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.)

Comments

MySQL won't die

[Hyppy]

Oracle won't kill MySQL. MySQL's accessibility hurts Microsoft's database division too much. Oracle and MySQL are two different markets, anyway.

Re:MySQL won't die

[DavidD_CA]

They won't kill it by pulling the plug. But we've all seen these things happen.

They will give it funding, throw some more people at it, and it will become an entry-level system which will be awesome for 1-2 years.

Then someone will decide to rename it to something like Oracle LiteSQL. It will get a new logo. It all goes downhill from there as people forget what MySQL was, and it just gets integrated right into the main Oracle product line. The free service will be useless for all but the most basic of tasks. Support options will be more expensive. It will become unnecessarily complex. Lawyers will force takedowns of servers still using MySQL. There will be a security issue that takes 2 months to fix.

Bookmark this and come back in 2012. You'll see.

Re:MySQL won't die

[rattaroaz]

Oracle and MySQL are two different markets, anyway.

It always bothers me when people make this comment, because it assumes things always will be that way. Oracle and mysql are different markets, but does it always have to be? Well, now that oracle owns mysql, yes. But if it wasn't so, mysql could have evolved into an oracle competitor with time. And that is so with a lot of products and markets. They are in two different markets now, and oracle might not kill it off, but we know that oracle is unlikely to develop it to rival their proprietary product, whereas before, any outcome of mysql's future would have been possilbe.

Re:MySQL won't die

[segedunum]

MySQL doesn't hurt Microsoft's database ambitions at all. MySQL has basically become the dominant database for web applications simply because it's licensing is cheap and it's cheerful and fast (at one time anyway). However, there is no way at all that MySQL will be allowed to acquire features that will let it compete with Oracle. That is now the sole domain of PostgreSQL.

Sun Microsystems: What are your theories?

[Futurepower(R)]

Why has Sun Microsystems not done particularly well in the last few years? Why are they finding it necessary to sell themselves to Oracle? My theory is that the highly reliable hardware Sun Microsystems sells is no longer popular because it is far cheaper to use consumer-grade hardware with software that is fault-tolerant. The excellent 2008 book Planet Google describes Google's experiences on page 54: "For about $278,000 in 2003, [Google] could assemble a rack with 176 microprocessors, 176 gigabytes of memory, and 7 terabytes of disk space. This compared favorably to a $758,000 server sold by the manufacturer of a well-known brand, which had only eight multiprocessors, one-third the memory, and about the same amount of disk space."

Why would Oracle buy Sun? Possibly because there are difficulties in making Oracle database products work with the new fault-tolerant technology. For example, fault-tolerant technology may require performing all database modifications on 4 computers at the same time, and Oracle may not want to sell 4 licenses for one application at the same price as the 1 license used with the more expensive high-reliability equipment.

What are your ideas about the sale of Sun, and Oracle's interest? There are many people with far more knowledge about this than I have.

Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories?

[randomnote1]

As a former partner with Sun, I strongly believe that Sun's insistence on using an Oracle out of the box solution to for its company wide sales to service system is what caused its demise. This software never worked and increased case handling times in the call center. That decreased customer satisfaction to such a point that customers started going elsewhere. I also believe Sun should have never gotten into the x86 server/workstation market. Instead they should have focused their energies behind their flagship SPARC lines and actually produced a processor of their own rather than buying Fujitu's technology. Overall I think Sun offers superior products, but their customer support system is rather terrible.

Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was there in the past few years. Basically, why SUN went south can be summarized as follows:

- hardware company in a rapidly shrinking margin-wise server market
- commodization of software
- change of strategy every two months (open source/not open source)
- disregard of customers (preparing solutions no one asked for, announcing projects while still on a drawing board - see JavaFX, treating low volume customers as "trash" etc.)
- easy going development pace, slow responses to customers bleeding money caused by bugs in SW/HW, a lot of monetary interest in senior managment to outsource parts of the work and profit on it personally
- brain drain (I was amazed by the "talent" intake in the past few months), OTOH many great persons have just left the company
- old boys network in the company (beware Google)

Anyway, the feeling at SUN was that Oracle was a better fit than IBM, though the expectation is to have massive layoffs in October.

