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European Commission Approves Oracle-Sun Merger
rubycodez writes "The anti-trust body of the EU, the European Commission, has approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, believing competition would be preserved. It saw PostgreSQL as a viable independent alternative to MySQL and that market access to Java would not be restricted. Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year."
Oracle is sure to kill or marginalize MySQL. Rest in peace my old friend.
Monty is going to have a fit.
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GlassFish competes directly with Oracle AS, and Weblogic (which Oracle acquired through BEA's acquisition a while back).
NetBeans competes directly with Oracle's JDeveloper.
I wonder if Oracle will keep these tools around. Personally, I think Oracle would be a fool not to. The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is by far the most productive way to develop server side Java Applications.
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Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year.
Uh.. Citation needed, uhu.
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"Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year." No, you can't say that. Last year could have been a really bad year for Sun regardless, they might have only sold 100 Million dollars worth without all this fiasco going on. Not meeting what the accountants project is not "losing sales" but "missing your target".
Now that the obligatory is out of the way, is this going to be the last I hear about this? Or is someone (name rhymes with Bonty) going to write an angry blog post thats going to get /. front paged? Bound to happen.
From a competition point of view those applications also compete with JBoss and Eclipse / IntelliJ IDEA. I certainly hope that they are preserved. But moving them into Oracle will certainly not limit choice between providers. I presume Oracle will keep at least one application server / EE environment and IDE alive.
I know that many MySQL folks are antsy about this, but let's face it, this was the best hope for Solaris & related technologies.
Being swallowed by IBM, I believe, would have led to the swift death of many SUN technologies / divisions. I'm firmly of the opinion
that IBM's major interest was in acquiring and converting SUN's existing enterprise userbase.
Of course, they got a good chunk of that practically for free by the EU's foot-dragging.
I imagine SUN / Oracle have no recourse?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I doubt Oracle is going to kill or even hamper MySQL. If anything, they will make an Oracle upgrade path that fits like a glove. While MySQL takes away some of Oracle's business, there are things out that that just doesn't need Oracle and companies that just can't afford Oracle DB. It is in Oracle's best interest to empower MySQL so that people don't switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL or other free alternatives. I mean, if I'm Oracle. I want users under my umbrella even if they aren't using my flagship product. If they ever outgrow MySQL, I would (if I were Oracle) want them to look stay with me and upgrade to Oracle DB rather than look else where.
This is a huge boon for PostgreSQL though as several people will migrate away because of this. I used to use PostgreSQL a lot. The only reason I stopped was once InnoDB really stepped up it did what I needed, and MySQL is just easier to use.
Will MySQL survive this merger?
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While it's annoying that something like this had to take ages, I still think it's a good thing that these things are looked into. Far too many deals are done under shady circumstances. At least this one, potentially affecting countless systems around the world in the long run, was scrutinized before given a go-ahead.
.: Max Romantschuk
Have you ever tried to migrate anything from MySQL to Oracle? They are *so* different. It would take *years* to get MySQL to a point where such a transition would even be considered by companies wanting to switch.
Granted, migrating from any database to another is difficult, but I jut can't see it.
I presume Oracle will keep at least one application server / EE environment and IDE alive.
No doubt Oracle will keep at least one app server/IDE alive, the question is, which one?
Oracle App Server, Weblogic or GlassFish?
JDeveloper or NetBeans?
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Hopefully they will keep them around. Both Oracle and IBM pushing Java is a bigger threat to Microsoft than Linux at the moment.
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I have worked on projects that have thrown out Oracle in small/medium business setups (before the acquisition) in favor of MySQL. And yes, I do believe that MySQL clustering can be a well performing product. Now, the mistake started with the reliance of the InnoDB engine. What I will miss is the skill of the core MySQL developers (?) to work on non standard engines (like the Federated engine). Oracle makes the big money from large installations. Small to Medium sized demanding businesses have still a lot of ground to cover....And no, unfortunately, I have seen Postgres going horribly wrong, so it is not an option for my production environment.
I am worried for Netbeans since I've found it to be pleasant to do Java development in. My consolation is that I've heard from most people that JDeveloper is much more geared towards Oracle's own offerings than any of the other Java IDEs. The rest tend to be more general purpose. Hopefully this means that Netbeans will continue being supported even though their press release on the matter was a little bit vague.
I kinda agree.. This puts Oracle right up against HP, and IBM. Both of which have huge consulting, sell hardware, services, and their own databases, as well as selling others if its needed.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Yeah, I'd really miss Netbeans, it's definitely my favourite IDE after Visual Studio on any platform and my first choice for Java development also.
