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62% of Sun's Stockholders Vote For Oracle Deal
Moon Workstation writes "In an special meeting held at Santa Clara, CA, 62% of Sun's stockholders voted for the acquisition by Oracle. As a result of this Sun's stock will be taken from the stock market as of Friday. The acquisition is still waiting for approval by the US Department of Justice and anti-trust offices in other countries. The planned acquisition is source for rumors and speculation about the future of different Sun products, like OpenSolaris, CPUs and others." (MySQL among them.)
It is likely that shareholders owning 62% of Sun stock voted for the Oracle deal. This is slightly different than 62% of shareholders (for instance, if 1 person owned 50% of the company, another owned 12%, and 15,000 people owned the rest, 0.013% of the shareholders would have 62% of the vote).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Larry is the goatse guy?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
62 percent of the voting shares. this does not mean 62 percent of shareholders.
The buying was de facto, but not official yet. To buy a public company, what you are really doing is buying out the shareholders, but the Board of Directors does most of the work in deciding if it is a good idea for the company. The board also usually also has representatives from major shareholders on it, so usually their determination also has some built in voting power, if not all of it.
So, if the Board says they are bought, they pretty much *are* bought.
However, sometimes there is a significant shareholder rebellion, and hostile takeovers are possible, where the buyer has obtained enough shares to impose their will on the board either through direct vote or through shareholder suits. You can usually see that coming a mile away, though, because its unlikely that individual shareholders of tiny numbers of share will care about anything more than making the straight money on their stock that they will be getting. That means a corporate raider or some similar organization would have to appear who buys into the company for it to be a real threat.
And of course, the government needs to approve for anti-trust reasons.
In this case, the shareholders' meeting is required, but is likely just a formality. The government inquiry is actually a bigger threat by far. The Board's determination in this case is sort of like Election night in the US. You aren't elected until the Electoral College has met, but it would be fair to say that you're pretty much President-elect as soon as the popular vote totals are tallied and the margin is wide enough.
Wonderful how everybody needs replication and no one seems to need anything else that PostgreSQL has to offer (most of which could be summarized by "maturity"). Anyway, PostgreSQL 8.4 comes with master-slave replication in core.
Ezekiel 23:20
JAVA will be removed from the *NASDAQ-100 composite index*, but will continue to trade as normal until the company is actually acquired. This point was even mentioned in the press release, so extra points for getting it so (so!) basically wrong.
(Man, /. just continues to accumulate fail. I wonder when it'll implode.)
Sun bought MySQL around the beginning of 2008 for around USD$1 billion.
Oracle has been trying to acquire MySql to years. It seems to me that they want to get it for a reason and that reason most likely isn't just to keep it safe from Sun's influence.
First, 62% refers to the number of shares, and not the number of stockholders as the summary claims. Probably, the 62% mostly represents 30 or 40 large shareholders, made up of pension funds, stock funds, and rich people. Second, 62% refers to the number of outstanding shares, not the number of shares for which there was a vote. Very small shareholders rarely bother to vote their shares and do not vote one way or the other. I doubt very many shareholders voted in opposition to this deal, which would be very silly because Sun's prospects without this deal are very dim.