Oracle Buys Sun

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After weeks of speculation of IBM buying out Sun, which failed to produce a result, today Oracle have swept in and bought Sun. The deal is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt, with Oracle buying Sun at $9.50 per share.

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

This could be the most important decision made in the software industry for 2009. The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems all approved the transaction that is due to close this summer subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.Jonathan Schwarz is certainly happy with the deal:

"This is a fantastic day for Sun's customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace," said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, "From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun's SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we'll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace."

It seems like a sudden move, and one that Sun and Oracle both did well to keep quiet. I wonder what this means for Java developers. Are Oracle better owners of Sun than IBM? It's good for Solaris, does it have any effect on Java?

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Oracle Buys Sun

Comments

Alessandro Santini replied on Mon, 2009/04/20 - 2:02pm in response to: Osvaldo Doederlein

Osvaldo, having been employed with IBM I know how Java is pervasive in their product offering but this is not, at least from my point of view, the point: it really depends upon how Oracle will manage the licensing and the evolution of Java in general. Sure, IBM and others may fork and build their own fashion - but still it won't be named Java anymore, would probably fail the compatibility kit and would diverge in specs and libraries over time. This would absolutely destroy Java. however this is not necessarily a bad thing, assuming that it will evolve in something better :) PS: I also see Project Zero as an attempt at escaping from the Java strings... don't you?

Slava Imeshev replied on Mon, 2009/04/20 - 3:09pm

My prediction is that Oracle will commercialize Java, or Java won't be available for production use outside of Oracle product suite.

Java exists because Sun has poured noticeable amount of resources into it. As far as I understand, it wasn't a very profitable exercise for Sun.

Oracle, on the contrary, knows how to make money on software. Also, we should keep in mind that Oracle is not known for giving out stuff for free.

Regards,

Slava Imeshev

Guido Amabili replied on Mon, 2009/04/20 - 3:42pm in response to: Alessandro Santini

Alessandro,

Nobody knows what will happen to GF, MySQL, etc... but I much prefer Oracle than IBM as the owner of Java, maybe time will prove I am wrong, but I could bet this is a much better move for Java if the bright mind(Amy Fowler, James Gosling,etc...) currently at Sun will be allowed a certain independence...

Nor how the JCP will evolve, but what's IBM problem with Sun having a veto right on JSRs for the core platform ?It didn't stop IBM to push their SWT and trying to change the rules.....

Johan Compagner replied on Mon, 2009/04/20 - 3:57pm in response to: Slava Imeshev

I agree with this. I dont trust oracle 1 bit. I do trust ibm way more on the java front, but yeah i use IBM projects for a long time (VAJ and eclipse) And what ibm does on the open source source for stuff that i use and contribute to my self (eclipse sub project) And how they build eclipse and there licenses is a big example for the rest, for example Symbian foundation is completely mirrored on how eclipse is set on. Besides that i work a lot with JDBC in our code, our product supports (or tries to) all jdbc databases. But in our code we have a lot of if(oracle) they even dont follow the jdbc spec! (look at how they work with date/datetime). If i look at there jdbc driver and certain stuff they only want to force you to cast to there oracle.ResultsSets and call specific methods to get everything! Maybe they have fixed this now (i hope so) but we have a special sub project that compiles against oracles own stuff to get our project working with oracle databases.. They just try to force you to be oracle all the way No i dont trust oracle 1 bit. I really hope that i am wrong

Osvaldo Doederlein replied on Mon, 2009/04/20 - 5:41pm in response to: Alessandro Santini

So far PZ is nowhere that I can see, even after branding as WebSphere sMash. And it supports Groovy and Java as well as PHP. I suppose the runtime is Java. Perhaps PZ is not as much an alternative to Java, but an alternative to JavaEE, which is a very different thing. Even tough IBM owns the lion's share of the JavaEE cake with WAS, there are some companies that don't contribute to that cake, choosing other platforms like LAMP, RoR etc. But these are typically the same companies/developers that don't want to use IBM stuff, even if it's technically similar.

David Lee replied on Mon, 2009/04/20 - 8:40pm in response to: Alessandro Santini

I agree that IBM is forced to something drastic, and it would seem safe to assume java will change in ways that benefit Oracle and hurt its competitors. I don't think IBM will exit Java, but it would not be a suprise to see IBM fork java by supporting one of the open source implementations or something along those lines. They affected the market in a huge way w/eclipse and I suspect they've had contingency plansfor Sun's demise before now.

Oracle was a software company that got to their position the same way Microsoft did. That is to say, they didn't become the company they are by giving away their software and source for free.

There simply is no way to know how Oracle's ownership of Java and Sun's other software assets will affect the rest of the java community. How will this affect Spring, Resin, IntelliJ, OpenJDK ? Will microsoft decide to enter the *nix enterprise software space due to the disarray the java world. I would say a .net vm on linux able to run all .net applications looks very appealing right now. So does firebird and postgres.

