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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible hard to figure out what Oracle is planning and they really need to make their intentions more clear. If they don't, Solaris and SPARC will just die off, and to be fair, that might be the plan.

Right now we don't know if Solaris 11.Next is a maintenance release or if they are just moving to something more akin to a rolling release, as some people have suggested. Unless all the question currently floating around are addressed by Oracle, no sane person would base new infrastructure on neither Solaris, nor SPARC.

Perhaps Oracle want to move all Solaris and SPARC deployments in-house, but what sense would that make?

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My guess is Oracle bought Sun for control of Java and perhaps Solaris and server hardware design. Perhaps combining their database, Solaris and server hardware would give full control of the platform. But things have shifted and cloud computing is the new big thing so all that they acquired has less value to them.

AFAICT, Oracle bought Sun to get at their (really x86_64) hardware business, to compete with HP/IBM. One quick ref that kinda shows this angle: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Oracle-buy-Sun

The rest of Sun was just extra. So Oracle's seeing if they can use them. If they find that they can't they'll just dump them. As they're doing now.

The challenge I have with believing that theory is they paid an _awfully_ large sum for just the hardware business.

Sun's hardware business is mostly irrelivant, and both IBM and HP are in the process of switching away from providing hardware (Especially IBM). SPARC was already mostly dead by the time that Oracle bought Sun.

The prize Oracle was after is Java, and they have already begun the long process of squeezing large enterprises with Java "commerical" features flags.

I thought they bought Sun for Java, especially the (then-ongoing) lawsuit against Microsoft?

Perhaps MySQL too as it would be one more major database product under their control.

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