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writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer.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."
Makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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: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.
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mom! Dad! Don't touch it! It's EEEeeeevil! (Score:2, Insightful)
Code can fork. Licenses can generate lawsuits and intimidation forever.
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.
Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:Not Oracle, Microsoft.. (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)
Re:Yahoo! + Sun (Score:1, Insightful)
Regardless of what popular folklore may have to say, the reality as explained to me at the time it was happening is that Yahoo! was founded, developed, and intially hosted on hardware borrowed from Sun. Not purchased from Sun. Not rented or leased from Sun, borrowed from Sun. Specifically, customer demo equipment from (IIRC) the Sun office in San Francisco which in turn borrowed additional demo equipment from other offices around California to loan to Yahoo!. There was not a great deal of happiness when Yahoo! finally came into some money and then purchased hardware from (IIRC) HP which hadn't done doodle for them when they were penniless.
Re:Makes sense (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:And... not going to happen. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:3, Insightful)
Burning hours/money to make those options configurable would be irresponsible for someone that doesn't know the company culture, or if it is unlikely that they will be used because the next contractor isn't even going to be aware that it is there. This becomes even more so when you implement half of a feature because you are already making a change to that part of an application suite, and you know that a year or two down the line the functionality will be needed for work you will be doing on another piece of the suite.
It's called capitalism (Score:1, Insightful)
*Insert any company name here* has no allegiance but to itself.
Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (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 (not in a way that is too subjective either, good naming conventions, good structure, good comments etc), these are the projects I contribute to. People pay me to wade through a quagmire of crappy code, when I do it for free, I want to work with the good stuff.
I suggest that you would be better to say... "Show me a developer who understands *why* everybody else's code is crap"... generally it is not down to idiocy.