OStatic

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 M?rten 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.

Online app stores have become quite a phenomenon, in and out of the open source arena. Apple's app store made it the largest digital download retailer of all, and Microsoft has an app store in the works to challenge Apple's. The Android Market is teeming with useful applications. However, as Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz details in this blog post, Sun's upcoming App Store for Java could become the biggest app store of all. Schwartz also says this about it: ...and this time, it's all about revenue and business opportunity. Does Oracle have anything to do with this?

When Oracle announced its intent to acquire Sun Microsystems, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Java is the single most important software we've ever acquired. Since he made that statement, though, there has been a lot of second-guessing regarding Oracle's true intent with Java. The DevXtra Editor's Blog, for example, suggests that ?as Oracle seeks to get a $1.5 billion contribution to its profits in its first year with Sun, Oracle may start pulling staff and funding from Sun Java projects that don't immediately contribute to the bottom line or at least show promise of contributing in the near future. While that's possible, I'm more inclined to believe that Oracle will extend much of what Sun has done with Java, and one big reason for that is that Java makes Oracle an important player in the fast-growing market for mobile technology.

According to the New York Times and Bloomberg, IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems is imminent. The official announcement and terms of the acquisition will most likely be made public on Monday, but a late in the day announcement hasn't been ruled out. It's estimated that the purchase will cost IBM nearly $7 billion.

There's been much speculation and discussion both here at OStatic and elsewhere about what this means for Sun and its open source projects.