This buyout changes everything imo.

Bora Ertung replied on Mon, 2009/04/20 - 11:58pm in response to: Slava Imeshev

Oracle was giving away its Enterprise database servers for non-commerical use. I remember myself subscribing to this free distribution in around year 2000. I would not know if they still have that offering. But I presume they have stopped that because it was only the last year of the great dot com bonanza. Oracle does not give anything away if they believe it would not generate revenue.

I really believe Oracle will continue to offer the Java SE and Java RE and distribute them for free. They know Java has come along this far because of its free Runtime and SDK. I do not think they will close Java because that would not make sense but can keep a special high performance enterprise version to themselves which is just normal. They are not a charity but a corporation.

Jeroen Wenting replied on Tue, 2009/04/21 - 12:32am

Oracle is still giving away all its products for educational and test/dev work. Just create an OTN account and you can download literarlly everything except some betas and patches (which require a Metalink account, which is coupled to a SLA or reseller account).
Here's what Oracle states on their download site:

All software downloads are free, and each comes with a Development License that allows you to use full versions of the products at no charge while developing and prototyping your applications (or for strictly self-educational purposes). In some cases, certain downloads (such as Beta releases) have licenses with slightly different terms.

Oracle isn't going to "commercialise Java and make it available only within their product line". That's not their way. It is however IBMs way. There may be tighter integration, some things may be changed to make it easier to use Oracle products in relation to Java, but that's likely as far as it goes.
As to fearing for Eclipse, no need. Oracle's had Eclipse based products for some time now, and seem to be moving more and more of their SOA tooling into Eclipse, expanding the BEA studio in favour of (or side by side with for now) JDeveloper. JDeveloper have in fact been worried about that development for some time now, fearing it will mean the eventual demise of JDeveloper in favour of Eclipse in the 12R1 cycle.

Yuval Goldstein replied on Tue, 2009/04/21 - 4:42am in response to: Rick Ross

See the poll in LinkedIn, what will be the effect on Java/JEE?

http://tinyurl.com/c5fuo7

Rick Ross replied on Tue, 2009/04/21 - 7:06am in response to: Osvaldo Doederlein

When I see what you write, Osvaldo, it always reminds me how much I miss you :)

Osvaldo Doederlein replied on Tue, 2009/04/21 - 3:36pm in response to: Rick Ross

Thanks Rick... I miss those old times too :-) in the last few years I've been pouring 99% of my writing into the brazilian Java Magazine, so there's little precious time/inspiration left even for my java.net blog. But I'm still lurking here on a daily basis...

Vicente Filho replied on Tue, 2009/04/21 - 8:05pm

One thing one must not ignore is how Microsoft would react in case of any kind of dispute between Oracle X JCP, Oracle X IBM, maybe Oracle X SAP.

Such kind of fights in the Java world could bring kind of a 'weakness' to it, and I bet my coins that our beloved Mr Gates (Ballmer?) would be the first one to offer its C#s stuffs in place of Java to IBM, SAP and whoelse uses Java. And if we think about a bit more, the change from Java to C# would not be so traumatic as it would be for a company to come back to C, Object Pascal(where is Delphi?) or even Ruby or Python, given C# is a 'deviation' from Java...

So, as a Java guy, I hope things just keep going on in positive way, now Oracle owns Sun. I don`t want to build nightmares DLL`s, COMs, ActiveX instead of J/W/EARs...

:-D

BTW: Very good/high level posts going on here!

Otengi Miloskov replied on Thu, 2009/04/23 - 12:03am

Damn Java is toast. Sun is a dumbass company to let die Java in this manner. Why not Sun let go Java right now to an ISO!. Oracle will charge lots of cash just for download a copy of the JVM.

Simon Ibarra replied on Sun, 2009/04/26 - 11:06pm

What can I say?

Sun is (was?) known to be the most FOSS-friendly company, and Microsoft is known to be the top FOSS enemy. Now that Java is owned by Oracle, a purely non-FOSS-friendly company (like .NET is to Microsoft), how can you now diffrentiate Java's philosophy from .NET's? Java and .NET now looks similar to me. And why stick to Java when .NET has more clear future both in the server and client-side? Unless Sun/Oracle clears out what lies ahead of Java, developers will start migrating to .NET.

Just my two cents.

Carla Brian replied on Tue, 2012/06/05 - 6:04pm

Oracle’s middleware is built on Java and the applications giant said it will continue to invest in the software. - Garrett Hoelscher

Carla Brian replied on Mon, 2012/07/30 - 6:37pm

This would be a good idea actually. It is quite interesting though. I think Oracle’s shareholders will still be well-served in the end. - Mercy Ministries