Hacker News Reader

Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

> The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle.

Strong disagree with this!

The MySQL purchase wasn't a lot of money and was a move towards becoming a systems company (like you suggested they need to be)

Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for MySQL.

View on HN

My memory is that Oracle bought Sun for the Java lawsuit, not Java itself.

Oracle sued Google over Java - it wasn't some previously existing case.

Yes, it is Oracle so there's a great chance they were considering this when they bought it.

The disagreement had been going on for years (at least since Google launched android, perhaps before that), Google and Sun had been in “negotiations” that were publicly documented as going nowhere. All that had happened is Google implemented more “workarounds” to use less of Sun’s IP.

I actually remember media speculating that Sun didn’t want to take the next step and actually file a lawsuit, because they didn’t have enough resources to go up against Google in court.

Then Oracle bought Sun, and suddenly the unproductive negotiations transformed into a lawsuit.

And thanks to that lawsuit, we got to see Oracle lose (always nice!) and SCOTUS establish that using APIs constitutes fair use (awesome!)

I think it was both. They would have shitcanned it just like they did with so many other Sun projects. If anything Java has gotten better stewardship under Oracle than the very late Sun years with enough enhancements to make me almost want to try using it again despite Oracle. Almost.

> The MySQL purchase wasn't a lot of money

IIRC it was $1bn or so, and Sun only had like $6bn in the bank. It was a desperate play when Sun needed help.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com