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Oracle to buy Sun

249 points by justinsb 18y ago

samt 18y ago
The best news that could come out of this deal would be better Linux support for T1/2/2+ and Thumper hardware. Awesome hardware but I can hardly justify building expertise and support infrastructure for Solaris just to run it.
sunjain 18y ago
Overall it might be much better than the deal with IBM. With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished, in case of Oracle there is a fair chance it will survive(look at Weblogic - Oracle is promoting Weblogic as their primary middleware). With this purchase, Oracle is in a position to provide(and own) the whole stack : hardware/os/app container(java)/app/database - look around the only other company which comes close to this is Microsoft(which does not have a big ERP portfolio). I think MySQL was just a small factor in this deal. I think this will be big loss to IBM(now that Oracle gets it). IT customers are gravitating towards utility and end-to-end solutions and applications usually drive push(guess who has the biggest business application portfolio).
- swillden 18y ago
  With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished IBM currently sells OS/390, OS/400 and AIX while also pushing Linux and only recently stopped selling OS/2. I think it's quite likely that Solaris would have just joined the list.
  - gaius 18y ago
    IBM GS would happily sell you Solaris services, but there's no way they'd port Solaris to POWER.
    - hapless 18y ago
      Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1 were ported to IBM PReP systems in the 90s. You could order certain models of PPC workstation with AIX, Solaris, Windows NT, or OS/2 preloaded.
      - gaius 18y ago
        Haha, I remember when you could get Windows NT on SPARC too... Not the same thing as being a real product tho'.
voidpointer 18y ago
Maybe this is exactly what they had in mind at Oracle when they first released their stuff or Linux...
compay 18y ago
So I guess Windows 8 will not be built on Solaris now.
- binarycheese 18y ago
  So Oracle owns VirtualBox?
pwim 18y ago
I wonder what this means for the future of MySQL.
- andr 18y ago
  Oracle owns InnoDB and Sleepycat/BerkeleyDB, both of which are in active development. InnoDB is also MySQL's most popular storage engine. So I wouldn't fear for MySQL's future. It wasn't doing well in Sun anyways.
  - briansmith 18y ago
    Now MySQL doesn't have to implement a new engine to replace InnoDB (their previous motivation for the new engine was to keep control of it away from Oracle).
    - Keyframe 18y ago
      And now they will have to implement a whole new company. Sigh, I want to feel optimistic about this buyout, but somehow I don't.
      - briansmith 18y ago
        Monty already left Sun last month to start his own fork of MySQL.
        staunch 18y ago
        The Open Source golden parachute.
        briansmith 18y ago
        Let's wait and see if he actually makes any money before we call it "golden".
        18y ago
mrduncan 18y ago
As far as their larger products are concerned, I think that Oracle is a much better fit for Sun than IBM was. Obviously there will be some overlaps in technologies (MySQL vs. Oracle being the big one) but on the whole, I think these companies match together pretty well. Are there any other huge overlaps in technologies (other than the obvious MySQL/Oracle)?
- dwwatk01 18y ago
  Definitely not as big as MySQL/Oracle, but one that I'm wondering most about is their open-source app server Glassfish. A big part of Oracle's BEA acquisition was bolstering their middleware suite (with WebLogic, et al.). Will Glassfish development continue? I hope so...
moeffju 18y ago
The only thing that comes to my mind is: Someone's had to do it. But it's still interesting that it's Oracle who did. This brings InnoDB/BDB and MySQL and of course Oracle under one umbrella. Also, Java now 'belongs to' Oracle, as does Solaris, xVM/VirtualBox, etc. I am curious how and where this will go.
dhimes 18y ago
Oracle is as committed as ever to to Linux and other open platforms How committed is that? Is this the end of free Java, MySQL, etc.?
- mseebach 18y ago
  As committed as ever: Oracle will still run on a small selection of RHEL releases. /sarcasm
- j_baker 18y ago
  This is interesting because I looked on Oracle's website for the deal expecting to at least see a percursory promise to keep things open but didn't find it. Who knows?
  - nailer 18y ago
    Click 'Oracle Buys Sun' and scroll down. http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf "Will the ownership of Solaris change Oracle’s position on Linux? No. This transaction enhances our commitment to open standards and choice. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships."
  - mseebach 18y ago
    In the conference call they talked about operating Sun at a significantly higher margin, and talked only about Java/Solaris/Sparc/Storage + Oracle synergy. The sum of references to open source was, "oh yeah, and Oracle still runs on Linux". I'm a bit of a pessimist, but I'd expect to see serious downscaling of FOSS at Sun.
- blasdel 18y ago
  http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ Their sponsorship of BTRFS is a pretty big deal -- especially that it's truly open source (development model and all), unlike Sun's simulacra.
