You should have probably already heard it: Oracle decided to acquire Sun Microsystem for $7.4 Billion.

The news become public yesterday morning as a surprise since it was IBM that was originally trying to acquire Sun and decided to back off just few days ago.

Oracle is planning to pay $9.50 per share for Sun’s common stock, but the deal is subject to closing conditions and the approval by the anti-trust commission.

What does this acquisition means to the IT market? So far Oracle mainly focused on its famous database and any software and hardware related to it, but with Sun Oracle will now have a broader weight on the whole corporate market: from servers to storage, passing by software.

On the last point, software, Oracle will probably work hard to integrate Sun products like Java and OpenOffice to its products line and if it succeeds there would be a win-win situation for both Oracle itself and the Java and OpenOffice communities.

Sound good, right? Well … there is a big question mark that is keeping the IT industry with bated breath: MySQL.

MySQL is the most famous (and installed) competitor of the Oracle own database and it was acquired just a little bit more than a year ago, on February 26th 2008, by Sun Microsystem. Of course many segments of the market are concerned that with this acqusition, MySQL’s future is in peril as they find unlikely that Oracle will support two separate (and so far competitive) database systems.

In theory MySQL’s death is not granted since it is released under the GPL licence and that allows any group of willingful programmers to pick up the source code and create a fork product; there is one “simple” issue to that: if Oracle indeed decide to “neglect” MySQL in favor to its own database system, is it possible to rise up a team of skillful developers fast enougth to hold up the market expectations?.

What do you think?

Links
Oracle announcement: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018363;
Sun announcement: http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/.

Google releases Android code as Open Source

With the release, Google kept it promise since it was announced on the “Android’s roadmap” for the fourth quarter.

According to the download page the source is approximately 2.1GB in size and it need 6GB more to complete the build. At the moment only Linux and Mac OS systems are officially able to compile the code while Windows is not currently supported.

Dave Bort, a Google software engineer and author of the announcement, stated that: “Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community.  All of the work that we’ve poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project”.

The announcement come a day before the the scheduled sale of the first Android-based smartphone: the T-Mobile G1 phone.

Links
Google Android: http://www.android.com/;
Google’s announcement: http://source.android.com/posts/opensource;
Google Android source code download: http://source.android.com/download.

A so big hit that the download servers had serious problems to stay up and still now the site is displaying a simple HTML page with the download links.

As typical for a major upgrade, OpenOffice 3.0 include a myriad of changes from the previous version. One of them for example is the support of the new Microsoft’s Office 2007 file format (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx) even if only in read mode for the moment.

Other changes include an overhauled equation editor, a better mail merge wizard, improved label templates, and OpenOffice.org Calc support to 1,024 columns.

Another big difference is that now OpenOffice supports Mac OS natively and therefore it no longer need to have X11, the Unix windowing environment, installed; this feature has been possible thank to Sun Microsystems that assigned company-paid engineers to the OpenOffice.org project.

With OpenOffice 3, the suite continue its competition battle versus Microsoft Office as it offers almost any feature that Office does, but for much less dollars … all less dollars since it is totally free for both personal and business use.

Links
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/

This Release Candidate code-freezes many of the new features present on the third version of OpenOffice.org; for example it includes:

• updated ODF format support with the inclusion of the features of the upcoming version 1.2 of the ISO standard;
• support of the new Microsoft Office XML format included in Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X;
• Native support for Mac OS X without the need for X11;
• Ability to share spreadsheets with multiple users.

The official release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is expected by the end of the month.

Links

OpenOffice website: http://www.openoffice.org/;

OpenOffice 3.0 RC1 download: http://download.openoffice.org/680/;

OpenOffice 3.0 RC1 Release Notes: http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.0.0rc1.html.