cheap. (Expect some real excitement when the next generation consoles come out - I think IBM has to win those, again, to keep enough volume to keep Power alive).
After all, these are both California companies, so they are offering a premo hash.
Think global, act loco
This has been almost 10 years overdue, when Scott McNealy started behaving like Ken Olsen, c. 1978-80, SUN was doomed, and makes the "No Computer Company makes two full generations" law up there with Moore's and Bell's laws.
... as SUN.
The get to have a death wish, and wont adapt to market conditions:
Use VMS/Bliss not Unix and C, Unix is Snake Oil
s/VMS/Solaris/g
It is soo sad, and in some ways the better the product they the worse the delusional thinking is. If HP/Intel had got the Itanium right this would have been over 10 years ago.
The other sad thing is how the aging Solaris sysadmins still insist that Lintel is less reliable than SPARC+Solaris. As one who worked extensively with the Solaris core kernel let me tell you the Linux code is far better than its Solaris counterpart. As some Intel hardware vendors, HP, Dell & IBM were forced to 86_64 when the Itanic sunk, one got similar high quality engineering for servers that SUN did, hot-swap, ECC ram carefully designed boards with diagnostic capability, good ground plane, equalised clock distribution, quality thermal design
It is so easy to get blind sided by prejudice, I remember the first DEC ethernet controller, for the Unibus, with AMD2900 bit-slice and loadable u-code, wonderfull engineering, but it drew 7A of 5V, and you often needed to install an additional backplane and PSU to cope with the heat and +5V drain. Madness!
Oracle (ORCL) announces that in order to emphasize the importance of this operation, and better reflect its activities, will switch its stock ticker name to JAVA.
Well, Oracle is working on Btrfs (http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page), which when finished should be comparable to zfs. They can as well just stop working on btrfs and make zfs gpl based :-D
Seeing they have not minted any pennies for 60 years it may be worth a dollar now.
See:
http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB
Since the back office is not mobile and caters to groupware, the cloud service could be called ImmobileUs, but I think marketing may object.
Think global, act loco
Lets see, 8 cores, 2000MHz each. Why that will be your firstborn sir. How would you like to pay? Blood will do nicely.
Deleted
Amusing that Oracle had changed the licensing to screw Sun. It's one reason we weren't upgrading our T2000's. It was, from a price point anyway, cheaper to get Oracle on a Linux platform, probably Oracle Unbreakable Linux :)
I wonder how they'll handle that now.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
In brief, Oracle will have the hardware and software to BE the cloud. However, it's not clear to me that they WANT to be the cloud. But neither Apple nor Oracle -- or together -- is likely to make a huge (> 10%) dent in Microsoft's Office monopoly anytime soon. Open Office has been out there for five years, and Apple is unwilling to invest to sell to the enterprise as it costs a lot more to make a sale than it does an iPod (as a percent of sales).
"Quoting IDC's figures doesn't lend you much credibility."
Quoting abyolutly nothing doesn't lead to much credibility either.
Don't get me wrong. IBM is not a bad company. I'm not calling the death of IBM. But I'm sure that the harm Oracle+Sun will cause is worth more than the few hundred million Dolars more Sun wanted from IBM.
And if you really really want to see Sun als a SPARC company only (which is way off the mark), i could stil point you to the demise of IBMs Power-based workstations. Face it: All non-i86 CPU-architectures between 200 $ and 10K$ are essentially dead.
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Oracle President Safra Catz was also heard to remark... "all your database are belong to us"
"I can haz these mergers"
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Well, all the other high-end IT companies are also down around the same (3-4-5%) so the market isn't actually saying anything about this.
Don't feed the penguins
Oracle should make both their main development platforms. Sun for high end, high performance while Linux for middle and low. There are plenty of small and custom built apps that don't need a huge license or big hardware to run fine. Oracle concedes that market when they allow Microsoft to throw around their cheap/freebie stuff that behaves almost like a full database.
If you run with this one, somebody is going to loose an eye.
Think global, act loco
Cue the scary orchestra music.
eldapo
It will just join berkley DB in the "its still around if you want it" class.
was my reaction when I read the title. Oracle is a closed-source company, Sun has a lot of open-source projects. They will probably go EOL.
By the way, the article link doesn't open. It sais "Content Server Error". They are probably melting right now.
The most effective way to deal with Oracle support staff is talking with their native language.
Default your Oracle EBS with success !
