Your headline (and a part of text) could be a bit confusing.
My interpretation of the numbers is the following. The aggregate non-cash value (or the valuation of just Sun's debt + equity, keeping aside Sun's cash; i.e., the value of the operating side Sun's business) is $5.6 billion.
The value of equity in Sun = Value of Operations (5.6B) - Value of Debt (0.7B) + Value of Cash (~2.5B) = $7.4 billion.
I think Oracle has a lot more to gain from acquiring Sun than IBM did. This is a better deal for Sun, as well, and there is a lot less potential for layoffs due to overlap in services/products.
The implications alone of Oracle owning Java are immense. They can have a vertically integrated business model in many areas now, which has certainly worked well for Apple.
I just hope they keep developing VirtualBox and keep it free!
My guess is that MySQL will be a lot better off under Oracle as a low-end intro DB kind of like SleepyCat.
that's a sad sad statement. mysql is a major competitive product to Oracle. they rival in performance with Oracle a bit ahead. it's really a shame if Oracle gets their hands on MySQL because it's going to go downhill. unless of course the recent news of community branches saves it from Oracles grasp...
I wait with baited breth to see what happens. If oracle contiune the development of open source system I believe this will have a great positive effect on the community. However if they decide that MySQL is to much or a rival as well as other open source systems developed by sun I forsee them being competely wiped out. I hope the first option prevails, as oracle could bring a few nice features to MySQL and vice versa.
that's a sad sad statement. mysql is a major competitive product to Oracle. they rival in performance with Oracle a bit ahead. it's really a shame if Oracle gets their hands on MySQL because it's going to go downhill. unless of course the recent news of community branches saves it from Oracles grasp...
You're correct. There is no way it will be entry level other than to [along side PostgreSQL] be two RDBMS Systems to work with Oracle 11g.
Oracle will use MySQL and PostgreSQL to drive the small-to-mid-tier solutions.
It will then focus Oracle 11g on upper tier only customers.
Hell, they might even do something wise and clean up Oracle 11g to better work with and compliment MySQL 5.1.x+ and PostgreSQL 8.3.x+.
If I were running the DB Solutions team I'd focus on providing Tools for MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle 11g+ that address their varying markets.
Obviously, PostgreSQL competes with Oracle, just like MySQL.
Oracle may even come to a time where it provides such a suite of tools that they end-of-life Oracle 11/12 [whatever they call it] and sell their enterprise services for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Apparently Oracle has the most to lose if Sun goes under.
Although I'm not so sure about some of the comments made; IBM is also in a position to offer its customers completely integrated systems as well. They do make their own hardware and software as well.
Most of their tools utilize Java. The real benefit is all the Unix/Linux/Java development staff they'll be getting. Plus the Solaris code base.
Most of their tools utilize Java. The real benefit is all the Unix/Linux/Java development staff they'll be getting. Plus the Solaris code base.
Wonder what this means for ZFS for Apple.
It means ZFS on Linux and OS X. Will Linux continue with Btrfs being co-developed by Oracle and the Linux community? Most likely they will definitely continue it's efforts.
Will dtrace finally be natively supported in Linux? Count on it. Oracle will have to deal with where it wants to work with Linux and where it wants to use Solaris/OpenSolaris.
What I think Oracle will now do is port ZFS to Linux and work with Apple to make sure ZFS on Linux and OS X are seemless.
Oracle will put more resources into OpenOffice and VirtualBox, not to mention Java.
Ellison is Job's personal best friend.
Why? To what advantage is it for Oracle to continue to make linux its primary OS when it just purchased the Sun hardware business and Solaris for $5B?
On Sun's big servers Solaris is superior to linux and frankly the whole open source thing has been a disaster for Sun. My little pony has done very poorly at wooing the FOSS folks despite giving away the kingdom and frankly there's no money in it.
IBM has been far more successful at destroying Sun with Linux than Sun has impacted MS with OpenOffice. That's simply pointless money to be spending. Oracle should gain brownie points with both MS and the FOSS world by making it a completely open source project and letting go the reins.
