Oracle's and Sun's Top Guns Reassure the Sun Faithful

The European Commission's months-long deliberation over Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems is still ongoing, causing many observers to conclude that Europe's pokey investigation is hurting Sun. There are signs, for example, that MySQL customers are jumping ship for Sun competitors, such as IBM. Former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos has written Neelie Kroes, Europe's Competition Commissioner, a letter saying as much. While Oracle itself has been relatively quiet about the delay, Sunday night at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, both Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy addressed an audience and vowed together that Sun's technologies will continue and improve under Oracle.

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference this week, much talk of Java is expected. Oracle's Ellison said, when announcing the proposed acquisition of Sun, that Java would be Oracle's most important software acquisition ever. Ellison also made several comments on Sunday night that imply that he remains very committed to Sun's hardware business, and aims to offer servers that come complete with pre-loaded software stacks. According to InfoWorld, Ellison has offered $10 million to anyone who can run database applications faster than he says they'll run on Sun's hardware. 

Some of the best news on the open source front appears to be that Oracle will nurture MySQL. We've said before that MySQL could become an open source on-ramp for Oracle's proprietary databases. MySQL founder Monty Widenius has speculated that Oracle could possibly kill MySQL. As Oracle OpenWorld starts, though, there are good reasons to believe that Oracle will increase its invesment in MySQL. After many bumps in the road for Oracle's proposed acquisition, that would be good to see.