Hmmmmmm. It's just a pity you couldn't actually talk about what you've quoted and I was never aware that quoting figures trumps discussion.
The problem is that most of their revenue still comes from the incumbant SPARC installed base, but it's declining. They haven't figured out a way of making enough money off x86 yet where margins are even tighter and they might have even cooked their own goose by selling some of these machines cheaply to gain shipments. They're also late to the game with x86 because they desperately have not wanted to go anywhere near that platform for a long time because they knew what it meant. However, it was only merely delaying the inevitable. Oracle, being the rather ruthless business it is with costs, I just can't see trying to work that out.
IBM didn't care and it doesn't matter. They moved on and didn't rely on them whereas Sun and SGI were wedded to their particular platforms and bound to protect them.
I can't disagree there, although I'd put the figure at a bit higher than 10K. That's why SPARC has been so badly affected. Sun sold a lot of SPARC systems, particularly in the dot com boom, where people then realised that they could get better performance on a cheaper platform by moving to x86. In academic circles I've seen many universities who were big Sun and SPARC users who have long since moved to x86 and Linux, especially where they use a lot of open source software that is readily available and working on the platform. OpenSolaris has a long road to travel there.
Important projects will be diluted by forking and Oracle's agendas. MySQL, kiss it goodbye, it's already been forked and quality lowered by Sun. Java/J2EE fucked. Open Office, toast. Open Solaris, good riddance, though the closed Solaris might do well. Other important Sun software projects, goodbye. UltraSparc will slowly die, Oracle is about the grid and clustering.
I'm listening to the conference call now.
One of the first thing Larry Ellison said was two of the main reasons they were buying sun were for Solaris and Java.
Solaris/Sparc is the largest base where Oracle is deployed. Linux is number 2. He also said "Solaris is the best unix techonology available in the market."
Solaris isn't going anywhere.
Dual Opteron < $600
MicroSoft seems to have gone nowhere financially the past decade while Larry is still aggressively expanding his empire. Bill has been the more likeable and scientifically astute guy, but lost the busienss fire some time ago. Larry was 4th richest after Gates, Buffet, and Sims in 2008.
Just to say I told you so:
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=4049959
Now let me tell you about MySQL's future. It is safe, its Open Source. It survived before the SUN buyout and its going to survive after it. There is no way oracle can kill it.
At the very least, MySQL forks will live on (e.g., Drizzle).
So please stop whining about MySQL dieing. The competition between the big tech companies is just going to heat up, which might be a good thing for open source overall.
You speak London? I speak London very best.
Would it be alright to whine about MySQL not dying? All these other comments have raised my hopes, and now you crush them. :(
Too bad its not April Fools Day.
I hope Oracle doesn't mess with Java!
I wasn't even talking about MySQL. There's a lot more to Sun's I.P. than that. Owning Java alone is worth 7.4 billion to IBM.
I suspect that there was something other than the price that made IBM turn away; some other condition of the deal. If so, I wonder what the Sun board put at a higher value than the shareholder's return in the sale.
I have been predicting this for years. (Google Search).
Oracle wants to control Java. And MySQL might be a good bat to beat SQL-Server with. That way oracle can compete on the low end without tarnishing the high priced image of their main DB offering.
Think Deeply.
That is heartening news.
Sorry, don't want to waste my time discussing Sun. What matters now is Oracle+Sun. You can be quite sure that this will be managed better than Sun has been in the past (great products, worst marketing ever)
bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Keep in mind that Larry Ellison feels a compulsion to compare pricks with Bill Gates. MS Office is one of the two main revenue sources for Microsoft, so there is a good possibility that Oracle will pump R&D into OpenOffice as a direct attack on Microsoft.
And Sun's T2 and Niagara chipsets are pretty much designed explicitly for the grid and clustering. From the threads per watt angle they have it all over Intel.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'm listening to the conference call now.
Conference call can be accessed from here: http://www.oracle.com/sun/index.html Login required for web access, or call +1.719.884.8882 and use passcode 923645
Years after Oracle's purchase of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel, these companies are still running pretty much like they had before the acquisition. Given their track record with letting the original company operate the way it had been, I'm betting Oracle will do nothing with Sun.
What needs to happen is for Oracle to split Sun apart, remove the business lines that aren't working (workstations, thin clients, huge servers, ..) and put the focus on the parts that are working (Solaris, Niagra next-gen chip technology, low-end to mid-range servers, ..). I'd also love to see Oracle release Solaris as a totally open-source kernel (under something like the GNU GPL, or a similarly F/OSS license) and let it compete with Linux. And I want Oracle to continue funding Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice (which are all owned by Sun.) I think MySQL would make a handy low-end competitor to MS-SQL, for example.
