European Commission Approves Oracle-Sun Merger 144
rubycodez writes "The anti-trust body of the EU, the European Commission, has approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, believing competition would be preserved. It saw PostgreSQL as a viable independent alternative to MySQL and that market access to Java would not be restricted. Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year."
Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL (Score:3, Insightful)
Oracle is sure to kill or marginalize MySQL. Rest in peace my old friend.
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Berkeley DB has zero overlapping market with Oracle DB.
Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL (Score:5, Insightful)
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The same is true of MySQL.
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The version of MySQL that Oracle can even potentially shut down, the dual-licensed one you pay for, does.
Sure, people who are happy with the GPL version aren't going to be using Oracle... but that version is out of Oracle's control.
(yes, I know that right now both of these are the same code base)
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You do not understand the database market. Oracle's competition includes products such as SQL Server, DB2, etc. What would be classified as enterprise level, where companies have large and critical data needs. MySQL is not in the same ballpark.
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I would personally agree that MySQL is not of the same quality as even PostgreSQL, but people ARE using it for business- and performance- critical applications regardless of its shortcomings.
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I would personally agree that MySQL is not of the same quality as even PostgreSQL, but people ARE using it for business- and performance- critical applications regardless of its shortcomings.
But no-one doing so would have considered Oracle as an alternative. Ergo, no overlap.
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But no-one doing so would have considered Oracle as an alternative. Ergo, no overlap.
I dearly wish you were right, but I've been to the meetings where decisions like this were made.
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Besides, even if we were to seriously consider, for the sake of argument, that Oracle would kill MySQL, I would say 'good riddance'. MySQL is a piece of crap, a toy database engine, and the world would be a better place if people would use decent alternatives instead.
I have to admit you have a point there.
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No, it's effectively dead. No one I've worked with in 5 years has started a project with Berkeley DB: every use of it that I've dealt with has been migrated to new systems, usually MySQL. And many of the lightweight uses of it, such as RPM databases and Subversion, have thrown it out with extreme prejudice in favor of SQLite. Oracle bought BerkeleyDB in time to harvest its good ideas and throw it onto the "support it by migrating to something that works better", and simplify the market to their own advantag
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You don't survive long as a company by having competing products in your line-up. MySQL has been a thorn in Oracle's side for a long time. Now they get to exploit the user-base, getting them over to their entry-level db and upgrading some to their enterprise level db all the while gradually shuffling MySQL into the background.
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Oracle has more than one db product: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html [oracle.com]
Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL (Score:5, Insightful)
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Interesting. I would have thought there was a higher percentage of folks using mysql for more powerful tasks. I know we're using mysql for a few production projects that need more power than that. Heck, we were considering kicking Oracle out and going with just MySQL because of the high costs involved.
Heck, Oracle costs have kept us from upgrading our Sun hardware. With the license increase for multi-cores, upgrading our T2000's is out of the question.
But you do have a point. There are probably quite a few
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What's odd is the latest GA install of community server on mysql.com doesn't work on win7 64bit.
Nil? Because Oracle wouldn't do something to lose themselves customers and revenue?
Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle is sure to kill or marginalize MySQL. Rest in peace my old friend.
I don't know about that. If I was running Oracle, I would do three things: gradually modify MySQL to make it easier to transition from MySQL to Oracle, market MySQL heavily as a lightweight, easy databse for companies and organizations that can't justify the cost of Oracle for their database needs, develop and market a for pay support structure for MySQL that easily transitions to Oracle if the database gets big and complicated enough to justify the transition (and train the support staff to not transition anybody until they really got significant benefit from the transition.
That would be a nightmare... (Score:2)
Have you ever tried to migrate anything from MySQL to Oracle? They are *so* different. It would take *years* to get MySQL to a point where such a transition would even be considered by companies wanting to switch.
Granted, migrating from any database to
Re:That would be a nightmare... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because of the huge userbase mysql has, compared to oracle express edition where 50% of users have tried it once and dropped it, while the other one is an oracle employee?
