Monday, April 20, 2009

Oracle to Acquire Sun

Sun Microsystems has been on the ropes since the first decade of this millennium when some of the largest Internet properties (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon) switched from Sun's Solaris to GNU Linux. That, and the two most recent stock market crashes, have really beaten this server hardware vendor and inventor of the Java programming language and platform down from a share price of $233 to $3.

A few weeks ago, it looked like IBM would be the one to purchase Sun. Now, it looks like database vendor and services company Oracle is stepping up to make the purchase.

This could be of particular concern to the large number of web companies who use MySql as their database. MySql is owned by Sun and will fall under Oracle's control once the acquisition is complete. Will Oracle poison or sunset MySql in order to make their own database product more compelling? Oracle has tried to acquire MySql before and has acquired one of MySql's back-end storage systems so you can't tell me that they aren't thinking about it.

That's the big news. Oracle makes a few other tools that compete with Sun tools too. Will Sun's NetBeans take a back seat to Oracle's JDeveloper?

May Update: Sun shareholders sue to block Oracle Acquisition.

June Update: Oracle fails to get regulatory clearance by the deadline.

September Update: DOJ gives Oracle approval to proceed with acquisition. Only barrier now is EU Commission approval.

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