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Oracle + Sun: Good News or Bad News for Open Source?
April 20, 2009
Posted by: Glyn Moody
The surprise announcement that Oracle is to buy Sun for $7.4 billion will provide fodder for news items, features, analyses, blog posts and tweets for many weeks to come as details begin to emerge and are pored over endlessly. But it's probably worth a very quick first attempt to delineate who are likely to be the winners and losers in this very interesting fusion.
I think one loser, at least in terms of perception, will be IBM. The long and painful discussions between Sun and IBM were becoming as tedious as those between Yahoo and Microsoft, and Oracle's nippy action makes it look as if IBM wasn't fast or smart enough to close the deal.
As well as perception, there's also the fact that it's bad news for IBM because putting Oracle and Sun together increases the clout of the former considerably in the corporate sector, and creates a much more powerful rival to Big Blue there.
That's actually quite good news for open source, though, because swallowing up Sun effectively turns a large chunk of the new, enlarged Oracle into an open source company.
If Sun's open source technologies aren't adopted by the enterprise, Oracle's main market, then the purchase will have been largely a waste of money. So through this move open source effectively gains an even bigger champion in business than it had in Sun.
The downside is that Oracle's feelings about open source – and hence its advocacy - are probably more ambiguous than Sun's. In particular, it seems to have very little truck with the more idealistic leanings of the free software side of things. Pragmatists might rejoice at that, but it does mean that Oracle will be aiming to use open source as a tool rather than see itself as an evangelist with a mission to convert.
That can be seen from the press release, where the “two key Sun software assets” that are named are Java and Solaris.
Java is relatively unproblematic, since Sun always managed it tightly, and Oracle will doubtless carry on in that vein. Thanks to Sun's decision to release it under the GNU GPL, people are pretty free to do with it as they wish. Oracle's backing should ensure that Java becomes even more important in enterprise settings – and that could be a big boost for open source in quite an unexpected way.
For a little while, I have detected a feeling that Java is a little passé, what with all the exciting new alternatives now available. With Oracle putting its weight behind the language, and able to push it in very different contexts from Sun, I think we will see something of a renaissance for Java. That's not only good news for Java itself, but also for all the open source projects that depend upon it – including Google's Android platform.
With more people programming in Java, I suspect that there will be more corporate uptake of the Android platform, whose programming environment suddenly begins to look more relevant to businesses – more so than that of the iPhone, perhaps.
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About the author
Glyn Moody Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).
Comments received
Monkey Crimes said on Monday, 20 April 2009
The fact that MySQL was not mentioned at all during the conference call or in any announcements seems to suggest that you are right. Although Oracle could make money from MySQL, would it be enough to save it?
Glyn Moody said on Monday, 20 April 2009
Yup, that's the big question...
billyliar66 said on Monday, 20 April 2009
Oracle might become a Linux player with this. Sun Solaris is essentially worthless.
Glyn Moody said on Monday, 20 April 2009
Why do you say Solaris is "essentially worthless"?
John Gay said on Tuesday, 21 April 2009
I'm most concerned to know what will happen to UltraSparc/OpenSparc??? Mainly because no one has mentioned it at all.
Abu Rashid said on Wednesday, 22 April 2009
MySQL the "Linux of databases"? I don't think so. It's certainly open source, but it's always been controlled by a company, not the community. Postgresql (even though it's BSD license, not GPL) is probably more akin to the "Linux of databases".
Glyn Moody said on Wednesday, 22 April 2009
@Abu: you're right in terms of licensing, but I was thinking primarily in terms of influence - as in the LAMP stack.
Toby Haynes said on Wednesday, 22 April 2009
I hardly think that Java is passé - more that it is now a mature platform. Looking around, the number of Java developments is huge, particularly on servers. So much business is run on top of Java, it's hard to understate its importance.
Now I'd like to see Oracle/Sun come to a better JCP, allowing Apache Harmony to certify properly. It'll be interesting to watch how Oracle chooses to position Java in the community.
Glyn Moody said on Wednesday, 22 April 2009
@Toby: I don't deny it's important, but so are many other things/people in their middle age. It's just that middle age ain't quite so exciting as youth...
Andrei Cimpoca said on Wednesday, 22 April 2009
The outcome of this will be the crippling of the open source community in my opinion. If MySQL brings money but they scrap it anyway then customers would have no choice but to go with oracle. I always favored postgres over MySQL because of licensing, company interests and especially quality. Useless to say people go for the lousiest solution when it comes to everything. Hitler and Microsoft are very relevant examples. What they do is they stop innovation in it's tracks. What would the world be if instead of money and ambition we had intelligence and devotion and instead of competitiveness we had communities! They should be called inquisitors not evangelists. It is more accurate.