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Cool. A technical reply on Slashdot is modded as a troll. How special.
[John]
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market MySQL heavily as a lightweight, easy databse for companies and organizations that can't justify the cost of Oracle for their database needs
Oracle has already a free (as in beer) database : Oracle Express. It was tailored to replace MySQL, a few years before this buy out.
Has it had any success at market penetration?
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Then Monty Wideanus should have bought back the copyrights to MySQL to preserve its fate. Otherwise it was just a bunch of butthurt on his part after cashing in for a billion dollars.
Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think that's probably the case too to be honest. Judging by the EU saying PostgreSql is a viable alternative even they accept it's a possibility.
At the time, as it always does, building an abstraction layer on my projects for database access seemed like one of those things you feel you have to do but might not ever end up being useful.
But things like this are one of the many reasons we do those sorts of chores- at least a switch to PostgreSql will be amazingly trivial for me on the projects which I've use
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well, I knew MS was deep rooted at slashdot, but I didn't know they employed people in the 7000 UID.
What's worse, MySQL being kept alive by oracle, or being owned by MS? Oh right, lets decry MySQL supposedly dying.
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Ignoring any pettiness though, do check out Postgre. I think it's quite nice.
Monty (Score:4, Funny)
Monty is going to have a fit.
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We can only hope. ;-)
Re:Monty (Score:5, Funny)
maybe eu approved the deal because they got annoyed by monty
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"maybe eu approved the deal because they got annoyed by monty"
More likely that Oracle's check finally cleared.
My honest response was... (Score:2)
"Oh no, not again!"
Forget MySQL, What about GlassFish and NetBeans? (Score:5, Insightful)
GlassFish [java.net] competes directly with Oracle AS, and Weblogic (which Oracle acquired through BEA's acquisition a while back).
NetBeans [netbeans.org] competes directly with Oracle's JDeveloper.
I wonder if Oracle will keep these tools around. Personally, I think Oracle would be a fool not to. The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is by far the most productive way to develop server side Java Applications.
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From a competition point of view those applications also compete with JBoss and Eclipse / IntelliJ IDEA. I certainly hope that they are preserved. But moving them into Oracle will certainly not limit choice between providers. I presume Oracle will keep at least one application server / EE environment and IDE alive.
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I presume Oracle will keep at least one application server / EE environment and IDE alive.
No doubt Oracle will keep at least one app server/IDE alive, the question is, which one?
Oracle App Server, Weblogic or GlassFish?
JDeveloper or NetBeans?
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Hopefully they will keep them around. Both Oracle and IBM pushing Java is a bigger threat to Microsoft than Linux at the moment.
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Threatening Microsoft is not Oracle's business. Selling Oracle software, servers, and services is.
Expect MySQL support for large scale customers to be phased out starting... oh, wait, it's already been occurring. The Oracle sales staff have been eager to migrate MySQL customers, and now they have Sun's client list to work on. And they've been encouraging migration since the sale started. Not without cause, and it often makes sense for large customers.
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I do not think that Oracle and IBM are deliberately going after MS. But the more business applications get written in Java, the more tenuous MS's desktop OS monopoly becomes.
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Yeah, I'd really miss Netbeans, it's definitely my favourite IDE after Visual Studio on any platform and my first choice for Java development also.
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The biguest competition against Oracle Weblogic (formerly BEA Weblogic) in the J2EE Application Server space is Websphere by IBM, not GlassFish.
The mostly widelly used IDE for Java development is Eclipse (which is open source), NetBeans is not even a second, maybe a far 3rd or worse.
I've been working professionally with Java for 12 years and I can't see how anybody can see GlassFish or NetBeans as at all important in the Java space: the truth is that while Sun's Java language and standard libraries are quit
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Netbeans runs better, imo, and it's slowly adding more support for languages like PHP and Python and it does a good job with them.