bukster 18y ago
I wonder what the implications are for Sun's mobile efforts (Java ME)??
justinsb 18y ago
http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-bought-sun-microsystems-859 http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-bo... is now particularly interesting (from 10 days ago). It argues: MySQL is a (low-end) complementary product to the (high-end) Oracle DB Solaris fits into Oracle's strategy of controlling an OS (their RedHat derivative) Sun's hardware business could continue given Oracle have just partnered with HP to ship hardware Java is key to Oracle's application strategy IMHO, this feels like a much less strained fit than with IBM.
- jhancock 18y ago
  Oracle didn't have to buy Sun to have these benefits. The only reason this fits better than an IBM acquisition is because Oracle and Sun internal cultures are more aligned.
  - lallysingh 18y ago
    There's benefits. First they can start making MySQL a gateway drug into Oracle. e.g. aligning syntax, a clear demarcation of features between the products, upgrade programs, documentation, support, etc.
    - jhancock 18y ago
      They could have done all you mention and saved $7 billion or so.
- briansmith 18y ago
  MySQL is a low-end complement to Oracle, but Oracle already had a whole range of products in the Oracle range, including a free version of Oracle (Oracle XE). If Oracle really wanted to give away a free database, they would raise the limits on Oracle XE to something practical. It is silly to spend resources developing MySQL in parallel to Oracle. I expect that MySQL will slow MySQL development (it is already glacial), and provide migration tools from MySQL to Oracle. Perhaps they will develop a MySQL front-end to Oracle and/or enhance MySQL's front-end to be more compatible with Oracle's syntax. Either way, MySQL has always been an inferior good and Oracle will ensure it always will be. Oracle just needs to keep MySQL alive enough that nobody else can start a viable business around a fork of it. I also don't think that Oracle will want to keep supporting both Linux and Solaris in the long run. Now Oracle has ZFS and BTFS; they don't need both. It will be interesting to see what they do with Solaris and its key technologies.
mseebach 18y ago
A webcast of the conference call is referred to, but I can't find it on Oracles investor website. Anyone know where it is?
- mtkd 18y ago
  There will be a conference call today to discuss the transaction at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time. Investors can listen to the conference call by dialing (719) 234-7870, passcode 923645. A replay will be available for 24 hours after the call ends at (719) 884-8882, passcode: 923645. A live audio webcast of the call will be made available at www.oracle.com/investor and a replay will be available for seven days after the call ends.
  - mseebach 18y ago
    Exactly. I went to www.oracle.com/investor and couldn't find it.
davidw 18y ago
Wow. Interesting, but my gut reaction is "yuck". In addition to the mysql question, I wonder what it will mean for other open source stuff, like Java, which has been moving in that direction, Open Office, Solaris, etc... Oracle, traditionally, hasn't been a big open sourcer of things, although they were one of the first to give some real legitimacy to Linux by porting to it, some 10+ years ago. Also, culturally, how will the fit be? Wonder if they intend to keep some of the good bits of Sun and trash the rest or try and run it as a going concern? Big news in any case.
- lallysingh 18y ago
  Legend has it, all they did to port oracle to linux was type 'make' -- no source changes whatsoever. Of course, this is Oracle, so that's most likely marketing...
  - tptacek 18y ago
    I thought Oracle used Jam, not Make.
  - briansmith 18y ago
    Because of different shared memory optimizations in Solaris (especially Solaris 10+) and Linux, there's a non-trivial amount of work involved. I doubt it was anything close to "just type make".
  - oddgodd 18y ago
    That was Informix, not Oracle.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Oracle is written in two layers, there is an abstraction layer and Oracle itself. If you know Oracle then you know it handles a lot of stuff for itself that the OS would traditionally do, for example it has its own process scheduling, interprocess communication, filesystem/volume manager, memory management - as of 11g it even talks directly to NFS servers in userland, bypassing the OS filesystem mounts entirely. Once the abstraction layer is ported then yes, it would be just "make" for Oracle itself. This is how back in the day Oracle ran on 90+ Unix variants...
j_baker 18y ago
Maybe I'm just out of the loop but, this kind of struck me out of left field. All in all, I think this is aimed to keep Oracle competitive with Microsoft outside the database realm. Now, just like MS, they control the Operating System (Oracle's Linux is no match for Solaris), the language, and the database. Plus, they have the added bonus of controlling the hardware too!
- nailer 18y ago
  "Now, just like MS, they control the Operating System (Oracle's Linux is no match for Solaris), " Really? The telco and finance industries that were all Sun based in the mid 90s have dumped most of their Solaris for Linux. Startups are still predominantly Linux. Where's Solaris growing?