Glassfish and MySql will become entry level products like IBM's WebSphere Community Edition. MySQL has been gutted anyway since most of the key devs have left and it's been forked. Also as a minor irritant to Redhat/JBoss.
If Oracle wanted to make a big services/software/open source play they'd have bought Red Hat instead and ended up simply a weaker version of IBM.
By getting Sun they're making a vertically integrated systems play vs services and trying to become the Apple of the enterprise world. Position the Unbreakable Linux + MySql + Glassfish on commodity hardware as the low end solution and open source banner waving (to keep RedHat scraping by at the commodity end of the enterprise market) and then make bank on high end Solaris + Oracle + WebLogic on high end multi-way servers. I would keep ZFS for myself and away from IBM/Linux and keep it CDDL.
Shame about netbeans though. The good pieces are going to go to Eclipse but even with whatever bad blood that will cause having ONE decent free Java IDE will be better then two half assed ones. God do I hate Eclipse but I'm pretty glad we didn't go Netbeans and Netbeans Platform.
I wonder what this means for the future development of OpenOffice. As a 15 year Windows user who has recently migrated away from MS's bloated crapware, I was looking forward to converting all of my apps to open source and was really interested in adopting OpenOffice. If OO is going to wither and die under Oracle's control, it doesn't make much sense to me to invest time and effort to become a proficient user of OO. If that's the case then I would have to go with MS Office for the Mac when MS restores VBA functionality back to Word.
Why? To what advantage is it for Oracle to continue to make linux its primary OS when it just purchased the Sun hardware business and Solaris for $5B?
On Sun's big servers Solaris is superior to linux and frankly the whole open source thing has been a disaster for Sun. My little pony has done very poorly at wooing the FOSS folks despite giving away the kingdom and frankly there's no money in it.
IBM has been far more successful at destroying Sun with Linux than Sun has impacted MS with OpenOffice. That's simply pointless money to be spending. Oracle should gain brownie points with both MS and the FOSS world by making it a completely open source project and letting go the reins.
Glassfish and MySql will become entry level products like IBM's WebSphere Community Edition. MySQL has been gutted anyway since most of the key devs have left and it's been forked. Also as a minor irritant to Redhat/JBoss.
If Oracle wanted to make a big services/software/open source play they'd have bought Red Hat instead and ended up simply a weaker version of IBM.
By getting Sun they're making a vertically integrated systems play vs services and trying to become the Apple of the enterprise world. Position the Unbreakable Linux + MySql + Glassfish on commodity hardware as the low end solution and open source banner waving (to keep RedHat scraping by at the commodity end of the enterprise market) and then make bank on high end Solaris + Oracle + WebLogic on high end multi-way servers. I would keep ZFS for myself and away from IBM/Linux and keep it CDDL.
Shame about netbeans though. The good pieces are going to go to Eclipse but even with whatever bad blood that will cause having ONE decent free Java IDE will be better then two half assed ones. God do I hate Eclipse but I'm pretty glad we didn't go Netbeans and Netbeans Platform.
Just watch. Linux will continue to be Oracle's primary OS. Solaris will be for their Fortune 50/100 clients and Linux because guess what? Those clients are moving more to Linux and Oracle still wants them to use Oracle Dbase. Fortunately, Oracle sees the writing on the wall for their flag ship and is starting to lose clients to MySQL which they now own.
They are covering all fronts for their business goals.
I wouldn't think 50 Million plus downloads of OpenOffice.org 3.x is small, by any measurement. 90% of those downloads are for the Windows platform.
OO 3.1 and especially 3.2 adds even more compelling reasons to dump MS Office.
Just watch. Linux will continue to be Oracle's primary OS. Solaris will be for their Fortune 50/100 clients and Linux because guess what? Those clients are moving more to Linux and Oracle still wants them to use Oracle Dbase. Fortunately, Oracle sees the writing on the wall for their flag ship and is starting to lose clients to MySQL which they now own.
Yes, we'll see.