But I'm not holding my breath for Oracle to do the right thing.
Right, because you can go and make a change to every other OSS out there without being vetted or anything.
Hell, I directly patched Linux, MySQL, XULRunner and FreeBSD yesterday and no one within them have any idea who I am.
Anarchy is the only true OSS! /sarcasm
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Novel doesn't own the copyrights to Solaris. Novell owns the copyrights to SVR4.
Novell, or whoever winds up buying Novell, would have a very hard time with that case. Not only has Sun paid for various licensing along the way, even before SCO, they wrote SVR4 with AT&T before Novell bought it.
Suing a company over a product they wrote and open sourced would probably be worse than what SCO did.
Dual Opteron < $600
"The acquisition of the sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system and power it indefinitely by harnessing the seemingly infinite power of our nearest star. Our customers benefit as their power bills and systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up. We can't imagine a better perimeter security appliance than one with a surface temperature of 5,778 degrees Kelvin. We are also on the verge of announcing a deal whereby our entire staff will be entitled to a free lifetime supply of sunscreen lotion."
In other news, Solaris renamed to "Oracle Loader", and Java to "Oracle Scripting Language".
IBM has contributed a lot to Java technology... would it be true going forward too?
Oracle buys Sun, GM is considering selling Saturn, I hear even Uranus is up for grabs.
I don't think you understand. Let me give you an example. With Spring, I can browse their SVN trunk and see what they're up to. I can use unreleased software, submit bugs, and possible even submit patches. With BDB, I only see Zips of releases, making it relatively inconvenient to contribute. I love the BDB guys, but getting involved is really encumbered by Oracle. SpringSource and JBoss, on the other hand, do a great job of encouraging involvement.
Open Source In Name Only not only hinders an application's progress and development, but it's not really sustainable. Why give out something for free, call it Open Source, but not seek help from the community? It makes me think the commercial companies are just going to dump it when they figure out they're not making any money off of it.
Also, Oracle Forums SUCK. They're slow and buggy. Honestly, with the one exception of BDB, I have never seen software improve after Oracle got their hands on it (& I credit the motivated Sleepycat team, especially Mark Hayes...not Oracle). I'm not a fan of Oracle's main DB and everything else they've put out, with the exception BDB, has been awful, amateurish garbage. I used to hate Microsoft and they I started working with Oracle products and really started appreciating MS.
Glassfish v3 is on of the best web containers I've seen yet. It's as fast as Jetty and Tomcat and just as easy to use. I'd hate to see it die in favor of WebLogic or plummet to mediocrity, like the rest of the Oracle Family.
Obviously, I'm a bit worried about MySQL as well. Sun was just starting to put out compelling products and figuring out what to do with Java, I hope Oracle doesn't make anything worse.
That is so impractical it is not even funny. It would amount to rewriting ~30-40% of the internal core of the Oracle database, redoing more than twenty years of work, and would make it so that Oracle would no longer be portable to any other filesystem.
Not only that, ZFS is designed for a completely different workload than Oracle anyway. Oracle is designed to run on the equivalent of raw disk devices. If you snapshot an active Oracle datafile, a copy on write filesystem like ZFS will start relocating newly written blocks, which will gradually defeat all of Oracle's internal I/O optimization logic until the datafiles are defragmented back into linear order.
JDeveloper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JDeveloper
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Ford and GM--
You mean to say Toyota and Honda, I presume.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
That was a good theory for IBM's attempt to purchase Sun. It doesn't work so well for Oracle, since there isn't that much overlap between Oracle and Sun's product portfolio. Worse for this theory is that there is already a huge overlap between Sun and Oracle *customers*. So, according to your theory, Oracle bought Sun, so that it can sell to Sun customers products they already own. Try again.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Sun's multicore sparc work is basically custom designed to run giant database servers, and giant web servers with giant database back ends. Doing so at lower power draw than the competition has the potential to be a market winner. That alone will not be sufficient, however.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
people should be told before it disappears, that opensolaris is the desktop distribution of solaris, based on open solaris code. like an ubuntu clone, only with solaris. it is maintained basically entirely by sun. what will happen is that since oracle doesn't care about a desktop os, the desktop os part of that initiative will be flushed. and the solaris os migration from the old solaris code to new opensolaris code and build systems and such will probably be accelerated.
oracle wants sun because sun has everything oracle needs to provide service top to bottom. all of the official releases from both companies, and the internal memo, speak of this. they all mention solaris and "open" java. none of them mention opensolaris.
they also don't mention workstation machines, virtualbox desktop virtualization, and whatever else sun does that oracle doesn't care about.
so anyway, RIP opensolaris. people at sun worked hard for years now bringing it up to standards set by linux desktop distros.