  - blasdel 18y ago
    The only thing I can think of is http://joyent.com/ http://joyent.com/ Initially they were a FreeBSD shop, I think Sun gave them heavy subsidies to switch to OpenSolaris on Sun hardware. I'm not sure how much the sweetheart deal was relaxed as Joyent grew.
mcormier 18y ago
"The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion". The value of the failed IBM deal was $7 billion.
- j_baker 18y ago
  Yup. They rejected IBM's offer for 9.40 a share, but are accepting this one for 9.50 a share. After their stock plummeted for rejecting IBM, I suspect they didn't want to pull another Yahoo.
  - jimbokun 18y ago
    This is all interesting, but I think IBM may regret not getting this deal done. It seems "owning" Java gives Oracle some leverage over IBM as so much of their services business hinges on Java. The possibility of turn key solution stacks with hardware/Solaris/Oracle/business apps might give Oracle a chance to compete in IBM's markets, too, or at least reduce demand for IBM services. If you can get all that installed and supported from one vendor, you might need fewer service agreements from third party vendors like IBM.
    - dean 18y ago
      Unfortunately that takes companies back to the old days of being a hostage to their vendors.
- nailer 18y ago
  IBM lowered it's offer after discovering a few things about Sun it didn't like. Sun was OK with the price, but added some legal causes IBM didn't like - so IBM walked away.
  - vang3lis 18y ago
    can you elaborate, please?
- mbreese 18y ago
  Then there were also the regulatory issues that the IBM+Sun deal would have faced. IBM and Sun are the main competitors in a few areas (large scale tape storage, for example). This would have made the deal more expensive for IBM than just the $7 billion price tag. Oracle and Sun have very few overlapping markets (I can't think of any off hand, aside from the Oracle Red Hat clone and Solaris). As such, this deal will be much smoother for both parties.
modoc 18y ago
I really wish it had been IBM. IBM's investment in Java, open source, free tools, etc... has historically been stellar. Oracle, not so much. I would have felt much better about Java's future if it were in IBMs hands.
- jhawk28 18y ago
  Of the companies, Oracle is the only one who has ever made really LARGE acquisitions and made them work. It will be interesting to see what Oracle does when they need to start spinning off the different tools that duplicate their functionality. Oracle has been dev friendly with free tools and development environments. You can download their enterprise Oracle database from their website. IBM always seems to charge for their tools.
  - modoc 18y ago
    My experience has been the opposite. Yes, you can get Oracle XE on a limited set of platforms (still no OS X support for any current Oracle databases), for free, although the default configs leave a lot to be desired. However that doesn't compare to the large number of free and/or open source Java projects, libraries, tech articles, forums, etc... that IBM has supported. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/ http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/. You also need a registered account to do pretty much anything on Oracle's site, in stark contrast to IBM's developer tools and sites. Also if Oracle's SQL Developer is them being friendly to devs, then I wish they wouldn't:) That thing is one of the ugliest, most prone to crash, DB tools I've ever used.
    - gaius 18y ago
      Not true; you can download 10.2.0.4 for OSX from OTN.
      - modoc 18y ago
        Which just came out on the 9th of April I think, which is how many years late? Also, it doesn't appear to install correctly unless you're running OS X Server. Fine for production, useless for doing development on my laptop with.
bensummers 18y ago
I wonder what will happen to the Sun Startup Essentials scheme. It's not exactly compatible with the Oracle view of the world.
- nailer 18y ago
  First time I met anyone from SSE they tried to sell me SPARC hardware. For me it seems very much compatible with the Oracle view of the world.
  - bensummers 18y ago
    We're on the scheme, and use Sun x86. Maybe it's different here in the UK, but it's been wonderfully pressure-free on the sales side and they've put an awful lot of effort into helping startups in ways other than selling cheap kit. Obviously it's all out of self-interest, but it seems to me to be very much enlightened self-interest. Which isn't how you'd describe Oracle.
    - nailer 18y ago
      Odd, I'm UK (London) based too. I encountered their salesy SSE people at FOWA London. Politely had to explain that I has no need for 256 concurrent threads on a single machine in any of my web apps at the present time.
      - bensummers 18y ago
        Predictable, I suppose. Sun's sales and marketing people take yet another good thing and fail to sell it.
WalkingDead 18y ago
Was it all pre-planned? Sun buying MySQL at 1 billion just to make itself more attractive to Oracle for a buyout within a year? In the end Sun seems to have made a profit out of its 1 billion investment. Oracle probably have added a lot than it would have offered simply to ensure it owns its main business killer MySQL.
