Alex Hudson

So, the news is out that Sun are being bought by Oracle. Personally, I didn’t see that coming – didn’t see Oracle wanting to get into the hardware business, but maybe they will literally just chop those bits out and sell them off. Or maybe they do want to get into hardware.

This has some interesting implications for free software projects, though:

1. Java. Clearly Oracle are huge fans of Java and will want to continue the development. Will it stay entirely free software? I would imagine so – I don’t see what there is to gain by closing it up again. They pretty much have control of the development process thanks to Sun’s nature, and it’s not really like anyone is going to be forking it at this point. Probably not much danger here.
2. Solaris. Oracle’s DB software runs best on this platform, so again it’s likely to be continued – at least, in the short term. Longer term, I don’t see Oracle wanting to commit development resources to both Solaris and Linux, and this could be the key time to start to merge the two. Not necessarily great news for Solaris fans.
3. OpenOffice.org. Erk. Traditionally, Oracle have never been slow to stick it to Microsoft, so at first glance you could see this going great guns under Oracle as Larry tries to sink another Bill battleship. However, it doesn’t really look to me like this would fit terribly well into the Oracle product line-up, and Oracle have traditionally been a bit luke-warm about OOo – for example, their stuff doesn’t really integrate with it at all, whereas it does with Office, understandably. Indeed, search their blogs for talk of OOo and you find basically nothing – and Oracle aren’t even involved in the OASIS technical committee for ODF, which seems to me to betray a complete lack of interest in this area. OOo is potentially in trouble with this news.
4. VirtualBox. Not sure much will happen with this; I imagine it would continue but I don’t see Oracle being particularly interested in driving it hard. Probably it would merge with Oracle VM, although the latter is Xen-based. Both could continue with the idea of aligning them in the future, which would probably happen naturally.
5. MySQL. Erk again. Oracle already own the developers of InnoDB, and in fact the BDB developers too, but don’t expect to see MySQL being in a position to compete with Oracle’s database any time soon now. However, much of the interesting MySQL development now appears to be taking place in the community, so maybe this doesn’t make much difference.

Compared to IBM, on the face of it Oracle doesn’t offer a substantively different story with regards free software. They contribute when and where it makes sense for them, and not in ways which could possibly compete with their software. However, their software is also essentially all extremely high-end enterprise process stuff, which is generally relatively bespoke and requires armies of trained monkeys consultants to install. In that scenario, free software offers a much lower threat and doesn’t even come close to touching many of their markets – so it can perhaps feel a little more relaxed about its contributions. The Oracle OSS page is relatively happy reading,

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So, probably as I was posting my little blog piece yesterday on IBM taking over Sun, it seems that the IBM and Sun deal was falling apart – seemingly a quabble over the pricing, but I suspect a little more must have been to it than that.

Again, I’m reminded somewhat of Microsoft – when Yahoo! refused their take-over offer, which at $31 represented an extremely generous premium over their then ticker-price of about 62%, with a total deal worth $44.6 billions. Such a rich deal that even Microsoft would have been forced into debt (though doubtless they’re thanking themselves for walking away now – the timing would have been awful). When we look today, it’s around $13 and has been as low as $9. Shareholders were rightly steaming.

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If we’re to believe what we’re told in the press, sometime tomorrow – or perhaps later in the week – IBM and Sun will announce some kind of merger. I’m not sure anyone is under any illusion that this would effectively mean the end of Sun in time, being absorbed into IBM, although there is a lot of speculation over what would happen to various projects. Some, like NetBeans, seem pretty certainly done for, and the amount of life left in the SPARC architecture post-merger seems limited.

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