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Comments: 237 +- Developers: What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems? on Thursday April 09 2009, @01:40PM
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snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."
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Yahoo! + Sun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yahoo! + Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it insulting when applications bundle unrelated crapware like browser toolbars, particularly when the installation selects the extra junk by default...
...software upgrades need to be elegant and streamlined. Bundling in a browser toolbar cheapens the whole experience because it starts looking just like so many other crapware applications that plague the PC industry.
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Makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
No it isn't. That's Postgres.
And with the current state of mysql, I wouldn't look at buying Sun for that reason at all. The other assets make far more sense.
Plus, Sun and Oracle have both been major open source supporters, Oracle probably one of the single largest kernel contributor. That would be a good pairing.
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Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. PostgreSQL is much closer to Oracle than MySQL is. Anyone that thinks MySQL is the best replacement for Oracle likely doesn't know much about Oracle.
It seems that sun has done a bit with PostgreSQL as well. Too bad they bought MySQL. They should have instead invested in making PostgreSQL better, at least developing better replication and clustering. That way, PostgreSQL would have been an even stronger alternative to Oracle.
Oracle used to have Solaris/SPARC as their main development platform, then they switched to Linux. That seems to have been a big blow to Sun. While Oracle still releases Oracle for Solaris/Sparc along with Linux, but the Solaris/x86 versions are always slow. I don't 11g has been released for Solaris/x86 yet.
If I was Jonathan Schwartz, I would have rather put the $1bln they spent on MySQL on PostgreSQL. I don't think it would have even really taken that much either. I'm still just baffled over spending $1bln on a company that I think made $50mln in it's best year!?!?!
Anyway... Oracle developers might not have been too happy about moving away from Solaris because they'd lose DTrace [intel.com].
I thought I heard something about there being some bad blood between Ellison and Sun but I don't know what that was about.
I still think Cisco should be more interested.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oracle has no interest in Sun. Oracle just launched the Database Machine/Exadata with HP. Does anyone think that they are going to stab HP in the back and buy Sun? Definitely not.
Oracle is not a hardware company. It doesn't want to be a hardware company. Sun has way too much hardware for Oracle to even consider them.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
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That comparison chart is really wrong (Score:4, Informative)
That comparison chart is really wrong; I think it was done by someone who either never actually used DTrace, didn't know how DTrace works, or just hasn't used it well enough to be familiar with it.
DTrace instruments by placing an INT 3 (on other platforms, it's an illegal instruction) at the probe point and remembering where that was done. The trap handler then has a code path that knows about this, and shunts it over to DTrace for a probe lookup.
Pretty clearly, whoever wrote that chart has only used fbt (Function Boundary Tracing), and is not familiar with the fact that the trace points can pretty much be put at any instruction location where the instrumentation would not involve reentering the trap handler. This means any instruction, and it's done *without* using break points.
I really don't have time to fix this for them (and I doubt I'd get edit rights if it started making DTrace look relatively better anyway), but someone involved in the project should actually take a real look at the software they are trying to compete with before they so casually (and incorrectly) dismiss it.
-- Terry
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"MySQL is the best alternative to Oracle" - that's a pretty bold statement. You don't want to add some context? What about large, high transaction databases - DB/2 would probably be the best alternative to Oracle. What about Postgress? What about SQL Server?
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My Thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the two companies have some excellent synergies*. My biggest concern with Oracle purchasing Sun (as opposed to the other way around) is that there would be a culture clash. Sun is a very dynamic environment that fosters great new ideas. But unless those core competencies bubble up through Oracle, the Sun portion of the company would be strangled to death.
Personally, I've always wanted to see Sun purchase Oracle. But I don't think that's happening at this point.
* Warning: Corporate buzzword!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What?
On what basis do you believe that?
Considering that Sun is a drop in the bucket (around 5 billion market cap) compared to Oracle (~100 billion), I think you're right. Oracle's been much bigger than Sun for a very long time. Never mind the fact that Oracle's business model is ve
Re: (Score:2)
Put Sun in those related groups and you'll see something on order of IBM Alphaworks and some cool results.
Oracle+Sun will make a good F/OSS ally. Oracle's main goal is DB licenses as they truly bel
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
* Warning: Corporate buzzword!
GAAH!! Put the warning (or at least the asterisk) before the word! It's well documented that overexposure to corporate buzzwords causes headaches, confusion, and eventually IQ loss.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sun can't market their way out of a paper bag. And that's just the God's honest truth. There's nothing inherently wrong with the company besides that.