- aardvark 18y ago
  I doubt Sun planned for this. If it hadn't been for the financial downturn, Sun's acquisition of MySQL (with its 12 million customer base) could have been Sun's path to new profitability. Maybe not a guarantee, but I suspect they were hoping for growth rather than a buyout.
- blasdel 18y ago
  Especially since MySQL would never have sold out to Oracle directly.
bpyne 18y ago
Wouldn't this give Oracle ownership of the JVM? I'm a little more concerned about their ownership of it than the Java language itself.
- nailer 18y ago
  They'd own the copyrights and trademarks, yes. JDK 1.7 is however OSS.
- jaaron 18y ago
  It gives them the key vote in the JCP which means they own not only the copyright to the JVM code, but also the rights for the Java specification. There's been some arguments in the JCP about Java 7, with Sun usually the last hold out. So this move is likely to resolve many issues within the JCP. Or at least we can hope.
jermy 18y ago
Less clear-cut than the future plans for the database servers are those for Sun's ZFS and Oracle's BtrFS. Are they likely to continue development in parallel, or might the licence on ZFS be changed and development merged?
- blasdel 18y ago
  The best hope for merging might be that BtrFS adopts ZFS's on-disk format as an alternate to it's existing ext-based one.
alexitosrv 18y ago
And what will happen to VirtualBox? Oracle has server Virtualization software too...
- scorpioxy 18y ago
  I'm curious to know that too. Sun was pushing VirtualBox(with more features and killer performance improvements) in order to sell more machines and promote virtualization as the way to the future. I am not sure if Oracle would actually be interested in this.
psadauskas 18y ago
Does this mean we'll never get Solaris' ZFS open-source enough for Linux?
- blasdel 18y ago
  It actually makes it marginally more likely (Oracle's not going to be so worried about pissing off old anti-GPL Solaris engineers), but the license is the least of the problem. ZFS would have to be completely rewritten to ever make it into Linus's tree -- it's written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer, so it implements its own, and the linux kernel devs are pretty anal about sharing implementations. Once you fixed all the VFS issues, you'd end up with essentially a BTRFS clone that uses ZFS's on-disk format. Incidentally, BTRFS's development is sponsored wholly by Oracle!
  - kmavm 18y ago
    I'm not sure it's fair to summarize the Linux community's complaint about ZFS as the latter being "written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer." Solaris very much has a VFS layer, and ZFS plays with it. What's different about ZFS is that, from most storage stacks' perspectives, it is also a volume manager. Linux people claim this is a layering violation; ZFS' architects claim that integrating traditional functions of filesystems and volume managers let them innovate, e.g., by closing the RAID write hole.
markh 18y ago
One of the things Oracle does VERY well is acquire companies. They do it a lot more often than most people realize and have it down to a fine art. That does not mean that everyone fits into their culture, but they'll identify those people as part of their process. They'll start by putting an Oracle logo on the Sun product and service range and keep selling them to exist Sun customers and then start on existing Oracle customers (where Oracle don't already compete). Next step is to more clearly position, integrate and possibly rationalize the new offerings. Step 3: profit.
banned_man 18y ago
Simpsons did it. (* Well, Mr. Burns didn't technically buy it; he merely blocked it out.)
oomkiller 18y ago
NOOOO! Sun has done many great things for the computer world, and I'd hate to see them be locked behind Oracle's doors so where only big corporate guys that smoke cigars and drink fine aged bourbon have access to them.
kubrick 18y ago
... or, as My Little Pony prefers to phrase it, Sun is reverse-acquiring Oracle.
samuel 18y ago
From my ignorance, it seems a very smart move from Oracle. It makes a lot of sense for them since Sun has lot of things they lack of: Server hardware, the Java stack, an operating system, their own processor line... They just became an IBM or HP!! IBM already has all of that, and they sell the complete stack: zSeries/iSeries servers - Power Architecture - zOS/OS400 - DB2. Now Oracle may compete with Sun M9000 - SPARC - Solaris - Oracle DB. Amazing, isn't?. I understand that people around here is worried about's MySQL's future and the like, but I believe that this acquisition is about the big bucks of the high end servers, and the fact that Sun owned MySQL had zero relevance.
zandorg 18y ago
I recently emailed Oracle to give me a quote for Berkeley DB, so I could use it commercially. The response? Absolutely None!
hsuresh 18y ago
Sad day for Java, IMHO. But am hoping this would turn out to be a blessing for Ruby/Python.
ars 18y ago
Now forget that both oracle and sun are names of companies, and instead read them as english words. :)
justlearning 18y ago
I was wondering if anyone here "working" on ZFS can speculate what this may mean for ZFS and Open Solaris. I tried Open Solaris some time back, though the package system is not as friendly as Ubuntu, I found it really interesting to work with.

