> Oracle's only possible course in purchasing Sun was litigation.
To be fair to Oracle (OMG I can't believe I just typed that) it's not clear to me that they realized that at the time.
Oracle has a relatively large, locked-in, and well-monetized customer base. They have tools and languages and interefaces too. I imagine that most of the time they don't end up litigating against their customers.
Sun had a good customer base and a lot of them were fairly deeply committed to Sun hardware, Solaris, and yes, Java. Often they were running Oracle on Sun hardware and developing database data entry apps in Java.
It's possible that they were thinking "There's a good synergy here with the market footprint, opportunity for vertical integration, we both have some server tools, developer tools used by committed/locked-in corporate users. Sun isn't getting any revenue from Java because they're just too much "Mr. Nice Guy". We can fix that, we know how to monetize an app platform in the corporate market.
It may also be that I am hopelessly naive and they bought Sun solely as a ticket to sue Google.
Oracle on Sun hardware was like peanut butter & jelly for a long time. It would have been very bad for Oracle's business if IBM had purchased Sun and used the hardware as a wedge to sell middleware. So while I'm sure Oracle wanted to monetize Java as much as possible, buying Sun was largely a defensive move.
Actually, I wouldn't have been surprised if IBM (if it had purchased Sun) had dumped Sun's hardware division. It was losing money hand over first, and IBM was doing a pretty good beating Sun with its hardware offerings. Between IBM's x86, Power, and Mainframe hardware product lines, it really wouldn't need sparc. So the only question is how quickly IBM would have been able to transition what was left of Sun's hardware business to IBM's x, p, or z series machines.
As a result, that's probably why Oracle was willing to pay more than IBM. Both IBM and Sun wanted to be able to make sure they could continue to use Java --- and preserving the freedom of action against lawsuits was I'm sure high on both company's minds. But Oracle could also find a good use for its hardware division, where IBM probably would have tried to sell it off.
Well, platforms like Solaris/Sparc are never just dumped. No matter who ended up with it would be milking it all the way down, making it that much more expensive & obscure every year, until the users finally say uncle. Generally that's when the customer wants a new CRM or something and gets two birds with one stone.
That's why it would have been disastrous for Oracle if IBM got them. Everytime a Sun customer ordered a new stick of RAM, the IBM software sales team would have been circling around.
(Note: I'm sure there's some niches where Sun hardware is very strong, but those are only going to get narrower over time.)
The staff lawyers were getting bored and Ellison fell for the old "must defend our intellectual property or lose it" routine?
Just in the hope of picking up a little short term cash by shaking down the deeper pockets in the Java community at the expense of making .Net look to 3rd parties like a legally safer ecosystem?
On one level, the Sun people went to great efforts to prevent 'fragmentation' of the Java platform, and I think they felt honestly wronged by what Google did. Sometimes people sue over the principle, not the law.
On another level, it was probably just dumb greed.
But I do agree Oracle aggressively wanted to remind the industry they owned it. And that they don't really care if Java is COBOLized. (COBOL is still big business!)
To be fair to Oracle (OMG I can't believe I just typed that) it's not clear to me that they realized that at the time.
Oracle has a relatively large, locked-in, and well-monetized customer base. They have tools and languages and interefaces too. I imagine that most of the time they don't end up litigating against their customers.
Sun had a good customer base and a lot of them were fairly deeply committed to Sun hardware, Solaris, and yes, Java. Often they were running Oracle on Sun hardware and developing database data entry apps in Java.
It's possible that they were thinking "There's a good synergy here with the market footprint, opportunity for vertical integration, we both have some server tools, developer tools used by committed/locked-in corporate users. Sun isn't getting any revenue from Java because they're just too much "Mr. Nice Guy". We can fix that, we know how to monetize an app platform in the corporate market.
It may also be that I am hopelessly naive and they bought Sun solely as a ticket to sue Google.
Edit: See example "Mr. Nice Guy" blog post at http://groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110723095928839 How would an Ellison interpret that?