Oracle buys Sun (not THE Sun)!

At one point it was Apple, then IBM was supposed to be it more than a couple of times, well the buyer of Sun ends up being Oracle and I think this is a good thing.

First of all (and related to that panel from Watchmen), I was getting a little anxious about all this merger talk and wished it was done with. It’s difficult for a company to be under merger talks for too long, and as a user of a lot of Sun technologies it makes you nervous. So I’m glad this seems to be over with.

Anyways, I think ithis is better than the IBM-Sun (BlueSun) merger because it just didn’t make much sense for IBM to buy Sun. They overlap too much on hardware and software, and I was afraid IBM was just going to buy it to finally kill off a hardware competitor and just take ownership of Java. With Oracle, you still have IBM as a strong Java player and Sun actually brings a lot of new things to Oracle.

Yes, there are overlaps, but there’s a bigger chance for projects like Netbeans to survive under this environment than in a company with IBM which would rather keep putting money on Eclipse.

What I wonder about is these products:

JavaFX - Does Oracle really have the stomach to compete in the client space? I’m hoping they have the guts to keep at it and not settle only on the server side. Client side Java is still important, and makes sense when you want to have very well integrated tools that go from end to end. As for mobile, who knows, maybe Oracle wants to expand.

Glassfish - Can Glassfish survive in a company that uses WebLogic. I think so, at least initially or for the short term. Glassfish can still be used as the “JEE” reference implementation, so there is a chance Glassfish can still continue being a supported project.

MySQL - I’m not really sure Oracle wil want to keep spending money on this for obvious reasons. But who knows. Anyways, MySQL is open source so it can’t really be killed in a sense.

So I’m glad the speculation is over, good luck to all the Sun employees during this transition. This year should prove to be a very interesting and surreal JavaOne!