In what has to be one of the worst mergers since InBev took over Anheuser Busch, Oracle now has control of their competition.
MySQL is a lean alternative to Oracles bloatware. In 2003, after I found it so difficult to use Oracles SQL program I switched to MySQL. With Sun stock slowly ailing as Flash becomes more popular than Java for web applications, Sun has finally decided to let Oracle swallow their poisonous assets.
Meanwhile, MySQL is in trouble.
As with any large corporate take over, the process is that competitors try to buy out each other until one falls, the other aquires their assests, discontinues all the products similar to their own that customers prefered over theirs, sells off any assets that provided the community with philanthropic or social causes, and eventually shuts down their competitor for good. Fortunately, these companies are in the same neighborhood unlike the strife that the St. Louis area is going through with a Belgian comapny taking over a St. Louis company which may move to New York as soon as all the assests are sold off or converted into a holding company.
MySQL users should expect a bumpy road ahead and expect to migrate to a fork of MySQL (such as Drizzle) in the near future.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Open Source In Name Only not only hinders an application's progress and development, but it's not really sustainable. Why give out something for free, call it Open Source, but not seek help from the community?
Yeh, I wonder about this. Oh, there's a bunch of different levels of commitment between open-repositories and closed-with-code-drops, and there's at least sum benefit from the open source over most of the spectrum... but if they really accept NO patches or other contributions (is that really true) what's the point? Is it just marketing? Or are they effectively holding off a fork of The Last Good Bits by tossing prophylactic tarballs over the wall?
We do of course - the dumbass customers due to investor greed. As someone who took six months to wean us off Oracle saving craploads in the process, moving to Netbeans and Glassfish - I'm right back where I started - except for the (PostgreSQL) database - thank god for that choice! No company in its right mind will properly support all the acquired app servers and databases when they can have a single cash cow to milk daily. Fuck Oracle!
It seems clear to me there is going to be major forking action here, led by none other than some key leaders of the mysql project and company, who if I'm not terribly mistaken just recently left Sun.
I am hopeful that one of these forks becomes the dominant MySQL again.
MySQL. No! MySQL! MySQL! Mine. Mine.
(no major forking action jokes in reply please.)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Sun hardware and support was reliable when techies were running the company. Since the money men (read "idiots") took over and purged anyone who knew anything and outsourced it has gone downhill.
Sun has had some problems with their planning for a long time (they specialized in SMP hardware, and then brought out JAVA in a manner that made it scale really badly over multiple CPUs, for example).
I expect Oracle will work out the planning and hardware selection.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Oracle sales reps claim that they have more linux devs than RedHat and that they feed lots of code back. They also say that they used to work more closely with Redhat but ended up getting frustrated and now they just buy one subscription and go their own way though they still provide fixes.
Oracle's plan of owning everything remotely connected to the database makes some sense as 90% of Oracle support calls consist of proving the problem is not the O/S, the app server, the hardware, Veritas, etc.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Hrm... that posted Anonymous Coward. Wasn't intentional. Those were my thoughts, simple or flawed as they may be, I'm not ashamed of them.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
No, IBM isn't kicking themselves. They are gleeful. They believe that Oracle+Sun will be an enormous destruction of shareholder value -- for somebody else's share holders.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
While this is obviously a problem for FOSS, as somebody who works for startup companies, I am also very concerned about potential changes to the pricing structure. Startup companies and SMB's use MySQL instead of Oracle because they can't afford to pay for a database on top of all of their other costs. Cheap/free database software is part of what makes entrepreneurship possible for so many people.
If Oracle slowly kills MySQL through neglect, it could have ramifications for the broader economy, unless another database software (e.g. PostgreSQL) can fill the void.
Fortunately, it's all based on the SQL standard, but there are still differences between RDBMS's that developers will need to learn to switch.
And yes, why is there no antitrust attention when Oracle tries to buy the owner of MySQL?
I was talking about the market for unreliably gas-guzzling SUVs.