Oracle probably lost as much to MS SQL as it did to MySql in terms of real revenue. MySQL was generating maybe $40-70M in revenue per year. Sure, they have InnoDB as well but jeez. The DB market was $18B in 2007. SQL Server had 18% market share vs Oracle's 44% in 2007. MySQL had 0.2% market sahre in terms of revenue.
How on earth are you going to replace a $7B revenue stream with one at best $70M? You can't without going the Sun route (out of business). Open Source is a spoiler at their level...a weapon to bludgeon the revenue stream of the market leader with. IBM linux services revenue is simply acceptance that they could live with 1-10% or the original market revenue stream if it killed Sun in the process and got more hardware share out of it even at the expense of AIX. Something they achieved.
MySQL hurts MS SQL a lot more since MS SQL is still middle tier. Even then it's still a $3.1B revenue stream.
Sure, there may be a lot of MySQL installs out there but it doesn't generate that much revenue for the company that owns it in comparison to proprietary DB owners.
Quote:
They are covering all fronts for their business goals.
I wouldn't think 50 Million plus downloads of OpenOffice.org 3.x is small, by any measurement. 90% of those downloads are for the Windows platform.
OO 3.1 and especially 3.2 adds even more compelling reasons to dump MS Office.
Vs 95% market share and 400M MS Office users. Not all of those downloads translate into users and OO doesn't translate into a usable revenue stream for Oracle at all.
As a revenue destruction tool to hurt MS it's still debatable. Ellison dislikes MS so he might invest more but OO probably hurts Works sales more than Office.
How could Apple be affected by this? Lets break it down in big chunks...
Solaris: Larry can go head-to-head against MS on the Server OS front (and possibly the workstation too of course) = good for Apple?
D-Trace & Instruments
Java
ZFS (potential replacement of HFS+)
Solaris is starting to use Darwin's SMB/CIFS client (which in turn was based on NetBDS and FreeBSD's)
Open Firmware (deprecated at Apple)
MySQL
Larry and Steve are pals
Scott and Steve are pals right?
Sun uses a LOT of Macs in their corporate offices, and so do their engineers and techs.
VirtualBox
OpenOffice: Larry now owns a another product that directly competes with Bill (and another productivity option for Apple) - but no DAV/EWS/MAPI Exchange client...yet.
How could Apple be affected by this? Lets break it down in big chunks...
Solaris: Larry can go head-to-head against MS on the Server OS front (and possibly the workstation too of course) = good for Apple?
D-Trace & Instruments
Java
ZFS (potential replacement of HFS+)
Solaris is starting to use Darwin's SMB/CIFS client (which in turn was based on NetBDS and FreeBSD's)
Open Firmware (deprecated at Apple)
MySQL
Larry and Steve are pals
Scott and Steve are pals right?
Sun uses a LOT of Macs in their corporate offices, and so do their engineers and techs.
VirtualBox
OpenOffice: Larry now owns a another product that directly competes with Bill (and another productivity option for Apple) - but no DAV/EWS/MAPI Exchange client...yet.
Yeah, the acquisition is of a type that would make the ultra-capitalist Ferengi from Star Trek proud, and has to be the most significant one so far in 2009 in the field of electronics technology/database and communication.
I don't see a Carl Icahn-style raiding going on here though. This applies to their business, and it may be very beneficial to them. If someone else got the company, I think it really would have been seriously gutted.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer
What I think Oracle will now do is port ZFS to Linux and work with Apple to make sure ZFS on Linux and OS X are seemless.
I thought ZFS was already in Linux, or did that get sidelined?
Quote:
Originally Posted by dstranathan
Scott and Steve are pals right?
Sun uses a LOT of Macs in their corporate offices, and so do their engineers and techs.
How many and for what particular reasons? I understand that many may be needed to develop for OS X, are there a lot more than that can account?
I don't see a Carl Icahn-style raiding going on here though. This applies to their business, and it may be very beneficial to them. If someone else got the company, I think it really would have been seriously gutted.