Larry is a good friend of Scott, perhaps it's just personal prestige to conquer independent empire with some benefits such as SW/HW stack, all-in-one solutions, Java platform control and patent portfolio, or just another step in the ambitions of Larry to conquer the world. I am not playing golf with either of them...

In the end, I must emphasize SUN was a really nice company, the ethical standards were higher than anywhere else and the feeling of freedom was awesome. It's especially tragic to see the product of enthusiasm and virtues of so many people in the past to fall into the hands of Oracle...

Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories?

[DiegoBravo]

> Overall I think Sun offers superior products, but their customer support system is rather terrible.

I also believe that Sun offered superior products, but too overpriced for the market of the end of the 90s.

> Instead they should have focused their energies behind their flagship SPARC lines and actually produced a processor of their own

Yes... but for sure, the sale price would be at 20k/cpu for a performance similar to a Xeon; that's not competitive.

Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories?

[hairyfeet]

I always thought the point of Oracle buying Sun was so they could offer a full stack. After all before only IBM could offer the full stack from top to bottom from a single vendor. Now Oracle has their DB+Solaris+Sun hardware all under their control, which they can then optimize for DB throughput and if the customer has any problems there is only one vendor to call. Never underestimate how valuable not having to deal with multiple vendors saying "its not our fault" is to a corporation.

The software I would figure would be most likely to hit the chopping block (besides OO.o which seems to be a mess with lots of forking going on) is unbreakable Linux. After all they don't control Linux, but with Solaris they can now have the OS designed to integrate perfectly with their DB and they can control the direction of development. It always seemed to me that Oracle was a better fit for Sun than IBM, which would have had more overlap. But while you are correct that there are many like Google that prefer to "throw more boxes at it" there seems to still be a market for IBM "big iron" so I'm sure Oracle will still have plenty of customers.

PostgreSQL anyone?

[pEBDr]

"...I think that the need for an independent true Open Source entity for MySQL is even bigger than ever before." Umm, PostgreSQL, anyone? Try working with it after having used MySQL or Oracle. It's just years ahead.

Meh

[jmorris42]

It has been obvious that Sun was a zombie since the dot com bubble burst. That their corpse was going to be bought by someone was equally obvious. So of the available suitors was Oracle the best the Sun shareholders could hope for? Probably. Which explains they vote.

Re:Release ZFS as GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

...and expect it to still get rejected from inclusion in the Linux kernel due to ZFS implementing its own volumes and RAID instead of using existing Linux infrastructure. See Reiser4 for a precedent.

Re:Release ZFS as GPL

[diegocgteleline.es]

It wouldn't get rejected because of the internal volumen-raid implementation. Btrfs has that aswell, and has already been merged. ZFS would be rejected the first time due to other reasons, ZFS is not just a filesystem, it is a complete IO stack. Linux could merge the filesystem, but not the rest of IO stack, because Linux developers would not tollerate two separate IO stacks. ZFS would need to be ported first to the Linux layers.

Just get it over already.

[Roskolnikov]

This is one sideshow I wish I didn't have a front seat to; it was hard enough dealing with the re-branding every 2 months, not being one of the elite (try being a contractor supporting folks that 'wrote' what your supporting, especially when they didn't) lip service to a eat our own dog-food policy and an internal culture that expects weekly heroic acts; add to that the company trying very hard to sell itself for nearly the last year, being in offer status for half of that and having absolutely no forward momentum because no one seems to know what the 'Oracle' has in mind so why bother, well really, I would like to see this end so we can all see where the chips fall; unfortunately for me I believe I will be on the losing side of this deal, Oracle seems to avoid contract/outsource like the plague and I fall squarely in that bucket.