I really wish it had been IBM. IBM's investment in Java, open source, free tools, etc... has historically been stellar. Oracle, not so much. I would have felt much better about Java's future if it were in IBMs hands.
Of the companies, Oracle is the only one who has ever made really LARGE acquisitions and made them work. It will be interesting to see what Oracle does when they need to start spinning off the different tools that duplicate their functionality. Oracle has been dev friendly with free tools and development environments. You can download their enterprise Oracle database from their website. IBM always seems to charge for their tools.
MySQL is a low-end complement to Oracle, but Oracle already had a whole range of products in the Oracle range, including a free version of Oracle (Oracle XE). If Oracle really wanted to give away a free database, they would raise the limits on Oracle XE to something practical.
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.
Oracle didn't have to buy Sun to have these benefits. The only reason this fits better than an IBM acquisition is because Oracle and Sun internal cultures are more aligned.
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?
"I wonder what it will mean for other open source stuff"
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.
One of the things Oracle does VERY well is acquire companies. They do it a lot more often than most people realize and have it down to a fine art. That does not mean that everyone fits into their culture, but they'll identify those people as part of their process.
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.
Oracle owns InnoDB and Sleepycat/BerkeleyDB, both of which are in active development. InnoDB is also MySQL's most popular storage engine. So I wouldn't fear for MySQL's future. It wasn't doing well in Sun anyways.
MySQL and Oracle excel in different areas. I would expect Oracle to halt any effort to grow MySQL towards Oracle's feature set.
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.
I would definitely be concerned about any future innovation of MySQL. Perhaps, it will get folded into Oracle's Express edition and then slowly phased out over time. Any advances that put MySql even remotely close to Oracle in terms of scalability are unlikely to occur.
Overall it might be much better than the deal with IBM. With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished, in case of Oracle there is a fair chance it will survive(look at Weblogic - Oracle is promoting Weblogic as their primary middleware). With this purchase, Oracle is in a position to provide(and own) the whole stack : hardware/os/app container(java)/app/database - look around the only other company which comes close to this is Microsoft(which does not have a big ERP portfolio). I think MySQL was just a small factor in this deal. I think this will be big loss to IBM(now that Oracle gets it). IT customers are gravitating towards utility and end-to-end solutions and applications usually drive push(guess who has the biggest business application portfolio).
With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished
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.
Was it all pre-planned? Sun buying MySQL at 1 billion just to make itself more attractive to Oracle for a buyout within a year?
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.
I doubt Sun planned for this. If it hadn't been for the financial downturn, Sun's acquisition of MySQL (with its 12 million customer base) could have been Sun's path to new profitability. Maybe not a guarantee, but I suspect they were hoping for growth rather than a buyout.
The only thing that comes to my mind is: Someone's had to do it.
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.
From my ignorance, it seems a very smart move from Oracle. It makes a lot of sense for them since Sun has lot of things they lack of: Server hardware, the Java stack, an operating system, their own processor line... They just became an IBM or HP!!
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.
This is interesting because I looked on Oracle's website for the deal expecting to at least see a percursory promise to keep things open but didn't find it. Who knows?
Yup. They rejected IBM's offer for 9.40 a share, but are accepting this one for 9.50 a share. After their stock plummeted for rejecting IBM, I suspect they didn't want to pull another Yahoo.
IBM lowered it's offer after discovering a few things about Sun it didn't like. Sun was OK with the price, but added some legal causes IBM didn't like - so IBM walked away.
Then there were also the regulatory issues that the IBM+Sun deal would have faced. IBM and Sun are the main competitors in a few areas (large scale tape storage, for example). This would have made the deal more expensive for IBM than just the $7 billion price tag.
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.
As far as their larger products are concerned, I think that Oracle is a much better fit for Sun than IBM was. Obviously there will be some overlaps in technologies (MySQL vs. Oracle being the big one) but on the whole, I think these companies match together pretty well.
Are there any other huge overlaps in technologies (other than the obvious MySQL/Oracle)?
Definitely not as big as MySQL/Oracle, but one that I'm wondering most about is their open-source app server Glassfish. A big part of Oracle's BEA acquisition was bolstering their middleware suite (with WebLogic, et al.). Will Glassfish development continue? I hope so...
Maybe I'm just out of the loop but, this kind of struck me out of left field. All in all, I think this is aimed to keep Oracle competitive with Microsoft outside the database realm. Now, just like MS, they control the Operating System (Oracle's Linux is no match for Solaris), the language, and the database. Plus, they have the added bonus of controlling the hardware too!
"Now, just like MS, they control the Operating System (Oracle's Linux is no match for Solaris), "
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.
I'm curious to know that too. Sun was pushing VirtualBox(with more features and killer performance improvements) in order to sell more machines and promote virtualization as the way to the future.
I am not sure if Oracle would actually be interested in this.
Less clear-cut than the future plans for the database servers are those for Sun's ZFS and Oracle's BtrFS. Are they likely to continue development in parallel, or might the licence on ZFS be changed and development merged?
It actually makes it marginally more likely (Oracle's not going to be so worried about pissing off old anti-GPL Solaris engineers), but the license is the least of the problem.
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!
The best news that could come out of this deal would be better Linux support for T1/2/2+ and Thumper hardware. Awesome hardware but I can hardly justify building expertise and support infrastructure for Solaris just to run it.
NOOOO! Sun has done many great things for the computer world, and I'd hate to see them be locked behind Oracle's doors so where only big corporate guys that smoke cigars and drink fine aged bourbon have access to them.
[+] [-] modoc|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhawk28|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlrobinson|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinsb|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] briansmith|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jhancock|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jimbokun|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bensummers|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lallysingh|17 years ago|reply
Of course, this is Oracle, so that's most likely marketing...
[+] [-] markh|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pwim|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andr|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewf|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] neovive|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmcknight|17 years ago|reply
Anyone at the MySQL conference today (April 20)?
[+] [-] sunjain|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swillden|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WalkingDead|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aardvark|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blasdel|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moeffju|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samuel|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dhimes|17 years ago|reply
How committed is that? Is this the end of free Java, MySQL, etc.?
[+] [-] mseebach|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blasdel|17 years ago|reply
Their sponsorship of BTRFS is a pretty big deal -- especially that it's truly open source (development model and all), unlike Sun's simulacra.
[+] [-] mcormier|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nailer|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbreese|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrduncan|17 years ago|reply
Are there any other huge overlaps in technologies (other than the obvious MySQL/Oracle)?
[+] [-] dwwatk01|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bensummers|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nailer|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpyne|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaaron|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nailer|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nailer|17 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] alexitosrv|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scorpioxy|17 years ago|reply
I am not sure if Oracle would actually be interested in this.
[+] [-] jermy|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blasdel|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psadauskas|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blasdel|17 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] samt|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oomkiller|17 years ago|reply