Thank God IBM didn't acquire them. There would have been way too much overlap in their assets and IBM would have simply killed most of Sun's good products. Oracle and Sun's products mostly complement each other.
Quote:
I thought ZFS was already in Linux, or did that get sidelined?
ZFS can't be added to Linux because the GPL is incompatible with OpenSolaris's CDDL license. This hasn't prevented everybody else from using it, from Apple to FreeBSD.
Quote:
How many and for what particular reasons? I understand that many may be needed to develop for OS X, are there a lot more than that can account?
Lots of Java developers prefer OS X to other OS's. It's very productive and pleasant to use. A major barrier to more use of OS X by Java developers is that Apple is traditionally behind Sun in releasing Java updates. I can't say how many Sun employees use them, but somebody blogged that about 1/3 of the laptops at Java One were Macs.
Lots of Java developers prefer OS X to other OS's. It's very productive and pleasant to use. A major barrier to more use of OS X by Java developers is that Apple is traditionally behind Sun in releasing Java updates. I can't say how many Sun employees use them, but somebody blogged that about 1/3 of the laptops at Java One were Macs.
I can assess this. I was at a Java conference in February and easily 1/3rd of all laptops were Macs. It would be cool if this deal improved the speed of implementation for Java on OSX. For end-users it might seem obsolete, but Java is the most used programming language in the world, and I'd like te see someone develop a non-Microsoft distributed business application without Java.
I'm curious to see what Oracle will do with all of Sun's Open Source stuff though. My bet is they'll just release most project to the community and don't bother with it for the rest. Maybe they'll keep one or two developers for each project not to seem too evil. I'd hate to see NetBeans and VirtualBox go though...
Comments
Is this a serious question?
Sun's influence on Apple.
MySQL
Java
DTrace
ZFS
NetBeans, OpenOffice and VirtualBox, too.
A very interesting a well written article but what exactly has it got to do with Apple?
Uhhh...... Oracle is going to have an App Store app?
My interpretation of the numbers is the following. The aggregate non-cash value (or the valuation of just Sun's debt + equity, keeping aside Sun's cash; i.e., the value of the operating side Sun's business) is $5.6 billion.
The value of equity in Sun = Value of Operations (5.6B) - Value of Debt (0.7B) + Value of Cash (~2.5B) = $7.4 billion.
I think Oracle has a lot more to gain from acquiring Sun than IBM did. This is a better deal for Sun, as well, and there is a lot less potential for layoffs due to overlap in services/products.
The implications alone of Oracle owning Java are immense. They can have a vertically integrated business model in many areas now, which has certainly worked well for Apple.
I just hope they keep developing VirtualBox and keep it free!
Oracle is developing Btrfs : http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
What I think Oracle will now do is port ZFS to Linux and work with Apple to make sure ZFS on Linux and OS X are seemless.
Oracle will put more resources into OpenOffice and VirtualBox, not to mention Java.
Ellison is Job's personal best friend.
My guess is that MySQL will be a lot better off under Oracle as a low-end intro DB kind of like SleepyCat.
that's a sad sad statement. mysql is a major competitive product to Oracle. they rival in performance with Oracle a bit ahead. it's really a shame if Oracle gets their hands on MySQL because it's going to go downhill. unless of course the recent news of community branches saves it from Oracles grasp...
that's a sad sad statement. mysql is a major competitive product to Oracle. they rival in performance with Oracle a bit ahead. it's really a shame if Oracle gets their hands on MySQL because it's going to go downhill. unless of course the recent news of community branches saves it from Oracles grasp...
You're correct. There is no way it will be entry level other than to [along side PostgreSQL] be two RDBMS Systems to work with Oracle 11g.
Oracle will use MySQL and PostgreSQL to drive the small-to-mid-tier solutions.
It will then focus Oracle 11g on upper tier only customers.
Hell, they might even do something wise and clean up Oracle 11g to better work with and compliment MySQL 5.1.x+ and PostgreSQL 8.3.x+.
If I were running the DB Solutions team I'd focus on providing Tools for MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle 11g+ that address their varying markets.
