DOJ Gives Oracle Approval To Buy Sun

k33l0r writes "The BBC is reporting that the US Justice Department has approved Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems. The acquisition gives Oracle control over (or a leading role in), among other things, Java, MySQL, (Open)Solaris, ZFS, OpenOffice, and the NetBeans IDE. 'The European Commission has still to rule on the deal, a step that will be required before it can close. That body has indicated it will issue an initial opinion on Sept. 3, according to the Wall Street Journal. It may OK the deal at that time or launch a four-month probe of it. ... The Justice Department ruling came earlier than expected, a possible response to Sun's declining revenues and precarious business position in a steep recession, as the required reviews proceeded.' We first discussed the deal back when it was announced in April."

Comments

Reason for merger oversight: Java licensing

[javacowboy]

For those wondering why the merger wasn't simply rubber stamped, it has to do with the licensing of Java:

http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/no_java_7_us_doj

From what I read, it wasn't a *huge* deal, but enough of a concern that the DoJ had to work with Oracle instead of simply approving the merger right away.

The EU probably has similar concerns.

Re:What about Java

[javacowboy]

Oracle's middleware business basically runs on Java. Why would they abandon it?

Re:What about Java

[Eirenarch]

Do you really believe Ellison hates Microsoft? I do not believe at this level of business feelings matter. We've seen multiple times companies that fight a fierce fight in court over one thing to be first friends and combine efforts in another field. Basically these companies try to do whatever is more profitable to them. If Ellison judges that it is more profitable to make OOo interopable with MS Office and Java interopable with .NET this is what he will do. I can asure you that he is above simple Slashdot-like hate for Microsoft. That being said he may decide that the profitable thing is exactly what you said but somehow I doubt it.

Re:Not sure if this is more funny or scary

[davecb]

Actually the advantage is a fast backplane, not the memory. You may remember they bought the rights to the Cray asynchronous (really packet-switch-like) backplane quite a number of years ago, and have been expanding on it since.

It's easy to build a fast chip if it never has to maintain cache-consistency with anything off-chip. If it has to stay sane, even with only 64*4*2 = 512 threads banging on the same memory range, it not only takes an expensive bus, but it's also memory-transaction-rate limited.

That's why you read about transactional memory in Linux Weekly News: we all need it, SPARC and Intel both.

--dave