What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe its just that the code I've seen has been outsourced stuff that came back in as unclean globs of code but it makes me a little leery to see where Oracle would take Java.
Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. Developers today (at least the vocal ones) seem to be a lot more interested in putting down the work of others than improving their own. That's why there are sites like The Daily WTF.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Me! Actually most developers I think.
The reason we think that (almost) everybody else's code is crap is because much of it is. The mistake that we make is to assume it is crap because the original coder was an idiot, when in most cases it is crap because of unrealistic time pressures placed on the developer, or some basic mistake in the foundation that acts like a ball of crap that radiates outwards.
I have seen quite a few pieces of open source code that I would regard as awesome in terms of code quality (n
Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you worked with contractors? It's not about what country they're from -- it's about their contractor status. Of the ones I had, the foreigners were better coders, though poorer communicators. But in all cases, the lack of ownership in the product, of knowledge of the history, business purpose, and architecture of the product, the lack of sense of long-term commitment, of common goal, of responsibility for the outcome (in terms of ongoing maintenance, not just "going live") ... all made my life a lot harder. It's difficult work to get good, solid work out of contractors, and not because they don't mean well. They do. They're great people, sometimes even great coders, but their "wanderer" status has its drawbacks and you have to learn special skills to manage them.
So the GP is correct to worry about the quality of outsourced code.
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Am I the only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sun certainly have some good products. I often think that they need to focus a bit more. They have their fingers in many pies but can't be good at all of them.
At the moment I have no confidence in Sun. They were considering selling to IBM which potentially could have resulted in many of Sun's key products being discontinued. If Sun is willing to 'sell the farm' why should I buy their products? If Sun doesn't believe in their own future how can I believe in it?
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Sun's a hardware company, and the pie they are in is singular, there: dealing with the memory bottleneck by coming up with new processor designs that don't spend all their time sitting in queue waiting for an I- or D-cache load. Most of the research is there, because it's a problem all the chip vendors are faced with. if they don't do it, they will die.
On the product side, you're mostly seeing the necessary support a hardware company needs (Solaris), the languages (Java, TCL, etc) and the combinations of
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
NO, absolutely not the only one - that's my hope as well. But the truth is, Sun is a company that gave a lot to the world in which it exists, and monetized very little of it. It's the greatest open source contributor (Solaris, Java, OpenOffice, the SPARC architecture itself, NetBeans, ZFS... and I'm sure missing some, as Sun gave away HUGE amounts of stuff).
Such companies don't usually succeed in a commercial sense. I'm tempted to say that Sun should cease to be a for-profit publicly traded company, and become either a state-sponsored institution, or private foundation, for the development of high-tech.
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Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you were a customer willing to lay down a 5 million dollar deal on a two year contract would you feel better wi
Everytime I see this phrase... (Score:5, Funny)
It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle
Java will help Oracle colonize the entire solar system.
Re:Everytime I see this phrase... (Score:4, Funny)
Picture of spaceship crater, with caption: FAIL
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Slashdot shoud buy Sun . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . if we can get all those Anonymous Cowards and folks with ridiculous names like mine to chip in $10 each.
The company's direction and strategy could be guided by a Slashdot thread. A potent brew of "Informative, Interesting, Troll . . ."
Hell, maybe we could even patent that business model . . . crowd governance . . . or mod governance?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No. Linux is written by committee, but the design is by Linus. Similarly with Python, except the design is by BFDL Guido. Other projects have other heads...but the heads tend to be singular.
Note that the nominal authority of the FOSS project heads tends to be considerably more absolute than we would tolerate in most other areas. They can toss code on a whim. But this is restrained in the successful project because they mustn't alienate their developers...and they can't offer anything except acceptance
What if Oracle owned MySQL? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to see that, actually -- Berkeley DB is an amazingly robust data store. It worked well with MySQL.
Mom! Dad! Don't touch it! It's EEEeeeevil! (Score:4, Interesting)
I am so not comfortable with Oracle [wired.com] being in charge of one of the remaining UNIX vendors... Better to see another UNIX license holder get them than that.
Synergy! (Score:2)
Where "synergy" is another word for "2+2=1". This could produce even more economic value than Microsoft plus Yahoo! would have.