Obviously, PostgreSQL competes with Oracle, just like MySQL.
Oracle may even come to a time where it provides such a suite of tools that they end-of-life Oracle 11/12 [whatever they call it] and sell their enterprise services for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Apparently Oracle has the most to lose if Sun goes under.
Although I'm not so sure about some of the comments made; IBM is also in a position to offer its customers completely integrated systems as well. They do make their own hardware and software as well.
Most of their tools utilize Java. The real benefit is all the Unix/Linux/Java development staff they'll be getting. Plus the Solaris code base.
Wonder what this means for ZFS for Apple.
Most of their tools utilize Java. The real benefit is all the Unix/Linux/Java development staff they'll be getting. Plus the Solaris code base.
Wonder what this means for ZFS for Apple.
It means ZFS on Linux and OS X. Will Linux continue with Btrfs being co-developed by Oracle and the Linux community? Most likely they will definitely continue it's efforts.
Will dtrace finally be natively supported in Linux? Count on it. Oracle will have to deal with where it wants to work with Linux and where it wants to use Solaris/OpenSolaris.
Oracle is developing Btrfs : http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
What I think Oracle will now do is port ZFS to Linux and work with Apple to make sure ZFS on Linux and OS X are seemless.
Oracle will put more resources into OpenOffice and VirtualBox, not to mention Java.
Ellison is Job's personal best friend.
Why? To what advantage is it for Oracle to continue to make linux its primary OS when it just purchased the Sun hardware business and Solaris for $5B?
On Sun's big servers Solaris is superior to linux and frankly the whole open source thing has been a disaster for Sun. My little pony has done very poorly at wooing the FOSS folks despite giving away the kingdom and frankly there's no money in it.
IBM has been far more successful at destroying Sun with Linux than Sun has impacted MS with OpenOffice. That's simply pointless money to be spending. Oracle should gain brownie points with both MS and the FOSS world by making it a completely open source project and letting go the reins.
Glassfish and MySql will become entry level products like IBM's WebSphere Community Edition. MySQL has been gutted anyway since most of the key devs have left and it's been forked. Also as a minor irritant to Redhat/JBoss.
If Oracle wanted to make a big services/software/open source play they'd have bought Red Hat instead and ended up simply a weaker version of IBM.
By getting Sun they're making a vertically integrated systems play vs services and trying to become the Apple of the enterprise world. Position the Unbreakable Linux + MySql + Glassfish on commodity hardware as the low end solution and open source banner waving (to keep RedHat scraping by at the commodity end of the enterprise market) and then make bank on high end Solaris + Oracle + WebLogic on high end multi-way servers. I would keep ZFS for myself and away from IBM/Linux and keep it CDDL.
Shame about netbeans though. The good pieces are going to go to Eclipse but even with whatever bad blood that will cause having ONE decent free Java IDE will be better then two half assed ones. God do I hate Eclipse but I'm pretty glad we didn't go Netbeans and Netbeans Platform.
NetBeans, OpenOffice and VirtualBox, too.
I wonder what this means for the future development of OpenOffice. As a 15 year Windows user who has recently migrated away from MS's bloated crapware, I was looking forward to converting all of my apps to open source and was really interested in adopting OpenOffice. If OO is going to wither and die under Oracle's control, it doesn't make much sense to me to invest time and effort to become a proficient user of OO. If that's the case then I would have to go with MS Office for the Mac when MS restores VBA functionality back to Word.
Why? To what advantage is it for Oracle to continue to make linux its primary OS when it just purchased the Sun hardware business and Solaris for $5B?
On Sun's big servers Solaris is superior to linux and frankly the whole open source thing has been a disaster for Sun. My little pony has done very poorly at wooing the FOSS folks despite giving away the kingdom and frankly there's no money in it.
IBM has been far more successful at destroying Sun with Linux than Sun has impacted MS with OpenOffice. That's simply pointless money to be spending. Oracle should gain brownie points with both MS and the FOSS world by making it a completely open source project and letting go the reins.
