Oracle acquires Sun – and MySQL?
Why news like this comes when I am off-line (damn fried hard drives)??? 
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/.
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