Yeah, if you're talking about cars, Toyota and Honda.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Look at Sun's new JavaFX Script language. It makes String a value type, not-nullable - you can try to assign null to a Sring variable but the runtime automagically replaces it with "".
Yes, this is exactly the reason why this could turn out to be an interesting merger. Most of the mergers of UNIX workstation vendors were not interesting, and essentially served to consolidate customer bases. An acquisition of Sun by IBM would have been like that. IBM had overlapping products, and this would have resulted in the end of life for both SPARC and Solaris.
Oracle and Sun, however, have complementary product lines. The potential certainly exists for a vibrant new company to emerge from this. It probably won't but at least this way there is a chance.
Next up, Oracle+Sun buys Yahoo!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
It wasn't too long ago that it was credibly rumored that Sun might buy Apple. Lately, it would have made more sense for the opposite to be true.
I don't have anything against Mysql, and it does what it's meant to do just fine, but it isn't a fully featured db, and attempts to use it for that usually end up with people doing half the query in their code instead of in the db, where queries are meant to be run.
I think mysql's popularity can be attributed to php, when I come to think about it. Togther with apache they made the lamp thing work and moved web development for better or for worse to the masses. Mysql has always been good for straightforward simple queries and even scales well there, but Mysql, the company, screwed up when they started messing with the licences, causing the nerds at Zend to remove it from the default compile and install.
These days you can do most of what you used to do with mysql with sqlite on the light end and postgresql on the big end.
They are the seeds of the internet. You plant some and sprinkle them with bits. Eventually they grow into a huge series of tubes. How do you think the internet was created? With lots and lots of netbeans.
One summer - when the Senator's boy, on vacation from the St Alban's School, was shredding, spiking, stripping, and selling all that demon weed tobaccy - he found time to trade the family cow for a handful of netbeans.
And the rest, as they say, c'est l'histoire.
IBM makes products that compete, no matter what segment of the IT industry a company is in. IBM also plays nicely with many of those companies, as IBM makes enormous amounts of revenue by introducing complexity into a customer environment, and providing consultants to glue it all together.
For example, IBM vends several databases already, including DB2 and Informix, yet they also provide IBM AIX servers to enterprise customers running Oracle on them.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
He also said "Solaris is the best unix techonology available in the market."
Solaris isn't going anywhere.
So why is there still no Oracle 11g for Solaris/x86, when its already been released for most of the other major platforms, including Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX. It has been released for Solaris/Sparc, but as of yet, no 11g for Solaris/x86.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
...in Oracle.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is little reason why Oracle will not gradually phase the MySQL code base out of existence. There is a narrow class of applications that MySQL can run more effectively, but that is more a like a division between "read only" and "transactional" database, not "division" and "enterprise". MySQL isn't a good fit even for most "departmental" applications when compared to Oracle. About the only things it has going for it in an Oracle world are mind share, compatibility with existing applications, and installed base.
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So why is there still no Oracle 11g for Solaris/x86, when its already been released for most of the other major platforms
Probably because there isn't much demand for Oracle on Solaris/x86 right now.
In the conference call, they mentioned that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice and Linux was second.
What's to say down the road, now that Oracle owns Solaris, Solaris/x86 might not get better treatment from Oracle once it's in it's stable. Customers obviously like the Solaris/Oracle combination so I can't see why Oracle on Solaris/x86 support shouldn't improve.
Dual Opteron < $600
In the olden days, people built oracles to worship the sun. Now-a-days, Oracles simply buy the Sun.
So, right now most of SUN's products are availible in a FOSS version, but my concern is that Oracle will do away with that. All oracle would have to do is realease a new version and force existing users to upgrade to a new closed source version that might or might not be free. Yes the existing versions are forever FOSS, but to get around that all Oracle has to do is change the JAVA EULA, and then charge for the compiler. Oracle is not exactly the most FOSS friendly company in the way that SUN is.
IBM would have killed all of Sun's hardware (including their backup and storage gear, which is often forgotten and yet it's very large and important). No more SPARC and their cool-running, many-core (and open-source) Niagara platform.
IBM would have killed Solaris (they have their own Unix, AIX). Luckily, Solaris is open-source, so perhaps someone would have picked up the torch.
IBM would have killed Star/OpenOffice (they have their own office suite, no matter how crappy). Again, OpenOffice is opensource, so...
Oracle likes all of the above, to a varying but still high, degree.
