Oracle to buy Sun
sun.com
sun.com
You also need a registered account to do pretty much anything on Oracle's site, in stark contrast to IBM's developer tools and sites.
Also if Oracle's SQL Developer is them being friendly to devs, then I wish they wouldn't:) That thing is one of the ugliest, most prone to crash, DB tools I've ever used.
Its about open specifications and standards. Sun had been hyping Java 7, but hasn't been going through the Java Community Process to "debug" the spec, and allow for OSS developers (like those at IBM) to develop spec-compliant tools of their own. If Oracle continues down that trend, it will see Java lose its most important asset: a community of developers who believe in open standards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, this is Oracle, so that's most likely marketing...
This is how back in the day Oracle ran on 90+ Unix variants...
This may not be a good thing for open source, unless Oracle want to do things a bit differently. Or treat Sun as an independent unit.
Looks like it's time for the open source model to prove its stripes. One of the main selling points for using software with an open source license is that you can get someone else to service/extend it for you even if the originator of the code goes out of business or shuts down development.
It will not be surprising if Oracle wants to take some of the Sun open technologies in a more proprietary direction or just show less interest in continuing development. That will mean we will see whether or not the purported benefits of an open source license prove themselves or not.
The main challenge will be forking, assuming Oracle continues to develop MySQL, for example, but only in ways that do not encroach further on Oracle's existing DB market. If people want features that Oracle does not want to provide, it looks like forking will be the only option.
Errr... it already has, over the last 10 to 20 years. That doesn't mean that projects don't go through ups and downs though, and Sun has, as of late, been contributing to stuff like JRuby. It won't die if they pull the plug on the paid developers, but it might be a setback for the project.
Hopefully Oracle will be friendly to Sun's research-like teams that may not be making direct contributions to the bottom line.
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.
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.
http://petereisentraut.blogspot.com/2009/03/sun-set-part-2.h...
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/6606-0-0-225-121....
Actually, that's incorrect; Sun is a backer, but hardly a major one.
A quick glance at Ohloh's contribution metrics for PostgreSQL (http://www.ohloh.net/p/postgres/contributors/) shows 17 committers with over 100 commits. If you start matching nicks up to the PostgreSQL contributor profiles (http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/), you'll quickly see that only one, Peter Eisentraut, works for Sun.
Actually, it's interesting to note that of those 17 top contributors not a single company employs more that one top contributor.
If anything this is good news for PostgreSQL, then: Oracle can easily acquire and steer the course of MySQL development, but shifting PostgreSQL priorities by financial means would take the acquisition of Sun, IBM, UC Berkeley, and over a dozen more companies.
True, but Josh Berkus also worked for Sun until last summer. So maybe it's correct to say Sun has been a major backer.
It's true that Josh is an extremely vital figure in PostgreSQL's community, but he doesn't contribute code as much as he advocates and interacts with the user community. Those roles are extremely important, but the people who hold them are pretty much beyond outside influence: Josh will always act in the best interests of PostgreSQL regardless of who signs his paychecks.
On top of that, these types of evangelists don't usually play a part in the technical direction of a project. I'm not sure exactly how closely involved Josh is personally with PostgreSQL's technical direction, but I can tell you for a fact that any attempts a company might make to steer a project through its evangelist are misguided.
Either way, though, there's no question that Josh is incredibly important to PostgreSQL. But, still, that's a whopping two contributors out of over two dozen.
We can go back and forth about what level constitutes "major backing", and that's fine. But at least now we're talking about some data instead of just hand-waving; that was my point in posting the initial correction.
PG said in one of his rants, "Do you know of any start ups choosing to go with Oracle? I don't either."
A whole new generation of companies (like RoR dev shops) are using Postgre/MySQL as clusters/shards and have no intention to ever moving to Oracle. This way, Oracle still captures revenue from them. (If they are paying for support).
Anyone at the MySQL conference today (April 20)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
How committed is that? Is this the end of free Java, MySQL, etc.?
I'm a bit of a pessimist, but I'd expect to see serious downscaling of FOSS at Sun.
http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf
"Will the ownership of Solaris change Oracle’s position on Linux?
No. This transaction enhances our commitment to open standards and choice. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships."
Their sponsorship of BTRFS is a pretty big deal -- especially that it's truly open source (development model and all), unlike Sun's simulacra.
Oracle and Sun have very few overlapping markets (I can't think of any off hand, aside from the Oracle Red Hat clone and Solaris). As such, this deal will be much smoother for both parties.
Are there any other huge overlaps in technologies (other than the obvious MySQL/Oracle)?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I am not sure if Oracle would actually be interested in this.
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!
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.
The response? Absolutely None!
(* Well, Mr. Burns didn't technically buy it; he merely blocked it out.)