Glassfish and MySql will become entry level products like IBM's WebSphere Community Edition. MySQL has been gutted anyway since most of the key devs have left and it's been forked. Also as a minor irritant to Redhat/JBoss.
If Oracle wanted to make a big services/software/open source play they'd have bought Red Hat instead and ended up simply a weaker version of IBM.
By getting Sun they're making a vertically integrated systems play vs services and trying to become the Apple of the enterprise world. Position the Unbreakable Linux + MySql + Glassfish on commodity hardware as the low end solution and open source banner waving (to keep RedHat scraping by at the commodity end of the enterprise market) and then make bank on high end Solaris + Oracle + WebLogic on high end multi-way servers. I would keep ZFS for myself and away from IBM/Linux and keep it CDDL.
Shame about netbeans though. The good pieces are going to go to Eclipse but even with whatever bad blood that will cause having ONE decent free Java IDE will be better then two half assed ones. God do I hate Eclipse but I'm pretty glad we didn't go Netbeans and Netbeans Platform.
Just watch. Linux will continue to be Oracle's primary OS. Solaris will be for their Fortune 50/100 clients and Linux because guess what? Those clients are moving more to Linux and Oracle still wants them to use Oracle Dbase. Fortunately, Oracle sees the writing on the wall for their flag ship and is starting to lose clients to MySQL which they now own.
They are covering all fronts for their business goals.
I wouldn't think 50 Million plus downloads of OpenOffice.org 3.x is small, by any measurement. 90% of those downloads are for the Windows platform.
OO 3.1 and especially 3.2 adds even more compelling reasons to dump MS Office.
Just watch. Linux will continue to be Oracle's primary OS. Solaris will be for their Fortune 50/100 clients and Linux because guess what? Those clients are moving more to Linux and Oracle still wants them to use Oracle Dbase. Fortunately, Oracle sees the writing on the wall for their flag ship and is starting to lose clients to MySQL which they now own.
Yes, we'll see.
Oracle probably lost as much to MS SQL as it did to MySql in terms of real revenue. MySQL was generating maybe $40-70M in revenue per year. Sure, they have InnoDB as well but jeez. The DB market was $18B in 2007. SQL Server had 18% market share vs Oracle's 44% in 2007. MySQL had 0.2% market sahre in terms of revenue.
How on earth are you going to replace a $7B revenue stream with one at best $70M? You can't without going the Sun route (out of business). Open Source is a spoiler at their level...a weapon to bludgeon the revenue stream of the market leader with. IBM linux services revenue is simply acceptance that they could live with 1-10% or the original market revenue stream if it killed Sun in the process and got more hardware share out of it even at the expense of AIX. Something they achieved.
MySQL hurts MS SQL a lot more since MS SQL is still middle tier. Even then it's still a $3.1B revenue stream.
Sure, there may be a lot of MySQL installs out there but it doesn't generate that much revenue for the company that owns it in comparison to proprietary DB owners.
They are covering all fronts for their business goals.
I wouldn't think 50 Million plus downloads of OpenOffice.org 3.x is small, by any measurement. 90% of those downloads are for the Windows platform.
OO 3.1 and especially 3.2 adds even more compelling reasons to dump MS Office.
Vs 95% market share and 400M MS Office users. Not all of those downloads translate into users and OO doesn't translate into a usable revenue stream for Oracle at all.
As a revenue destruction tool to hurt MS it's still debatable. Ellison dislikes MS so he might invest more but OO probably hurts Works sales more than Office.
Solaris: Larry can go head-to-head against MS on the Server OS front (and possibly the workstation too of course) = good for Apple?
D-Trace & Instruments
Java
ZFS (potential replacement of HFS+)
Solaris is starting to use Darwin's SMB/CIFS client (which in turn was based on NetBDS and FreeBSD's)
Open Firmware (deprecated at Apple)
MySQL
Larry and Steve are pals
Scott and Steve are pals right?
Sun uses a LOT of Macs in their corporate offices, and so do their engineers and techs.