Pfft. Same argument as the RIAA about piracy. "We certainly would have made $x bazillion, if only..."
Please, if you ever want to aspire to anything higher than tabloid journalism, do at the very least two things:
1 - add the word "estimated" or something to that effect when you're pulling figures out of your (or someone elses) ass
2 - do not use the word "cost" for lost sales or other imaginary did-not-happen income. Cost is when an expense has happened, i.e. money has been spent. Money that never came in is never a "cost".
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The biguest competition against Oracle Weblogic (formerly BEA Weblogic) in the J2EE Application Server space is Websphere by IBM, not GlassFish.
The mostly widelly used IDE for Java development is Eclipse (which is open source), NetBeans is not even a second, maybe a far 3rd or worse.
I've been working professionally with Java for 12 years and I can't see how anybody can see GlassFish or NetBeans as at all important in the Java space: the truth is that while Sun's Java language and standard libraries are quite successfull their tools and framework implementations never do take off (even though they keep pushing them year-in-year-out by offering them bundled with the Java SE and Java EE SDKs).
Threatening Microsoft is not Oracle's business. Selling Oracle software, servers, and services is.
Expect MySQL support for large scale customers to be phased out starting... oh, wait, it's already been occurring. The Oracle sales staff have been eager to migrate MySQL customers, and now they have Sun's client list to work on. And they've been encouraging migration since the sale started. Not without cause, and it often makes sense for large customers.
HR, back office, etc.
Not the guys that keep the tech alive.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
GlassFish competes directly with Oracle AS, and Weblogic (which Oracle acquired through BEA's acquisition a while back).
NetBeans competes directly with Oracle's JDeveloper.
I wonder if Oracle will keep these tools around. Personally, I think Oracle would be a fool not to. The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is by far the most productive way to develop server side Java Applications.
I agree, and I don't think Oracle will be pulling the plug on these. Some of these technologies might get integrated, and some will probably just continue on.
Look at how they've handled BEA. They have silently admitted that WebLogic is superior, but are still integrating it with some components of OAS to make an even better product. I think we can probably expect something similar with their IDEs.
As far as Glassfish/MySQL... I really don't think they will get rid of these either. WebLogic/OracleDB are powerful (and expensive) enterprise class closed-source products. However, there will still be a large community of open-source developers that Oracle will probably want to hang on to. This should allow Glassfish/MySQL to live on.
I think if they do for whatever reason try to get rid of these, there will be a huge migration of developers to other FOSS products, ultimately leading to more competition for Oracle.
What I'm really curious about is the O/S and server fronts. "Oracle Solaris" and "Oracle Fire" just don't sound right.
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market MySQL heavily as a lightweight, easy databse for companies and organizations that can't justify the cost of Oracle for their database needs
Oracle has already a free (as in beer) database : Oracle Express.
It was tailored to replace MySQL, a few years before this buy out.
I for one am totally in favor of merging Oracle with the Sun. Oh wait...they meant the "other" Sun...damn :(
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I can't belive they'd get rid of Netbeans. It one of the IDEs at the moment. At least it's open source so it can be forked if that happens.
I'd say Netbeans is gaining popularity. The issue is Eclipse started off with a big lead and people don't just up and leave their IDEs over night and their company may dictate what they can use.
Netbeans runs better, imo, and it's slowly adding more support for languages like PHP and Python and it does a good job with them.
I fully expect Netbeans to take off with PHP devs and if they keep going as they are then slowly it'll gain users amongst java devs too.
Oracle has the opportunity to pleasantly surprise the open source community. Let us hope they take the chance to not piss us off, and use MySQL as a low-end DB with an upgrade path to Oracle. besides, they already 'promised' to keep it open source and maintained.
As for Glassfish/opensolaris/Netbeans, I don't know. I certainly don't think they'll kill them, but who knows. They're all open source projects with a decent community.
offer to spin off mysql. Perhaps after a few years. It would seem that if their intentions was to acquire Solaris and that market, they would have offered mysql up. However, .....
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'll abandon both Java and MySQL before it's too late. Within a year, they'll be caught in a proprietary quagmire.
(Even more than Enterprise Java already is, I mean.)
The big deal with NetBeans is that it's an all-in-one package - you get it and JDK, and you're all set to go for any kind of Java development you can possibly think of - be it a desktop Swing application, a J2EE web app, a midlet, or whatever. In that, it's rather similar to Visual Studio.
With Eclipse, you don't even get a decent visual UI editor out of the box. Of course, you can find Eclipse plugins to do everything NetBeans can do, but that's precisely the point - you have to find them first, occasionally you have to pay for the good ones, too, and quite often you have to decide which one out of N options you want to use (just look at the list of available UI editors...). With NetBeans, the choice has been made for you, so you can just use it in blissful ignorance. This is particularly helpful for beginner programmers, since they can just take NetBeans and not worry about anything else.
