Blog dedicated to Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite) Technology; covers Apps Architecture, Administration and third party bolt-ons to Apps

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Oracle is buying Sun

If you go to www.sun.com, you'll see the news that Oracle is buying 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.

As per wikipedia:

MySQL project's source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. On April 20th, 2009 Oracle Corp., which develops and sells the proprietary Oracle database, announced a deal to acquire Sun Microsystems.

This leads to an interesting question.

Sun has MySQL in its kitty. So, Oracle becomes owner of MySQL automatically. MySQL is an Oracle competitor. What is Oracle going to do with MySQL now ? I would presume that Oracle will support MySQL for one more version and then give an upgrade path from MySQL to Oracle for the MySQL customers. That is exactly what is being done with Peoplesoft, JD Edwards products which it acquired previously.

Let me know your thoughts through comments.

1 comment:

Tom said...

Peoplesoft and the apps are a different beast. I think Larry wants to win, and rather than kill off MySQL, he will use it to win.

How you might ask? By using MySQL not to compete with Oracle, but by using it to compete with PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server and IBM's DB2 product line. He will obviously put in an upgrade path for MySQL users looking to move up to the more powerful Oracle database that we all know and love.