This is a weird and surreal morning. The previous week IBM attempted to buy Sun Microsystems (without get an arrangement) and we were speculating about the result of this. Now, surprised and shocked, the landscape looks totally different:
Last year Oracle bought Bea and Primavera, but those can’t be compared with this acquisition. Oracle gained a lot with this buy, at glance:
- A programming language: Java (and JavaFX)
- An application server: GlassFish
- An operating system: OpenSolaris
- An office suite: OpenOffice.org
- A virtualization software: Sun VirtualBox
- A database: MySQL
- An IDE: NetBeans
- And last but not least: Hardware! Servers, Storage, Desktop Workstations, Laptops
Some interesting questions:
- Oracle bought Bea last year and with this acquisition have 3 application servers: Oracle Application Server, Bea WebLogic and GlassFish. What is the future of the application servers? At the moment it is not clear. GlassFish should stay as free.
- What is going to happen with Java? Java is the core of the application servers and now Oracle possess 2 VM. JME is a new world quite bit far of the enterprise environment. It would be very interesting administrate a database from a mobile.
- What is the future of Exadata? Maybe run on Sun Solaris?
- What is going to happen with the cloud computing division of Sun? Definitely cloud computing is a field ready to be exploded, specially for databases and application servers.
- Does MySQL will stay free? Oracle is already the owner of InnoDB and Berkerley DB, database engines of MySQL. What about Oracle Express?
- Is OpenSolaris going to be integrated to Content Management solution, Oracle Fusion Middleware?
- NetBeans and JDeveloper. Personally I prefer NetBeans. Still the question is what to do with 2 similar products?
We need to wait for the next movements about this shocking acquisition. I hope all the open source doesn’t suffer a lost and keep the status quo. Everything is duplicated, except the hardware. Strange times in IT are coming.