In short, Eclipse is like Debian, while NetBeans is like SUSE. These are different niches, and both are good to have.
I'm firmly of the opinion that IBM's major interest was in acquiring and converting SUN's existing enterprise userbase.
IBM wanted control over Java. The rest of the Sun business was dying anyway.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I do not think that Oracle and IBM are deliberately going after MS. But the more business applications get written in Java, the more tenuous MS's desktop OS monopoly becomes.
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Yeah, I'd really miss Netbeans, it's definitely my favourite IDE after Visual Studio on any platform and my first choice for Java development also.
No immediate window, no fatjar, no STL containers debug... still a way to eclipse IBM's offering ;)
Disclaimer, I use netbeans *daily* (~5 hours a day) @ work and think it is a good IDE, but I think Eclipse is more feature complete (and faster!)
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just wait until you're out in the business world, you'll be amazed at how many different pieces of data need to be managed. it goes way beyond name, address, phone and email. on the surface it does sound like poor design and something that's probably impossible to normalize, but i have seen it (and more) in my day.
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Are you intentionally dense or is english not your first, second or third language?
I didn't doubt that "lost sales" exist.
I do insist to not call them "costs", because they aren't. Calling things by their proper names is a primary requirement for correct understanding and evaluation.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Big Blue was willing to cough up $4.5 Billion for Java, which has been FOSS for a few years?
I can't how it could have been worth so much to them.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It is however fact. If you follow the Sun mailing lists for opensolaris, you'll have seen extremely talented and valuable engineers leaving the company in droves, and not of their own volition.
Are you intentionally dense or is english not your first, second or third language?
Are you intentionally dense or do you fail to understand the difference between nouns and verbs in English?
I do insist to not call them "costs"
Cost (transitive verb): cause the loss of
As in, "Responding to your nonsense cost me more time than it was worth."
Cost (transitive verb): cause the loss of
Same thing. You can not lose what you do not have. Not winning something is not a loss. Or at least I don't feel like I lost the 100 m dash at the last summer olympics. Might be because I didn't compete, you know? Likewise, even if you compete, not winning the lottery jackpot is not identical to losing a million bucks.
Again, few misuses of words by large organisations are not intentional. If the RIAA were to whine "we don't make as much money as we think we ought to", very few people would sympathize. If they say "piracy costs us umpty-dumpty bazillion bucks", people do, because we can all relate to how it feels to lose something.
Same here. Sun/Oracle could have saved/made $x in this time. I could have won the lottery. I should have received a raise. That nice girl over there ought to have looked at me for longer. Really, what's the difference? It's all hypothetical profit, not the loss of something. You don't lose money, time or love that you never had to begin with.
Now, excuse me, I have several billion dollars to lose in all those lotteries I don't play in. Can you imagine what it costs me every week to not win?
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Your ability to resort to name calling instantly when anyone doesn't agree with you is another reason /. types work for the business types.
Really? You know so much about me, it's fascinating. And you assume that my behaviour on /. is identical to the one at home or at work or elsewhere in life. Do you treat your wife the same as your boss? Why then should I treat an anonymous coward on a website the same as real people in the real world that I really interact with?
of how much worse of Sun is because of market uncertainty.
Yes, except that this uncertainty is part of the process and in a serious enterprise will have been considered in the overal picture. If you orchestrate a merger at a size like this, you know the paperwork involved. Crying about these sales that didn't happen is like crying about taxes. You can do it, but the proper way to deal with it is to accept the fact and include it in your calculations.
In fact, as I understand, the regulators could have taken much longer, had they wanted to. So where is the joy about the profit that was made due to the short time? After all, if you call the one thing by a name, you should call its opposite by the opposite name, correct?
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because glassfish and netbeans don't have the perceived importance of mysql in their respective markets.
there is not a chance in the world they will be around in the long run. oracle isn't going to duplicate software dev teams to build competing products in house.
The problem is, the EU member countries are a pretty large market in themselves, and the EC appears to reserve the right to tell companies to go home and stop selling in the EU, if they don't like what they're doing.
So, if they want the EU market, they need to play by the EC's rules.
January 27th, Sun product fan-boi Geeks the world over who have been fretting, "but they *can't* kill my favorite Sun thing and fire the engineers for it because of x,y, and z" will find their X through Z reasons run through the wood chipper
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2010/01/sun-setting-on-jobs/1
Going to be a great splatter-fest, stay tuned.