249 points by justinsb 18y ago

samt 18y ago

The best news that could come out of this deal would be better Linux support for T1/2/2+ and Thumper hardware. Awesome hardware but I can hardly justify building expertise and support infrastructure for Solaris just to run it.

sunjain 18y ago

Overall it might be much better than the deal with IBM. With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished, in case of Oracle there is a fair chance it will survive(look at Weblogic - Oracle is promoting Weblogic as their primary middleware). With this purchase, Oracle is in a position to provide(and own) the whole stack : hardware/os/app container(java)/app/database - look around the only other company which comes close to this is Microsoft(which does not have a big ERP portfolio). I think MySQL was just a small factor in this deal. I think this will be big loss to IBM(now that Oracle gets it). IT customers are gravitating towards utility and end-to-end solutions and applications usually drive push(guess who has the biggest business application portfolio).

swillden 18y ago
With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished IBM currently sells OS/390, OS/400 and AIX while also pushing Linux and only recently stopped selling OS/2. I think it's quite likely that Solaris would have just joined the list.
- gaius 18y ago
  IBM GS would happily sell you Solaris services, but there's no way they'd port Solaris to POWER.
  - hapless 18y ago
    Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1 were ported to IBM PReP systems in the 90s. You could order certain models of PPC workstation with AIX, Solaris, Windows NT, or OS/2 preloaded.
    - gaius 18y ago
      Haha, I remember when you could get Windows NT on SPARC too... Not the same thing as being a real product tho'.

voidpointer 18y ago

Maybe this is exactly what they had in mind at Oracle when they first released their stuff or Linux...

compay 18y ago

So I guess Windows 8 will not be built on Solaris now.

binarycheese 18y ago
So Oracle owns VirtualBox?

pwim 18y ago

I wonder what this means for the future of MySQL.

andr 18y ago
Oracle owns InnoDB and Sleepycat/BerkeleyDB, both of which are in active development. InnoDB is also MySQL's most popular storage engine. So I wouldn't fear for MySQL's future. It wasn't doing well in Sun anyways.
- briansmith 18y ago
  Now MySQL doesn't have to implement a new engine to replace InnoDB (their previous motivation for the new engine was to keep control of it away from Oracle).
  - Keyframe 18y ago
    And now they will have to implement a whole new company. Sigh, I want to feel optimistic about this buyout, but somehow I don't.
    - briansmith 18y ago
      Monty already left Sun last month to start his own fork of MySQL.
      - staunch 18y ago
        The Open Source golden parachute.
        briansmith 18y ago
        Let's wait and see if he actually makes any money before we call it "golden".
        18y ago

mrduncan 18y ago

As far as their larger products are concerned, I think that Oracle is a much better fit for Sun than IBM was. Obviously there will be some overlaps in technologies (MySQL vs. Oracle being the big one) but on the whole, I think these companies match together pretty well. Are there any other huge overlaps in technologies (other than the obvious MySQL/Oracle)?

dwwatk01 18y ago
Definitely not as big as MySQL/Oracle, but one that I'm wondering most about is their open-source app server Glassfish. A big part of Oracle's BEA acquisition was bolstering their middleware suite (with WebLogic, et al.). Will Glassfish development continue? I hope so...

moeffju 18y ago

The only thing that comes to my mind is: Someone's had to do it. But it's still interesting that it's Oracle who did. This brings InnoDB/BDB and MySQL and of course Oracle under one umbrella. Also, Java now 'belongs to' Oracle, as does Solaris, xVM/VirtualBox, etc. I am curious how and where this will go.

dhimes 18y ago

Oracle is as committed as ever to to Linux and other open platforms How committed is that? Is this the end of free Java, MySQL, etc.?

mseebach 18y ago
As committed as ever: Oracle will still run on a small selection of RHEL releases. /sarcasm
j_baker 18y ago
This is interesting because I looked on Oracle's website for the deal expecting to at least see a percursory promise to keep things open but didn't find it. Who knows?
- nailer 18y ago
  Click 'Oracle Buys Sun' and scroll down. http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf "Will the ownership of Solaris change Oracle’s position on Linux? No. This transaction enhances our commitment to open standards and choice. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships."
- mseebach 18y ago
  In the conference call they talked about operating Sun at a significantly higher margin, and talked only about Java/Solaris/Sparc/Storage + Oracle synergy. The sum of references to open source was, "oh yeah, and Oracle still runs on Linux". I'm a bit of a pessimist, but I'd expect to see serious downscaling of FOSS at Sun.
blasdel 18y ago
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ Their sponsorship of BTRFS is a pretty big deal -- especially that it's truly open source (development model and all), unlike Sun's simulacra.

