Oracle buys Sun ? (Updated)

Thanks to Chris Dagdigian on the Beowulf list for pointing out:

It’s official:
http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp

That link says:

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

First thought – what on earth does that mean for MySQL ?

Update: this appears to be answered (well, as much as you can in a paragraph) in this FAQ document on the Oracle website (PDF):

MySQL will be an addition to Oracle’s existing suite of database products, which already includes Oracle Database 11g, TimesTen, Berkeley DB open source database, and the open source transactional storage engine, InnoDB.

Second thought – what on earth does it mean for the Sun NCI/BoM HPC deal in Australia ? HPC is hardly Oracle’s market..

Update – it appears the Oracle website can’t cope, currently it’s saying:

No Response from Application Web Server
 There was no response from the application web server for the page you requested. 
Please notify the site's webmaster and try your request again later.

I wonder if they need a LAMP stack to help them out ? 😉

Update 2Joe points out in his take on the deal that Sun employ(ed) a bunch of core PostgreSQL developers too, which could make life even more interesting..

Final thought for the night – what does this mean for btrfs, ZFS and Solaris licensing ? Oracle have said they are still committed to Linux, so perhaps we’ll see them trying to resolve the NetApp/Sun WAFL/ZFS patent lawsuits in a GPL compliant manner and then relicensing Solaris under the GPL – that would be sensible I think from their point of view as they could then use the good points of Solaris (dtrace and ZFS) to help improve the Linux kernel and benefit from a much larger developer community than they could otherwise get their hands on (OpenSolaris being a niche OS). Of course I won’t hold my breath, but it wouldn’t surprise me either..

One thought on “Oracle buys Sun ? (Updated)

Comments are closed.