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Comment by TY | Hacker News Reader

To the question of why it was sold to a company with such a vastly different culture.

Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracle has. The only metric that mattered was how much money Oracle was willing to pay for Sun vs another bidder.

Using any other criteria would just launch a nasty shareholder lawsuit against Sun's soon to be departed management...

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^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.

How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit.

So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

Recent history suggests for Sun's patents, not their software.

Oracle has claimed they bought Sun for their hardware (e.g. so they could do vertical integration selling like IBM), but that remains to be seen if it is true or not.

Oracle used Sun's hardware to build the Exadata - which they very aggressively sell as a data warehouse solution. Competing with Netezza, Teradata, Greenplum and the likes.

I wasn't claiming that Oracle maximized their shareholder value ;) In fact I'd argue that Oracle simply burned cash.

And perhaps it was just managers expanding their empire. You know, principal agent problems between managers and shareholders.

But they still own the brands and for business people it matters. They can also develop various proprietary extensions.

Oracle uses a decent amount of Java. It was probably worth it just to control the language's standards and runtime.

Sun has a significant hardware business, especially in the legacy SPARC products.

Combining that with Oracle's applications turns Oracle into a complete solution provider like IBM & HP.

Solaris is open source, but Oracle has dropped support for the open source version and isn't going to open source all new features.

Sun also owned MySQL, which gives Oracle a great foot-in-the-door at a whole industry segment where they weren't a player before.

Sun has more patents than pretty much any company not called IBM. Oracle probably paid way too little for what they got.

Well, Sun paid a billion dollars for the domain name mysql.com, when all's said and done.

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