Oracle is also a ruthless, almost barbaric company when considering their sales practices, but I prefer them to IBM any day. Oracle is like Attila's Huns - they pillaged for the money and the women, but they never tried to bullshit you with "we come in the name of the Lord" - that is IBM's style, with their fake and cynical pretense of contributing to open source and standards.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
But at least the landscape at the end of the pillage will most likely still have a free Java and a free RDBMS.
There is no most likely about it. There will always be a free Java and MySQL since they were both released GPL.
"Occultation" in the dictionary. It's an astronomical term and refers to what happens when one heavenly body is concealed because another heavenly body passes in front of it.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The Greeks and perhaps even the Romans in ancient times had a different view of the gay thing or the bisexual thing or the age of consent, although I suppose if you are a god, there is no real consent but then not the same kind of punishment either.
So anyway, I am using in class something that is named to celebrate something that got probation and forced retirement for one of my faculty colleagues.
Larry must have planned this coup long before. At least since he named his ship "The Rising Sun" in 2005.
"So why is there still no Oracle 11g for Solaris/x86, when its already been released for most of the other major platforms, including Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX. It has been released for Solaris/Sparc, but as of yet, no 11g for Solaris/x86."
Tinfoil mode on: Because Oracle has been thinking about this buyout for quite some long months now. Since one of best Sun's cards was "if you are real serious about Oracle you should go with Solaris", it seems sensible to threaten FUD-wise with no more (or late or not prioritary) release on that platform so stock prices goes down and you can make a better deal. Now that Sun is on Oracle's hands see how much we have to wait for 11g to become avaliable on Solaris.
I was intending to agree with TheRaven64.
Think global, act loco
even though it's not relevant to the topic has been fulfilled. Thank you for your kind attention.This moment has been duly-noted on your time cards and will be deducted from your pay. That is all.
I really despair at some of the comment comming from the USA, it is absolutely irrational.
... in fact.
Simplistically, when the desktop was seen as king WIntel was seen as the way, then people realised they still needed servers, and HP+Intel decided to start over, using an EPIC design.
The implementation was a goat-fuck, late, performance and delivery a disaster, personally I dont care for EPIC, but it did not work
The old DEC Alpha would, in my view, have been a better base, but that is not how the industry went. So what?
86_64 is morphing to RISC with the 4.2 ISA extensions though the 86 screws compilers to some extent, but it is, for now the commercial winner.
Itanic is dead.
The next frontier is parallelism.
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You'll notice he didn't name Sparc as a reason to buy Sun.
You'll notice he didn't name Sparc as a reason to buy Sun.
But he did mention that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice for deploying Oracle DB.
It wouldn't make much sense to buy a company and kill your customer's favorite product.
Plus, Oracle want's to compete with IBM and they need SPARC to go head to head with IBM's power servers. Oracle doesn't sell IBM servers directly. If you want to deploy Oracle on AIX/Power, you're going to have to go to IBM first to get the hardware and their salespeople will try to talk you into DB2. That's what Oracle wants to avoid. Now customers can come straight to Oracle and get the hardware and software. With Solaris and SPARC under Ellison's roof, you can bet that there will be the impression that Oracle will run better on Solaris than AIX. That impression is already there today really.
Plus, when you look at how Oracle releases for Solaris/x86 are so slow, it shows they have a preference for Solaris/SPARC.
In addition, up until a few years ago, there was only Solaris and Solaris/x86, Solaris implied Solaris/SPARC.
Dual Opteron < $600
Given that IBM has built a lot on Java, I wonder if, now that Oracle controls Sun, IBM will consider forking it? (They then start using their fork, thus retaining control of the platform...)
I don't think that'd be a good thing but if Java is open source it could happen...
Because Solaris x86 is such a tiny portion of the installed Solaris systems out there.
Then fork it.
Notice that I said fork, which is not exactly what I mean.
Come on, we can sell to HP/SAP/M$ in 5 years for a cool 1 billion
If they included a convert all mysql to oracle schema 100% then that would be of great value and make lots of 3rd parties useless.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Java
ZFS
Solaris
VirtualBox
OpenOffice
Glassfish
Netbeans
They are all outstanding, products that embrace openness, reliability and innovation.
Oracle has a stack of crap, with the only decent offering being a database that requires a skilled administrator to manage it.
While Sun's products reach out and enable entrepreneurs and individual developers, Oracle caters to large corporate teams with very specialized skills.
This is, in my opinion, the darkest day in the history of software.