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April 20, 2009

Comments

Alex

Sounds compelling but doesn't everybody these days want to offer a complete solution, why not keep the hardware and provide a datacenter-in-a-box complete with management service and consulting... oh and yeah, take some money away from IBM in the process. Or better yet, a complete cloud infrastructure powered by Oracle + Sun's software running on Sun hardware. Anybody thought about the "Sun IS the Cloud" campaign?

Raj

Whats the big deal about this article gloating on the discount Oracle is getting when everything on S&P 500 can be had at 40% discount compared to a year or two ago prices

Jon Pardee

The "net cash" will be burned up by the time the acquisition completes. I haven't spoken to anyone that has purchased any Sun hardware in years -- the few sales that happen must be lazy/fearful corporate IT organizations that can't be troubled to port.

Most importantly, will Ponyboy's tail end up in the Museum of Computer History?

Shai

Do you think Oracle will start charging for Java and MySQL?

vadlamani

If oracle charges for Java and MYSQL, Oracle will be the No.1 IT company in world....I wont be surprised if oracle gets into music, gaming business. :)

iresha

Oracle is already a monster. Let's hope they don't completely ruin all the "Sun" related data on the internet. When they took over BEA, they pretty much broke every link to weblogic and the WLNG on the internet. You'd search in google and click on a link, but end up redirected to some useless oracle site.

iresha

Oracle did a demolition job on the internet when they acquired BEA. All the weblogic/WLNG links in all the search engines were broken. I hope the same doesn't happen to Sun and MySQL

Dasein42

Sun is still the mainstay hardware supplier to engineering, medical and a number of other fields, fields Oracle would like a piece of. Solaris is still far more reliable than any Linux distro I've played with and Ultrasparc hardware is more stable and far cheaper in power costs than x86 (the City of London saved building 4 new power plants by putting in Sun Ultrasparc servers over equivalent Dells).

Many of Sun's open source software links point to dead entries and the new Oracle links point back to areas that you need a Sunsolve enterprise account to access. Perhaps this is just a transitional issue but it makes me suspicious.

As far as Java goes it would be difficult for Oracle to change much in the process, since the community includes companies like IBM that could take Oracle out in a lawsuit. I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle changes the licensing on enterprise products to only allow the open source versions to be used in not-for-profit situations though.

About competing products - what use is MySQL to Oracle besides killing it? Vice versa what use is Weblogic now other than a brand that could be used to promote Glassfish Enterprise code?

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My Current Reading List

  • Robert Jordan: Knife of Dreams (The Wheel of Time, Book 11)

    Robert Jordan: Knife of Dreams (The Wheel of Time, Book 11)
    I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I'm still reading Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. When he passed L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth decology I could have cried. Maybe WoT will be made into the worst movie of all time? Still, I've been following the saga of Rand al'Thor for more than a decade now, and I want to see how it ends. Rumor is that the next book, Memory of Light, will in fact conclude the saga. To borrow a phrase, "There should have been only one." (**)

  • Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)

    Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
    My family got me Quicksilver for Christmas. I'm not far into it, but it's clearly a Stephenson book: lots of historical connections, multiple timeline unfolding simultaneously, meticulous historical detail, 100 pages in the plot is still a total mystery, big "thud"factor... Should be a great read.

  • Chris DiBona: Open Sources 2.0

    Chris DiBona: Open Sources 2.0
    Anything edited by Chris DiBona is worth spending the time to read.

  • David Kahn: The Codebreakers : The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet

    David Kahn: The Codebreakers : The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet
    I'm just getting started with this one, but so far it's a fascinating account of the history of cryptology. It's a massive 1200 pages, so it may be a while before I move on to something else.

Larry . . .

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    • 2010-07-28 AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford.
      Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies is moderating a panel session at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford including Marten Mickos, Swayne Hill, Treb Ryan, Lars Buytaert, and me. I'm looking forward to a great discussion.
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      Dasient is an an early-stage company that is solving next-generation security problems for the Internet. News
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      Embedded instant-on operating system for consumer devices. News
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      On-line lead generation and marketing automation. News
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      Novara Clinical Research operates dedicated facilities for conducting Phase II to Phase IV patient studies for the pharmaceutical industry. News
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