bukster 18y ago

I wonder what the implications are for Sun's mobile efforts (Java ME)??

justinsb 18y ago

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-bought-sun-microsystems-859 http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-bo... is now particularly interesting (from 10 days ago). It argues: MySQL is a (low-end) complementary product to the (high-end) Oracle DB Solaris fits into Oracle's strategy of controlling an OS (their RedHat derivative) Sun's hardware business could continue given Oracle have just partnered with HP to ship hardware Java is key to Oracle's application strategy IMHO, this feels like a much less strained fit than with IBM.

jhancock 18y ago
Oracle didn't have to buy Sun to have these benefits. The only reason this fits better than an IBM acquisition is because Oracle and Sun internal cultures are more aligned.
- lallysingh 18y ago
  There's benefits. First they can start making MySQL a gateway drug into Oracle. e.g. aligning syntax, a clear demarcation of features between the products, upgrade programs, documentation, support, etc.
  - jhancock 18y ago
    They could have done all you mention and saved $7 billion or so.
briansmith 18y ago
MySQL is a low-end complement to Oracle, but Oracle already had a whole range of products in the Oracle range, including a free version of Oracle (Oracle XE). If Oracle really wanted to give away a free database, they would raise the limits on Oracle XE to something practical. It is silly to spend resources developing MySQL in parallel to Oracle. I expect that MySQL will slow MySQL development (it is already glacial), and provide migration tools from MySQL to Oracle. Perhaps they will develop a MySQL front-end to Oracle and/or enhance MySQL's front-end to be more compatible with Oracle's syntax. Either way, MySQL has always been an inferior good and Oracle will ensure it always will be. Oracle just needs to keep MySQL alive enough that nobody else can start a viable business around a fork of it. I also don't think that Oracle will want to keep supporting both Linux and Solaris in the long run. Now Oracle has ZFS and BTFS; they don't need both. It will be interesting to see what they do with Solaris and its key technologies.

mseebach 18y ago

A webcast of the conference call is referred to, but I can't find it on Oracles investor website. Anyone know where it is?

mtkd 18y ago
There will be a conference call today to discuss the transaction at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time. Investors can listen to the conference call by dialing (719) 234-7870, passcode 923645. A replay will be available for 24 hours after the call ends at (719) 884-8882, passcode: 923645. A live audio webcast of the call will be made available at www.oracle.com/investor and a replay will be available for seven days after the call ends.
- mseebach 18y ago
  Exactly. I went to www.oracle.com/investor and couldn't find it.

davidw 18y ago

Wow. Interesting, but my gut reaction is "yuck". In addition to the mysql question, I wonder what it will mean for other open source stuff, like Java, which has been moving in that direction, Open Office, Solaris, etc... Oracle, traditionally, hasn't been a big open sourcer of things, although they were one of the first to give some real legitimacy to Linux by porting to it, some 10+ years ago. Also, culturally, how will the fit be? Wonder if they intend to keep some of the good bits of Sun and trash the rest or try and run it as a going concern? Big news in any case.

lallysingh 18y ago
Legend has it, all they did to port oracle to linux was type 'make' -- no source changes whatsoever. Of course, this is Oracle, so that's most likely marketing...
- tptacek 18y ago
  I thought Oracle used Jam, not Make.
- briansmith 18y ago
  Because of different shared memory optimizations in Solaris (especially Solaris 10+) and Linux, there's a non-trivial amount of work involved. I doubt it was anything close to "just type make".
- oddgodd 18y ago
  That was Informix, not Oracle.
- gaius 18y ago
  Oracle is written in two layers, there is an abstraction layer and Oracle itself. If you know Oracle then you know it handles a lot of stuff for itself that the OS would traditionally do, for example it has its own process scheduling, interprocess communication, filesystem/volume manager, memory management - as of 11g it even talks directly to NFS servers in userland, bypassing the OS filesystem mounts entirely. Once the abstraction layer is ported then yes, it would be just "make" for Oracle itself. This is how back in the day Oracle ran on 90+ Unix variants...

j_baker 18y ago

Maybe I'm just out of the loop but, this kind of struck me out of left field. All in all, I think this is aimed to keep Oracle competitive with Microsoft outside the database realm. Now, just like MS, they control the Operating System (Oracle's Linux is no match for Solaris), the language, and the database. Plus, they have the added bonus of controlling the hardware too!