Forks of everything forkable approaching in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
A Strategic Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
If they could both bury the hatchet for about 5 minutes, a joint bid by Oracle and IBM would actually make much more sense. IBM would take the Solaris platform and hardware, Oracle would take the ZFS, MySQL, and DTrace. They could then both jointly purchase and spin-off Java into an Open Source project or its own firm with each company taking a stake. Since both rely so heavily on Java and neither would enjoy the other firm owning the platform it makes perfect sense for it to continue as an independent entity.
And... not going to happen. (Score:4, Interesting)
Maintaining and investing into current and future hardware and software from Sun to fit Oracle's business model after the deal makes no sense. That's basically down grading Solaris and their hardware to database only boxes. When Oracle sells across the landscape on all OSes. Why the over head of an internal OS and hardware too?
MySQL isn't an issue, if only a slight distraction. If Oracle took Sun, MySQL would slowly just get plowed under and absorbed. That's like mentioning that Oracle gets the fake ficus trees in the lobby in the deal too.
If Java is all so important to Oracle so much so, that it requires Oracle to purchase Sun, then Oracle is in deep trouble, because then coded themselves into making a purchase with a language that threatens the very stability of the company.
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When your share of the market is the 23% that doesn't buy anything, then your share of the market doesn't matter. Sorry, no one buys FOSS because of market share, they buy it because people are stupid and like buzz words. People who use FREE software generally are the people who don't PAY for software, so its of little value to anyone.
I really wish you people could it into your thick heads, companies don't want something thats free, they want something they can sell.
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People who use FREE software generally are the people who don't PAY for software, so its of little value to anyone.
it's not free as in beer, you imbecile.
RedHat should make the purchase (Score:3, Insightful)
personally i think Sun is done for (Score:3, Informative)
i think their support is crap. every time i call for netbackup support it takes them a week to get back to me. place i work for was scammed into buying netbackup from Sun instead of Veritas years ago.
i'm trying to get the latest media for netbackup and it's insane trying to register just to download it.
we looked at the SL500 a few months ago and it was overpriced. everything Sun sells seems overpriced compared to HP, including the servers.
Long thought IBM or Oracle would Buy Sun (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun + Oracle = Yay (Score:3, Interesting)
The documentation is horrible, but that's not what it's about. Our development machines run on a JBoss AS with a Mysql Repository. The performance is horrible, and I mean it. It's beyond bad, MySql gobbles up the whole server. It takes 95% CPU time and 2 gb ram for our (rather complex) queries.
On our staging machine (running Oracle as a repository), the same tasks take 10% CPU and we hardly notice it happening.
Needles to say, SUN thought it might be a good idea (for political reason obv) to include Mysql in their documentation as "supported", although no sane person would actually use it.
I kinda forgot what my post has to do with this story. I just read "Oracle + Sun" and it clicked. I'm conditioned to think it's a perfect combination.
Re:Strange Database Merge... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see anything changing. Right now we have a 3-way fight between three heavyweights: Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Everyone else is unimportant.
However, IBM and Microsoft have other competencies and sources of revenue. Oracle does not. In result, Oracle has been looking for new ways to enter the low-end market. So owning MySQL could be a boon for them, but it wouldn't significantly change the market.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Strange Database Merge... (Score:5, Funny)
So, what's next on your fight card? Space Marines vs. Pee-Wee Herman? Guillermo Jones vs. 6-year-old Timmy from down the block?
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PostgreSQL (Score:5, Insightful)
PostgreSQL is still a *huge* player (in fact, they're pretty-much the only open-source, fully-transactional DB available).
Also, Access isn't MS's DB offering... MS SQLServer is the real player. Access is as much a database as a go-cart is a race car (which is to say, kinda-sorta, but not really).
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Re:So where does this leave Open Souce? (Score:5, Informative)
While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.
Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.
Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris [opensolaris.com] - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC [opensparc.net] - Their CPU line
Java [java.net] - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice [openoffice.org] - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox [virtualbox.org] - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE [netbeans.org] - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS [java.net] - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster [opensolaris.org]
Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers
So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it, why would they bother with MySQL (unless its part of an 'upgrade' path to SQL Server).
MS already has SQL Server express, and developer edition versions so I'm not sure why they'd want to take MySQL on. I'm sure they're just waiting for Access to die naturally, or only keeping it around for legacy reasons.
And as for Java, they made J++ so this is 5 years too late for them, they don;t want Java now - they're more interested in converting Java devs to C# (and Windows lock-in, obviously)