I fully expect Netbeans to take off with PHP devs and if they keep going as they are then slowly it'll gain users amongst java devs too.
Re:Forget MySQL, What about GlassFish and NetBeans (Score:5, Insightful)
The big deal with NetBeans is that it's an all-in-one package - you get it and JDK, and you're all set to go for any kind of Java development you can possibly think of - be it a desktop Swing application, a J2EE web app, a midlet, or whatever. In that, it's rather similar to Visual Studio.
With Eclipse, you don't even get a decent visual UI editor out of the box. Of course, you can find Eclipse plugins to do everything NetBeans can do, but that's precisely the point - you have to find them first, occasionally you have to pay for the good ones, too, and quite often you have to decide which one out of N options you want to use (just look at the list of available UI editors...). With NetBeans, the choice has been made for you, so you can just use it in blissful ignorance. This is particularly helpful for beginner programmers, since they can just take NetBeans and not worry about anything else.
In short, Eclipse is like Debian, while NetBeans is like SUSE. These are different niches, and both are good to have.
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GlassFish competes directly with Oracle AS, and Weblogic (which Oracle acquired through BEA's acquisition a while back).
NetBeans competes directly with Oracle's JDeveloper.
I wonder if Oracle will keep these tools around. Personally, I think Oracle would be a fool not to. The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is by far the most productive way to develop server side Java Applications.
I agree, and I don't think Oracle will be pulling the plug on these. Some of these technologies might get integrated, and some will probably just continue on.
Look at how they've handled BEA. They have silently admitted that WebLogic is superior, but are still integrating it with some components of OAS to make an even better product. I think we can probably expect something similar with their IDEs.
As far as Glassfish/MySQL... I really don't think they will get rid of these either. WebLogic/OracleDB
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because glassfish and netbeans don't have the perceived importance of mysql in their respective markets.
there is not a chance in the world they will be around in the long run. oracle isn't going to duplicate software dev teams to build competing products in house.
Rrrreally (Score:2, Redundant)
Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year.
Uh.. Citation needed, uhu.
Re:Rrrreally (Score:5, Informative)
Okay [sys-con.com].
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claims the European Commission’s prolonged investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, which isn’t expected to finish much before the agency’s mid-January deadline, is costing Sun $100 million a month in revenues and a weakened revenue stream will impact how many employees Sun gets to keep if and when the acquisition is approved.
And this isn't the only citation you can find.
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Biased? Fact. (Score:2)
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Making false statements about financials in a public company leads people to spend a fair bit of uncomfortable time in prison.
If Larry Ellison is making those statements, you can be 100% sure they can be backed up with hard financial data.
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Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year.
Uh.. Citation needed, uhu.
No it isn't. This isn't Wikipedia.
Pet Peeve (Score:4, Insightful)
"Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year." No, you can't say that. Last year could have been a really bad year for Sun regardless, they might have only sold 100 Million dollars worth without all this fiasco going on. Not meeting what the accountants project is not "losing sales" but "missing your target".
Now that the obligatory is out of the way, is this going to be the last I hear about this? Or is someone (name rhymes with Bonty) going to write an angry blog post thats going to get /. front paged? Bound to happen.
Re:Pet Peeve (Score:5, Insightful)
$1 Billion out the window, down the tubes, bye-bye (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that many MySQL folks are antsy about this, but let's face it, this was the best hope for Solaris & related technologies.
Being swallowed by IBM, I believe, would have led to the swift death of many SUN technologies / divisions. I'm firmly of the opinion
that IBM's major interest was in acquiring and converting SUN's existing enterprise userbase.
Of course, they got a good chunk of that practically for free by the EU's foot-dragging.
I imagine SUN / Oracle have no recourse?
Re:$1 Billion out the window, down the tubes, bye- (Score:4, Insightful)
I kinda agree.. This puts Oracle right up against HP, and IBM. Both of which have huge consulting, sell hardware, services, and their own databases, as well as selling others if its needed.
