Oracle on Thursday said the U.S. Department of Justice has approved its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, although the deal is subject to certain conditions and still needs the blessing of European regulators. Oracle first announced its bid in April and Sun shareholders approved the acquisition on July 16. The combined company will give Oracle an array of new assets, including a stake in the computer hardware market, the open-source MySQL database and stewardship of the Java programming language. Sun would be just the latest in a long string of companies gobbled up in recent years by Oracle.
I would have preferred IBM to take over Sun than Oracle.
IMO, IBM would have steered Java in a more open way than Oracle but this has to be seen (since Oracle does not want to hurt its own business).
One of my concerns is that I have several Java certifications investing my career heavily just on this platform. I always thought the Sun Java certification path to be more organized and platform independent. Oracle also has several very good certifications but it ties their products to the exams very heavily, as if the knowledge in Java would be somehow secondary.
Also, as personal choice I prefer many of Sun products as Virtual Box, NetBeans and Glassfish and I wonder how this products will play in a company that has such a good stack of applications already(Oracle).
Every big old corporation is evil .. they will exploit everything and everyone to make money for their shareholders.
Just read:
http://slashdot.org/story/09/08/22/1825208/IBM-Other-Multinationals…
or ibmandtheholocaust.com etc.
Google is the only big corp. that hasn’t shown its ugly face _so_far_ …. but they are still young. Once the founders leave and some CEOs take over things will go down fast.
I dont understand what is the parameter of voting down comments such as mine, meanwhile I see flame wars going on here all the time…
Would be nice to get the list of whom mods one down…
<evil>Lets do some witch hunt</evil>
I was all geared up to hit a mod down but then saw your comment here so I saw the light to be merciful.
There is more at stake beyond Java, MySQL and other SUNW^H^H^H^HJAVA applications.
The bigger issue at hand with a HW vendor such as IBM taking over Sun would have been the question of what happens to Sun Hardware and Solaris itself. Previous takeovers of RISC server companies does not lend well to the belief that the technology would be saved or used correctly.
I for one preferred a company like Oracle to take over Sun.
Oracle has some really cool technologies now (remember they bought BEA last year as well not to mention some of their own “original” stuff).
Sun wasn’t able to do much recently and Oracle will spice things up a bit.
Hopefully Sun will treat Java, Solaris and MySQL well. What they will do with the latter will be interesting to see.
I have spoken to a sun representative about MySQL specifically. The company message is that it will NOT become closed sourced. Of course I want to believe them loving MySQL.
Of course one would have to be daft not to see the potential conflicts of interest with Oracle. I certainly would NOT hesitate to use MySQL and never give Oracle a curious glance, been there done that.
Simply put MySQL is very scalable and will do everything that anyone needs it to do.
Regardless of their words, their actions will speak loudest. Will they continue MySQL’s development and improvement or will they starve off resources letting it fall behind? Time and their actions will tell.
Remember MariaDB is a viable alternative if they get stupid with MySQL.
In their favor, so far they have positively treated OpenOffice.org (OOo) favorably so far. So that is a positive trend in a positive direction.
I would worry more about installers, if it requires a closed source solution, like Java, might be time to look for an alternative. Java is good, very good, but it is NOT 100% open source. Just saying….
We saw how Microsoft ponies like Corel required operating system upgrades, when it was NOT necessary, before you could update to their new versions. They even went so far as to try to lock down “where” you could install the application. Big time fail. All you had to do was use a desktop or laptop already running the current MS OS, install it, which it would now let you do after checking the OS. Copy everything to a USB drive and you could now run that newer version on Windows 2000, Windows XP, I did not try it on Windows 95/98, but it probably would have worked.
The end result, I stopped buying Corels products. Telling me what operating system I should use? NOT. Telling me where I should install it, how dare you. I bought it, I own it I will use it as I see fit, deny me that, bye bye as open source alternatives abound. Their stupidity forced me to learn that the open source alternatives to their product were superior. Their loss, my gain.
And I would have continued to use their products, they are great, had they not tethered so nastily to Microsoft’s new operating system.
This same scenario could happen with any app that requires Java to install it. Be mindful and aware. If you want to run Java, great, but do not require me to run Java to install an application that does not need Java. Because I have and will walk away to a superior alternative.
Vendor lock-in increases customer churn and throttles technological innovation.
What is that saying about those that too easily give up their freedom deserve neither freedom or something else. Enough said.
You want my money, innovate and you will get it, utilize any other tactic and bye bye.
Once customers see what they can do with Linux and open source, you are not going to get them back, so you MUST continue to earn and retain their TRUST.
And you believed it?
You had me up until this:
“Simply put MySQL is very scalable and will do everything that anyone needs it to do.”
Pfft. I don’t think you’ve given much thought to the scope of “everything” here.