nailer 18y ago
"Now, just like MS, they control the Operating System (Oracle's Linux is no match for Solaris), " Really? The telco and finance industries that were all Sun based in the mid 90s have dumped most of their Solaris for Linux. Startups are still predominantly Linux. Where's Solaris growing?
- blasdel 18y ago
  The only thing I can think of is http://joyent.com/ http://joyent.com/ Initially they were a FreeBSD shop, I think Sun gave them heavy subsidies to switch to OpenSolaris on Sun hardware. I'm not sure how much the sweetheart deal was relaxed as Joyent grew.

mcormier 18y ago

"The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion". The value of the failed IBM deal was $7 billion.

j_baker 18y ago
Yup. They rejected IBM's offer for 9.40 a share, but are accepting this one for 9.50 a share. After their stock plummeted for rejecting IBM, I suspect they didn't want to pull another Yahoo.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  This is all interesting, but I think IBM may regret not getting this deal done. It seems "owning" Java gives Oracle some leverage over IBM as so much of their services business hinges on Java. The possibility of turn key solution stacks with hardware/Solaris/Oracle/business apps might give Oracle a chance to compete in IBM's markets, too, or at least reduce demand for IBM services. If you can get all that installed and supported from one vendor, you might need fewer service agreements from third party vendors like IBM.
  - dean 18y ago
    Unfortunately that takes companies back to the old days of being a hostage to their vendors.
nailer 18y ago
IBM lowered it's offer after discovering a few things about Sun it didn't like. Sun was OK with the price, but added some legal causes IBM didn't like - so IBM walked away.
- vang3lis 18y ago
  can you elaborate, please?
mbreese 18y ago
Then there were also the regulatory issues that the IBM+Sun deal would have faced. IBM and Sun are the main competitors in a few areas (large scale tape storage, for example). This would have made the deal more expensive for IBM than just the $7 billion price tag. Oracle and Sun have very few overlapping markets (I can't think of any off hand, aside from the Oracle Red Hat clone and Solaris). As such, this deal will be much smoother for both parties.

modoc 18y ago

I really wish it had been IBM. IBM's investment in Java, open source, free tools, etc... has historically been stellar. Oracle, not so much. I would have felt much better about Java's future if it were in IBMs hands.

jhawk28 18y ago
Of the companies, Oracle is the only one who has ever made really LARGE acquisitions and made them work. It will be interesting to see what Oracle does when they need to start spinning off the different tools that duplicate their functionality. Oracle has been dev friendly with free tools and development environments. You can download their enterprise Oracle database from their website. IBM always seems to charge for their tools.
- modoc 18y ago
  My experience has been the opposite. Yes, you can get Oracle XE on a limited set of platforms (still no OS X support for any current Oracle databases), for free, although the default configs leave a lot to be desired. However that doesn't compare to the large number of free and/or open source Java projects, libraries, tech articles, forums, etc... that IBM has supported. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/ http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/. You also need a registered account to do pretty much anything on Oracle's site, in stark contrast to IBM's developer tools and sites. Also if Oracle's SQL Developer is them being friendly to devs, then I wish they wouldn't:) That thing is one of the ugliest, most prone to crash, DB tools I've ever used.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Not true; you can download 10.2.0.4 for OSX from OTN.
    - modoc 18y ago
      Which just came out on the 9th of April I think, which is how many years late? Also, it doesn't appear to install correctly unless you're running OS X Server. Fine for production, useless for doing development on my laptop with.

bensummers 18y ago

I wonder what will happen to the Sun Startup Essentials scheme. It's not exactly compatible with the Oracle view of the world.

nailer 18y ago
First time I met anyone from SSE they tried to sell me SPARC hardware. For me it seems very much compatible with the Oracle view of the world.
- bensummers 18y ago
  We're on the scheme, and use Sun x86. Maybe it's different here in the UK, but it's been wonderfully pressure-free on the sales side and they've put an awful lot of effort into helping startups in ways other than selling cheap kit. Obviously it's all out of self-interest, but it seems to me to be very much enlightened self-interest. Which isn't how you'd describe Oracle.
  - nailer 18y ago
    Odd, I'm UK (London) based too. I encountered their salesy SSE people at FOWA London. Politely had to explain that I has no need for 256 concurrent threads on a single machine in any of my web apps at the present time.
    - bensummers 18y ago
      Predictable, I suppose. Sun's sales and marketing people take yet another good thing and fail to sell it.