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I'm firmly of the opinion that IBM's major interest was in acquiring and converting SUN's existing enterprise userbase.
IBM wanted control over Java. The rest of the Sun business was dying anyway.
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Big Blue was willing to cough up $4.5 Billion for Java, which has been FOSS for a few years?
I can't how it could have been worth so much to them.
MySQL (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt Oracle is going to kill or even hamper MySQL. If anything, they will make an Oracle upgrade path that fits like a glove. While MySQL takes away some of Oracle's business, there are things out that that just doesn't need Oracle and companies that just can't afford Oracle DB. It is in Oracle's best interest to empower MySQL so that people don't switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL or other free alternatives. I mean, if I'm Oracle. I want users under my umbrella even if they aren't using my flagship product. If they ever outgrow MySQL, I would (if I were Oracle) want them to look stay with me and upgrade to Oracle DB rather than look else where.
This is a huge boon for PostgreSQL though as several people will migrate away because of this. I used to use PostgreSQL a lot. The only reason I stopped was once InnoDB really stepped up it did what I needed, and MySQL is just easier to use.
Re:MySQL (Score:5, Insightful)
MySQL future? (Score:2)
My tax Euros at work (Score:2)
While it's annoying that something like this had to take ages, I still think it's a good thing that these things are looked into. Far too many deals are done under shady circumstances. At least this one, potentially affecting countless systems around the world in the long run, was scrutinized before given a go-ahead.
Re:My tax Euros at work (Score:4, Funny)
I'm taxed in Pounds you insensitive clod. Not that EU taxes probably account for much compared with just the interest on Gordon Brown's debts.
Let the layoffs begin (Score:2)
50+% of [yesterday's] Sun employees will soon be pounding the streets
It seems it will not be the techies. (Score:2)
HR, back office, etc.
Not the guys that keep the tech alive.
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man, you have rose colored glasses on, thousands of sun engineers have been given the boot in the past five years.
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yes, it will be the techies, half of them according to industry analysts. January 27, mark on your calendar, Larry is going to tell what lives and what dies. Funny the dweebs here whining "oh they *can't* kill my crucial-to-the-world Sun thang.....Oracle is a multi-billion dollar company, the market of things such as glassfish or whatever else is chicken shit to them. Fact is Sun has been pissing money for years on things such as Java, never did figure out how to monetize them. So even free Sun Java mig
MySQL's future (Score:1)
Re:MySQL's future (Score:4, Insightful)
I have seen Postgres going horribly wrong, so it is not an option for my production environment
Can you clarify? I recently (well, a year ago) switched one of our main web apps from MySQL to Postgres (I needed transactional support on large tables (>100 columns) - which made InnoDB useless), and I've never looked back. How does Postgres go "horribly wrong"?
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i second your sentiments. i have never had even a blip with postgresql, so i'm interested in knowing what happened as well.
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just wait until you're out in the business world, you'll be amazed at how many different pieces of data need to be managed. it goes way beyond name, address, phone and email. on the surface it does sound like poor design and something that's probably impossible to normalize, but i have seen it (and more) in my day.
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although i'm not familiar w/ the 3rd party tool mentioned in the link you provided, i assume it has something to do w/ putting the data into a format that the COPY command can read, correct?
if that's the case, it sounds like it's the tool and not postgresql having the problem. i can't remember ever having a problem using COPY to load bulk data, even when moving data from an old distribution (7.x) to a new one (8.x). i've always found pg_dump -a to work well.
well, i take that
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I have seen Postgres going horribly wrong
An offhand negative comment with no explanation at all doesn't mean much. That could mean anything from a real problem to forgetting a WHERE clause on your DELETE statement.
"lost sales" (Score:3, Informative)
Pfft. Same argument as the RIAA about piracy. "We certainly would have made $x bazillion, if only..."