VirtualBox
OpenOffice: Larry now owns a another product that directly competes with Bill (and another productivity option for Apple) - but no DAV/EWS/MAPI Exchange client...yet.
Oracle has a couple iPhone apps
Apple has been supported by Oracle as a server platform with Xserve RAIDs etc http://www.oracle.com/partnerships/hw/apple/index.html
How could Apple be affected by this? Lets break it down in big chunks...
Solaris: Larry can go head-to-head against MS on the Server OS front (and possibly the workstation too of course) = good for Apple?
D-Trace & Instruments
Java
ZFS (potential replacement of HFS+)
Solaris is starting to use Darwin's SMB/CIFS client (which in turn was based on NetBDS and FreeBSD's)
Open Firmware (deprecated at Apple)
MySQL
Larry and Steve are pals
Scott and Steve are pals right?
Sun uses a LOT of Macs in their corporate offices, and so do their engineers and techs.
VirtualBox
OpenOffice: Larry now owns a another product that directly competes with Bill (and another productivity option for Apple) - but no DAV/EWS/MAPI Exchange client...yet.
Oracle has a couple iPhone apps
Apple has been supported by Oracle as a server platform with Xserve RAIDs etc http://www.oracle.com/partnerships/hw/apple/index.html
Very curious what will happen with Solaris. From what I saw as a user, I liked it in the past.
A very interesting a well written article but what exactly has it got to do with Apple?
Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison is on Apple's board.
Oracle's database software runs on MacOS X . Still haven't *quite* convinced my Oracle employee neighbor to get a Mac, though...
Yeah, the acquisition is of a type that would make the ultra-capitalist Ferengi from Star Trek proud, and has to be the most significant one so far in 2009 in the field of electronics technology/database and communication.
I don't see a Carl Icahn-style raiding going on here though. This applies to their business, and it may be very beneficial to them. If someone else got the company, I think it really would have been seriously gutted.
What I think Oracle will now do is port ZFS to Linux and work with Apple to make sure ZFS on Linux and OS X are seemless.
I thought ZFS was already in Linux, or did that get sidelined?
Scott and Steve are pals right?
Sun uses a LOT of Macs in their corporate offices, and so do their engineers and techs.
How many and for what particular reasons? I understand that many may be needed to develop for OS X, are there a lot more than that can account?
I don't see a Carl Icahn-style raiding going on here though. This applies to their business, and it may be very beneficial to them. If someone else got the company, I think it really would have been seriously gutted.
Thank God IBM didn't acquire them. There would have been way too much overlap in their assets and IBM would have simply killed most of Sun's good products. Oracle and Sun's products mostly complement each other.
I thought ZFS was already in Linux, or did that get sidelined?
ZFS can't be added to Linux because the GPL is incompatible with OpenSolaris's CDDL license. This hasn't prevented everybody else from using it, from Apple to FreeBSD.
How many and for what particular reasons? I understand that many may be needed to develop for OS X, are there a lot more than that can account?
Lots of Java developers prefer OS X to other OS's. It's very productive and pleasant to use. A major barrier to more use of OS X by Java developers is that Apple is traditionally behind Sun in releasing Java updates. I can't say how many Sun employees use them, but somebody blogged that about 1/3 of the laptops at Java One were Macs.
Lots of Java developers prefer OS X to other OS's. It's very productive and pleasant to use. A major barrier to more use of OS X by Java developers is that Apple is traditionally behind Sun in releasing Java updates. I can't say how many Sun employees use them, but somebody blogged that about 1/3 of the laptops at Java One were Macs.
I can assess this. I was at a Java conference in February and easily 1/3rd of all laptops were Macs. It would be cool if this deal improved the speed of implementation for Java on OSX. For end-users it might seem obsolete, but Java is the most used programming language in the world, and I'd like te see someone develop a non-Microsoft distributed business application without Java.
I'm curious to see what Oracle will do with all of Sun's Open Source stuff though. My bet is they'll just release most project to the community and don't bother with it for the rest. Maybe they'll keep one or two developers for each project not to seem too evil. I'd hate to see NetBeans and VirtualBox go though...