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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."
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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Oracle is sure to kill or marginalize MySQL. Rest in peace my old friend.
I don't know about that. If I was running Oracle, I would do three things: gradually modify MySQL to make it easier to transition from MySQL to Oracle, market MySQL heavily as a lightweight, easy databse for companies and organizations that can't justify the cost of Oracle for their database needs, develop and market a for pay support structure for MySQL that easily transitions to Oracle if the database gets big and complicated enough to justify the transition (and train the support staff to not transition anybody until they really got significant benefit from the transition.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
The primary hangup with the EU was the MySQL issue. Oracle didn't hold up 1 Billion dollars in sales with Sun by not giving up MySQL so they could kill MySQL. Releasing or breaking off MySQL would likely have removed all the barriers imposed by the EU and they could have moved along with their lives. They have an interest in MySQL, the question is what.
There are a lot of things that are perfectly suited to MySQL. The problem is when an organization or application grows and suddenly needs redundancy, and all the other fancy, expensive options that Oracle offers. An upgrade path would be brilliant. There is a market for free database software. If Oracle kills MySQL they've done nothing. Everyone can easily switch to Postgres or the branches from MySQL. I suspect that it's in their benefit to let it continue to exist and control the features, and make it upgrade compatible with OracleDB.
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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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.