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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.)
Oracle won't kill MySQL. MySQL's accessibility hurts Microsoft's database division too much. Oracle and MySQL are two different markets, anyway.
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.
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.
Monty is the man who will keep MySQL alive regardless of Oracle. Oracle can funble and bumble it all they want. In fact, you can expect MySQL development to slow to a crawl over the next 3 years as Oracles tries to figure out what to do and to integrate it. In the meantime, Monty AB is going to become the new defacto standard for MySQL replacing Oracles version in the open source community. Distros will start picking up Monty AB and as a result, more installs of Monty AB will be used than that Oracles MySQL in 5 years do to licensing issues or lack of development.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Larry is the goatse guy?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Personally I think Oracle and Sun are perfect for each other business wise. Two companies that have some good products, often don't even realize the potential of what they have, have no real vision other than getting big contracts signed, and couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag.
Now that there is even a hint that something might change, I halfway expect managers to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off spewing crap like "Solaris is going to be desupported!" or "Sparc servers are 'going away' soon". (I went through this with Oracle Forms when Oracle dropped the Win32 client ARRAGGG!)
It would just be nice if they could make their intentions 100% clear on what specifically they plan to do with Sun's products.
"and dump MySQL altogether."
How can this been modded up as "insightful"??? Everybody knows it's not "dump mysql" but "mysqldump"!!!
(/me ducks away)
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.