I know that I can’t be the only one out there who at once finds the news that Oracle is buying Sun both amazingly humorous and disconcerting. Not too long ago the leaders of both spared quite regularly (Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison); now nothing but a tech love fest. As many analysts have stated, this could be good for the Sun/Solaris platform, at least for a few years in that Sun was on the downslide financially. It also provides Oracle with a hardware arm and could support more advanced system tuning.
In my mind, however, I wonder whither Java and MySQL. Larry Dignan in the ZDNet article noted above makes his thoughts clear, “MySQL is MyToast.” Ellison is not likely to suffer an open source option nip Oracle profits around the edges. So, is the MySQL community strong enough to rest further development and support from Oracle? Can they legally?
Java’s another question entirely. Oracle could employ and support it as a tool in developing middleware, but again there is this nasty little issue of being freely available, not a common practice for Oracle.
We shall see.
