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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." 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.
Okay.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claims the European Commission’s prolonged investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, which isn’t expected to finish much before the agency’s mid-January deadline, is costing Sun $100 million a month in revenues and a weakened revenue stream will impact how many employees Sun gets to keep if and when the acquisition is approved.
And this isn't the only citation you can find.
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.
So the guy who wants the merger to happen as fast as possible claims (threaten ?) that slowing it down cost sun a lot of money and will lead to people getting fired ? That's not exactly unbiased ...
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?
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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I'm taxed in Pounds you insensitive clod. Not that EU taxes probably account for much compared with just the interest on Gordon Brown's debts.
I have seen Postgres going horribly wrong, so it is not an option for my production environment
Can you clarify? I recently (well, a year ago) switched one of our main web apps from MySQL to Postgres (I needed transactional support on large tables (>100 columns) - which made InnoDB useless), and I've never looked back. How does Postgres go "horribly wrong"?
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
I for one am totally in favor of merging Oracle with the Sun. Oh wait...they meant the "other" Sun...damn :(
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Well, not necessarily. MySQL has two parts, the front end and the storage engine. The storage engine is pluggable, and the front end is where all of the weirdness lives. Now that Oracle owns the copyright on MySQL, they are not bound by the GPL when modifying or distributing it, so they can create a MySQL personality for Oracle that will use its native storage (and maybe query optimisation engine in some cases) on the back end. The MySQL client would still think it was talking to a MySQL database, but would really be talking to Oracle via a translation layer.
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Agreed. it would be the proper way to go. As a matter of fact, this is not the first time this sort of translation is being made available by Oracle.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
Making false statements about financials in a public company leads people to spend a fair bit of uncomfortable time in prison.
If Larry Ellison is making those statements, you can be 100% sure they can be backed up with hard financial data.