WalkingDead 18y ago

Was it all pre-planned? Sun buying MySQL at 1 billion just to make itself more attractive to Oracle for a buyout within a year? In the end Sun seems to have made a profit out of its 1 billion investment. Oracle probably have added a lot than it would have offered simply to ensure it owns its main business killer MySQL.

aardvark 18y ago
I doubt Sun planned for this. If it hadn't been for the financial downturn, Sun's acquisition of MySQL (with its 12 million customer base) could have been Sun's path to new profitability. Maybe not a guarantee, but I suspect they were hoping for growth rather than a buyout.
blasdel 18y ago
Especially since MySQL would never have sold out to Oracle directly.

bpyne 18y ago

Wouldn't this give Oracle ownership of the JVM? I'm a little more concerned about their ownership of it than the Java language itself.

nailer 18y ago
They'd own the copyrights and trademarks, yes. JDK 1.7 is however OSS.
jaaron 18y ago
It gives them the key vote in the JCP which means they own not only the copyright to the JVM code, but also the rights for the Java specification. There's been some arguments in the JCP about Java 7, with Sun usually the last hold out. So this move is likely to resolve many issues within the JCP. Or at least we can hope.

jermy 18y ago

Less clear-cut than the future plans for the database servers are those for Sun's ZFS and Oracle's BtrFS. Are they likely to continue development in parallel, or might the licence on ZFS be changed and development merged?

blasdel 18y ago
The best hope for merging might be that BtrFS adopts ZFS's on-disk format as an alternate to it's existing ext-based one.

alexitosrv 18y ago

And what will happen to VirtualBox? Oracle has server Virtualization software too...

scorpioxy 18y ago
I'm curious to know that too. Sun was pushing VirtualBox(with more features and killer performance improvements) in order to sell more machines and promote virtualization as the way to the future. I am not sure if Oracle would actually be interested in this.

psadauskas 18y ago

Does this mean we'll never get Solaris' ZFS open-source enough for Linux?

blasdel 18y ago
It actually makes it marginally more likely (Oracle's not going to be so worried about pissing off old anti-GPL Solaris engineers), but the license is the least of the problem. ZFS would have to be completely rewritten to ever make it into Linus's tree -- it's written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer, so it implements its own, and the linux kernel devs are pretty anal about sharing implementations. Once you fixed all the VFS issues, you'd end up with essentially a BTRFS clone that uses ZFS's on-disk format. Incidentally, BTRFS's development is sponsored wholly by Oracle!
- kmavm 18y ago
  I'm not sure it's fair to summarize the Linux community's complaint about ZFS as the latter being "written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer." Solaris very much has a VFS layer, and ZFS plays with it. What's different about ZFS is that, from most storage stacks' perspectives, it is also a volume manager. Linux people claim this is a layering violation; ZFS' architects claim that integrating traditional functions of filesystems and volume managers let them innovate, e.g., by closing the RAID write hole.

markh 18y ago

One of the things Oracle does VERY well is acquire companies. They do it a lot more often than most people realize and have it down to a fine art. That does not mean that everyone fits into their culture, but they'll identify those people as part of their process. They'll start by putting an Oracle logo on the Sun product and service range and keep selling them to exist Sun customers and then start on existing Oracle customers (where Oracle don't already compete). Next step is to more clearly position, integrate and possibly rationalize the new offerings. Step 3: profit.

banned_man 18y ago

Simpsons did it. (* Well, Mr. Burns didn't technically buy it; he merely blocked it out.)

oomkiller 18y ago

NOOOO! Sun has done many great things for the computer world, and I'd hate to see them be locked behind Oracle's doors so where only big corporate guys that smoke cigars and drink fine aged bourbon have access to them.

kubrick 18y ago

... or, as My Little Pony prefers to phrase it, Sun is reverse-acquiring Oracle.

samuel 18y ago

From my ignorance, it seems a very smart move from Oracle. It makes a lot of sense for them since Sun has lot of things they lack of: Server hardware, the Java stack, an operating system, their own processor line... They just became an IBM or HP!! IBM already has all of that, and they sell the complete stack: zSeries/iSeries servers - Power Architecture - zOS/OS400 - DB2. Now Oracle may compete with Sun M9000 - SPARC - Solaris - Oracle DB. Amazing, isn't?. I understand that people around here is worried about's MySQL's future and the like, but I believe that this acquisition is about the big bucks of the high end servers, and the fact that Sun owned MySQL had zero relevance.

zandorg 18y ago

I recently emailed Oracle to give me a quote for Berkeley DB, so I could use it commercially. The response? Absolutely None!

hsuresh 18y ago

Sad day for Java, IMHO. But am hoping this would turn out to be a blessing for Ruby/Python.

ars 18y ago

Now forget that both oracle and sun are names of companies, and instead read them as english words. :)

justlearning 18y ago

I was wondering if anyone here "working" on ZFS can speculate what this may mean for ZFS and Open Solaris. I tried Open Solaris some time back, though the package system is not as friendly as Ubuntu, I found it really interesting to work with.