nice try to link your news to the big story of the day...

but none of the public statements made by top oracle execs mentions open source. Larry mentioned Java and Solaris, which you could argue are open... but he didnt mention the other properties. All Safra Catz could talk about was how to make the Sun Hardware business profitable.

The driver behind this buy is not open source. Get over yourselves.

My 2 cents,
Miko

Being gobbled up by a closed-source company that sells commercial software is validation of open source??? Shuttleworth just keeps getting more and more crazy. I think his Ubuntu hobby project has sort of nudged him over the edge.

Miko sounds like a guy determined to find something negative to say. I wonder why that is.

Sun's hardware is not its top asset. Its assets are software, and all of them I can name offhand -- Solaris, Java, OpenOffice, MySQL -- are Open Source. Two of them were mentioned. But, oh no, this is not about Open Source. How could anybody think that.

Larry doesn't like BillG. MS Office is a cash cow. If OpenOffice gets a boost, Larry could use it to take some fat off that cow.

I think we can discount any rude remarks about Mark Shuttleworth (shame about his initials) as nobody likes anyone who has been so successful, especially in the UK and the EU. And especially at such a young age (nearly 600 million at 24).

I must admit, when I first heard the news I thought Larry would work along two lines. One of which will be beneficial to the open source community and one that won't.

Open Office: I think Larry will plough a lot of resources into this and keep it Open Source. I think version 4 will be a very exciting product to all of us as this man certainly wants to knock Microsoft.

I don't think he will move the other software over from Open Source, but I reckon he will stop all help towards these products. Look for him to produce commercial items from them which is will capitalise upon. The Open Source community will still have the old source code, but will certainly not be given any additions to it in the future.

Ampers

Let me see, the president of GM buys a BMW ....

If owning these technologies is of no benefit, I would love to listen while Larry explains the missing $7B to the Oracle board and shareholders.

"I did it to confuse Steve Ballmer and piss off IBM"?

I think Mark's head is still in space. Oracle bought Sun for Java. Oracle has already stated that Sun's software stream isn't great and that they'd open-source projects they're not interested in, like MySQL, Glassfish, Solaris, etc. Oracle's got no solid reputation as a hardware vendor and Sun hasn't been doing well selling hardware, so that will probably be sold off or closed. If Oracle were really interested in continuing with open source and hardware, why would they mention a possible layoff of up to 10k employees? How can you cut out 1/3 of the brain-trust and still expect to provide full support? Existing Sun customers would have stood a better chance of survival if IBM had acquired Sun. Obviously Scott McNealy is nothing more than another Wall Street banker interested in filling his pockets and screwing his employees.

every good Capitalist knows that Linux/Open Source is Communist. that is why we must continue to use proprietary code. thank you.

and now i must go back to my ocean front beach house in wyoming and sip tea.

It's all about a stack that competes with Microsoft.

Solaris does scale from Sparc big iron, through the Intel/AMDSME server, right onto the desktop.
Sun have storage technologies.
Solaris interoperates with Linux.

Business, including governments, is who buys a stack.
Open interoperability and document standards are what business wants.

MySQL, Java, OpenOffice, & VirtualBox, use open standards and run on Windows as well as anything Linux runs on including Google phones, ARM & Atom netbooks, and IBM super computers.

Sun have interoperability agreements with Microsoft.

Oracle ties everything together for clients with this deal, especially those in these harsh economics who would like to reduce licensing charges and increase functionality and productivity without changing to new hardware on the desktop.

Microsoft needs to promote new hardware buys to sell new software.

It's a win win for businesses. It's a win win for Linux. Its a win win for Oracle. Its a lose lose for Microsoft. Its a loose win for IBM.

I saw Head Editor of CIO magazine being interviewed on CNBC saying that most probably Oracle wants to stop one threat to its database hegemony: MySQL.

Others are just icing on the cake.

If any of you who said that Oracle didn't mention any of the products other than Java, then you obviously didn't read the FAQ that Oracle created regarding this purchase, which along with the information regarding Solaris and Java specifically answers the question of MySQL. I quote:

"What does Oracle plan to do with MySQL?"

"MySQL will be an addition to Oracle's existing suite of database products, which already includes Oracle Database 11g, TimesTen, Berleley DB open source database, and the open source transactional storage engine, InnoDB."

When Oracle bought Berkeley DB and InnoDB, people made a lot of noise about how they were dead as open source products, but both are still developed and available. In addition, Oracle is a contributor to the Linux kernel. So while they are a proprietary software company, they are also involved with open source and have been for a very long time.