What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems? 237
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writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer.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."
Re:My Thoughts (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.
Re:Am I the only one? (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 with Sun whose leadership you know is looking to be bought out, or under new leadership that has a commitment and vision to move forward?
Re:Makes sense (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?
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.
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.
Re:Strange Database Merge... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:RedHat should make the purchase (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know if RedHat has the capital,
They don't. They only have about 1.7 billion in assets and less than 700 million in cash. They'd have to get some pretty hefty financing to buy Sun and I doubt anyone is going to loan them money that would amount to 12-15 times their total revenue last year.
Re:Slashdot shoud buy Sun . . . (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 (and a minimal bit of self-promotion).
Note also that anyone can fork a FOSS project, but very few such projects ever get far enough to even be noticed, much less release anything useful. Managing a FOSS project is a difficult art, and somehow you've got to fund both yourself and the project. It's cheap as things go, but it sure isn't free.
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