Re: OraSUN MicroDatabases

Dion <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.org.user-groups.slug.chat
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Andrew Sinclair wrote:
> Oracle (-1.3%) will buy Sun Microsystems (+36.8%) for US7.4B, $9.50 per
> share. SUn rejected IBM (-0.8%) offer of 7B earlier.
>
> Was it about the money, or do they really just want to avoid being
> humiliated by being brought out by the competition? Save Sun, loose MySQL.
>
> Not that it is my place to speak about such things, IBM would have been
> an ideal union. They both build the same stuff and both could have
> capitalised on consolidation / efficiency.
>
> Someone will likely prove me wrong; who's first?
>   
True, they build a lot of the same stuff, but that to me would have been 
a detraction.
Having two OS's (AIX and Solaris), two risc architectures (Power v 
Sparc) and two databases (DB2 and MySQL) leaves a lot of support and 
engineering overlap. In fact, IBM buying Sun would have been a bit HP 
buys Compaq kind thing.

However Oracle buying Sun, seems to make quite a bit of sense.

Oracle gets java which they use a lot.
Oracle gets MySQL which offers some options:
1. (is killed by neglect) reduces their competition,
2. or if they're smart, gets rebranded as Oracle-Web database and 
becomes their low budget product. World economic  crisis and all that, 
but still pulls in support contracts and so forth.
3. They get some great database talent to augment their engineering team.

Oracle also gets Solaris. This gives them complete control of the 
software stack for Oracle on Solaris on Sparc. This gives them complete 
optimisation control over the whole stack for high end customers and 
benchmarketing. It also gives them a complete competitive stack against 
IBM (DB2 on AIX on Power) at the higher end.

This seems a far more strategic advantage to Oracle than IBM.

I'm curious as to what happens to MySQL, it was open source right? So if 
it is taken closed source / proprietary, can it be forked? Would anyone 
want to? I would think with the large deployment of LAMP stacks out 
there, there would be great interest in an open source MySQL.

just my 2 cents.

D.

-- 
"Never ascribe to malice that which may adequately be explained by incompetence." - Napoleon Bonaparte

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