Please, if you ever want to aspire to anything higher than tabloid journalism, do at the very least two things:
1 - add the word "estimated" or something to that effect when you're pulling figures out of your (or someone elses) ass
2 - do not use the word "cost" for lost sales or other imaginary did-not-happen income. Cost is when an expense has happened, i.e. money has been spent. Money that never came in is never a "cost".
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The "money that never came in" is not the cost - the action/inaction that caused "money to never come in" is the cost.
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No, it is not. It is "money that we expected, but never made".
Cost is when you have $X and spend some of it. Not when you didn't make as much money as you'd have liked to. Heck, if that were the case, I'd have a couple million in "costs" every year, because where's that damn lottery jackpot that I'm waiting for?
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I'd love to buy from Sun but even I put off buying a couple servers until I see what happens. The sales rep was honest about the situation and his inability to say much so if the hardware side survives, I will still buy from them.
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Are you intentionally dense or is english not your first, second or third language?
I didn't doubt that "lost sales" exist.
I do insist to not call them "costs", because they aren't. Calling things by their proper names is a primary requirement for correct understanding and evaluation.
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Are you intentionally dense or is english not your first, second or third language?
Are you intentionally dense or do you fail to understand the difference between nouns and verbs in English?
I do insist to not call them "costs"
Cost (transitive verb): cause the loss of
As in, "Responding to your nonsense cost me more time than it was worth."
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Cost (transitive verb): cause the loss of
Same thing. You can not lose what you do not have. Not winning something is not a loss. Or at least I don't feel like I lost the 100 m dash at the last summer olympics. Might be because I didn't compete, you know? Likewise, even if you compete, not winning the lottery jackpot is not identical to losing a million bucks.
Again, few misuses of words by large organisations are not intentional. If the RIAA were to whine "we don't make as much money as we think we ought to", very few people would sympathize. If th
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Your ability to resort to name calling instantly when anyone doesn't agree with you is another reason /. types work for the business types.
Really? You know so much about me, it's fascinating. And you assume that my behaviour on /. is identical to the one at home or at work or elsewhere in life. Do you treat your wife the same as your boss? Why then should I treat an anonymous coward on a website the same as real people in the real world that I really interact with?
of how much worse of Sun is because of market uncertainty.
Yes, except that this uncertainty is part of the process and in a serious enterprise will have been considered in the overal picture. If you orchestrate a merger at a size like this,
Great Idea! (Score:2, Funny)
I for one am totally in favor of merging Oracle with the Sun. Oh wait...they meant the "other" Sun...damn :(
I find it interesting that Oracle did not .... (Score:2)
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...however, MySQL is a popular solution for businesses that don't want to use Oracle, and they can slowly migrate MySQL into being a "lightweight Oracle" - use MySQL, get hooked, and then have a simple migration process to real Oracle if you want more.
Screw this (Score:2)
I'll abandon both Java and MySQL before it's too late. Within a year, they'll be caught in a proprietary quagmire.
(Even more than Enterprise Java already is, I mean.)
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Regarding Java, there's just too many interested parties for it to be hijacked by Oracle, even if it now owns the trademark. I'll just name two names that are enough all by themselves: IBM, Google. Given that the code is open sourced already, the worse that can happen is that Java becomes a proprietary (and marginalized) Oracle technology, while what is now OpenJDK is renamed to avoid any mentions of "J", and, maintained by community guided by IBM and Google, supplants Java in most niches. But I think that
January 27th - Oracle Announces What Lives&Die (Score:2)
January 27th, Sun product fan-boi Geeks the world over who have been fretting, "but they *can't* kill my favorite Sun thing and fire the engineers for it because of x,y, and z" will find their X through Z reasons run through the wood chipper
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2010/01/sun-setting-on-jobs/1 [usatoday.com]
Going to be a great splatter-fest, stay tuned.
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The problem is, the EU member countries are a pretty large market in themselves, and the EC appears to reserve the right to tell companies to go home and stop selling in the EU, if they don't like what they're doing.
So, if they want the EU market, they need to play by the EC's rules.