Tuesday, 21 Apr, 2009

Sun has set

Sun has set

This is upcoming and shocking news for the UNIX-world, DB-World, Virtualization-World, Enterprise-software-world, developers-world ...

Essentially, the future IT world, is going to be influenced by the choices made by another big software giant like ORACLE, today a SUN-illuminated ORACLE.

The April 20 2009 ORACLE-SUN acquisition is probably going to change the IT World, this is almost a matter of fact, since now ORACLE is becoming the de-facto biggest sponsor and contributor of the open source world.

Till now, ORACLE pursued the "Microsoft way": cleansing and purging every possible competitor with big bucks (and it seems they largely succeeded with their former acquisitions).

At present, ORACLE made a new demonstration: successful open source can be "bought", even if it is a direct competitor (probably because successful open source moves a lot of money?).

I don't feel comfortable to argue about the future, but it's just natural to think about the LAMP-stack, and if it is going to become LAPP-stack in the future!

But I suspect ORACLE plans aren't to kill mySQL, maybe they'll relegate it to a "developers experiment", with an "enterprise version", who knows?

ORACLE seem actively involved in the open source, with btrfs filesystem development and previous contributions to ext4, but here I also see two possibly-related projects: ZFS and btrfs. What road will ORACLE choose to pursue?

Another interesting overlapping project is virtualization: ORACLE pushes XEN, and SUN have its own XEN setup on Solaris, so they'll probably merge the two, but what will happen to virtualbox is not known (SUN acquired innotek and made its own Xvm Virtualbox virtualization solution for the desktop and the workstations): another important choice for ORACLE here.

Another interesting and debatable argument is licenses: it seems now a matter of GPL vs CDDL, and probably ORACLE will have to make some important choices even on this field.

Other than that, my personal concern is non-existant, since I have no direct nor indirect and am in no way related to any (I'm just a generic GNU/Linux power user): for me they're two big companies merging, one heavily hit by the downturn and the other still sane, so, for me, this merger is probably a good thing; also, maybe the one makin'money will teach the other how to better monetize, "whatever the costs".

P.S.: I will still sporadically read Jonathan Schwartz's blog, given the new situation.

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