Oracle to acquire SUN

Sun and Oracle today announced a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The Sun Board of Directors has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer.

Is it good or bad ? I never though to such a deal. So this is my humble reactions on very hot news.

Oracle will now become a kind of new IBM, concentrating hardware and software. Not sure that's indicating a sign toward openess...

Today, I received one mail from Sun : "Need more scalability for your MySQL application". With the key message being : we own it and we know better how to run it on our boxes ! Hm, if we extend this to the new portfolio, not sure that's so pleasant for all other hardware vendors proposing Oracle software...

What for Java? I don't think Oracle did very great contributions to the community, however I must admit that they are great at charging for anything (the main difference with Sun) . Will Java continue to be free ? Oracle is used to charge developer tools. Time to check the NetBeans licenses and ownership ?

And what about MySQL? Oracle is buying its single open source competitor. Isn't that a monopoly ? Will innovation continue on this DB Engine? It is funny to see Sun being acquired while they just finished building their application stack... oh bad is live when all you did is good but too late...

My last thinking. Sun managed Java poorly but on the other side this commercial weakness has been sustaining a relatively open ecosystem. Now with Oracle and IBM face to face, the major Java love triangle is over and the fight is almost guaranteed. I am betting on competition by so called innovation that will result in incompatibilities... Not good.

With Java and Lamp (MySQL) at stake, the winner might be... Microsoft !

About Java, market, technology and attitude

I read this morning a small article from Timothy M. O'Brien
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/an-up-and-down-week-for-java.html
The article highlights the relation between Sun open/not so open behavior and its current market situation. Also, I agree entirely on the desperate JavaFX approach.
Would buying Sun be good to IBM ? If stock continues to drop, probably. Would it be good for Java: I think yes. IBM has been a fair player in the open-source community since several year and is good to listen to market and make money with services.

Yesterday, I saw a smart and interesting article "Meet Sun Software Engineering Manager Masood Mortazavi, Part 2: Java DB, Project Models, and More".
This is plenty of smart thinking, and I am sure Sun is full of these very talented people. Considering the situation, I will pardon the self-congratulating style of the article. However I was damned shocked by the following paragraph :

"SC: What are the biggest issues that companies have getting the most out of Java technology-based applications?

Mortazavi: I would point to problems related to a mishmash of technologies, the lack of ability to select properly, and a relative increase in nonstandard, de-facto programming platforms."

Well. I cannot agree. First, what is the sense of choosing and "open" solution to stick to a single vendor ?

Second, Sun pushed developers to these so called 'mishmash' by regularly delivering technologies not matching business expectations. Remember the first releases without JDBC, crappy AWT, poor Swing performance, have you saw there was no reporting solutions built-in, still no clean integration with desktop under Windows... In fact, Java has been saved by these 'mismatch' like (to cite a few) Eclipse, Tomcat, Spring, Hibernate,JasperReports, Struts etc

We must understand that a lot of mishmashers just tried to fill the gaps... and they continue and continue. Why is Sun then endorsing Ruby , Groovy... Why are web applications more often built with PHP than Java...

I will one more quote this article "Don't forget that billions of dollars of revenue have been generated and millions of people have been employed because someone at Sun Microsystems invented Java,..."

That's correct, but I am sure we could have done much more money if Sun started to listen more to the market and the developers needs. The Java platform remains a very attractive but not so productive platform with a difficult learning stage (again the mentioned article is worth reading). Look at how much shrink wrapped software are written in Java... How much solutions for small business... well we missed a lot of business opportunities because of blind smart people...