
Oracle to buy Sun - justinsb
http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp
======
modoc
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
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.

~~~
neovive
Thinking about these large acquisitions, it's hard to imagine that Oracle now
owns Solaris, Java, BEA, Seibel, Peoplesoft, MySQL and of course their own
Oracle DB.

~~~
vikas5678
I wonder how much influence oracle would have on java with java being open
sourced now.

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justinsb
[http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-
bo...](http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-bought-sun-
microsystems-859) 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.

~~~
briansmith
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.

~~~
blasdel
My hopes are on them finishing BTRFS -- it'd probably take a lot more time to
butcher ZFS into something that could be shipped by Linus (It took _years_ for
XFS, and ZFS is _way_ more proprietary about VFS shit).

~~~
briansmith
Oracle doesn't _need_ and probably doesn't _want_ it to be shipped by Linus.
They just need to license it under the GPL and convert it to the Linux
filesystem API. Then they can ship their own Oracle Unbreakable Linux with
ZFS. They don't need to send in patches to integrate it into the kernel
officially. Oracle can maintain its own private source control for the ZFS
kernel module, refuse any third-party contributions, and put tarballs on OTN
when they actually ship releases. Officially it would be GPL'd but practically
it would be useless to any vendor except them and their partners (RedHat).

~~~
blasdel
They'd spend quite a bit of their social capital with the Linux community if
they tried to be private that way.

I've also heard rumblings that a primary motivator behind the CDDL (and GPL
incompatibility) was a core group of old Solaris devs at Sun that would have
been royally pissed off if their work was GPLed. I wonder if Oracle would care
if they quit en masse.

~~~
briansmith
I don't think Oracle really believes there's value in "social capital". To the
contrary, they seem to thrive on the fact that almost everybody despises them
a little bit. If people were happy to do business with Oracle then Oracle
would feel like they weren't charging enough.

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davidw
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
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...

~~~
gaius
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...

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markh
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.

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pwim
I wonder what this means for the future of MySQL.

~~~
andrewf
MySQL and Oracle excel in different areas. I would expect Oracle to halt any
effort to grow MySQL towards Oracle's feature set.

I suspect this is very bad news for Postgresql. Sun is a major backer, but
that will likely end. Postgresql's target market already overlaps with the
low-mid end of Oracle's, and Postgresql 8.x has been largely about scaling up.

~~~
sethg
Wouldn't other hardware vendors be more interested in supporting PostgreSQL
now? Before the acquisition, if you bought a big HP database server, HP had no
reason to care which database software you ran on it. Now, HP would prefer
that you not be directing your software-purchase money to one of HP's
competitors.

~~~
ja27
I'm thinking Oracle/Sun will eventually end up in HP's hands.

~~~
ja27
Because Oracle and HP are already tight partners and analysts refer to them as
essentially one entity against IBM. Plenty of people expect the Sun hardware
line to die or get sold to HP, while Oracle keeps the software line.

[http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/6606-0-0-225-121....](http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/6606-0-0-225-121.html)

<http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2903>

~~~
briansmith
Now that it has aqcuired Sun, it can make those Exadata appliances itself,
without HP. That's basically what Oracle said they were going to do today.

------
sunjain
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
_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
IBM GS would happily sell you Solaris services, but there's no way they'd port
Solaris to POWER.

~~~
hapless
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
Haha, I remember when you could get Windows NT on SPARC too... Not the same
thing as being a real product tho'.

------
WalkingDead
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
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.

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moeffju
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.

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samuel
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.

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dhimes
_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.?

~~~
j_baker
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?

~~~
mseebach
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.

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

~~~
j_baker
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
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
Unfortunately that takes companies back to the old days of being a hostage to
their vendors.

------
mrduncan
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
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...

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

~~~
nailer
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
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
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
Predictable, I suppose. Sun's sales and marketing people take yet another good
thing and fail to sell it.

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bpyne
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.

~~~
jaaron
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.

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j_baker
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
"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
The only thing I can think of is <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.

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

~~~
scorpioxy
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.

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jermy
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
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.

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

~~~
blasdel
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
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.

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samt
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.

------
oomkiller
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.

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

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justlearning
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.

------
mseebach
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
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
Exactly. I went to www.oracle.com/investor and couldn't find it.

------
zandorg
I recently emailed Oracle to give me a quote for Berkeley DB, so I could use
it commercially.

The response? Absolutely None!

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

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

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

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

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banned_man
Simpsons did it.

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

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

~~~
binarycheese
So Oracle owns VirtualBox?

