The Oracle Sun Purchase

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Oracle's purchase of Sun went on hold while the DoJ continues its review. Last Friday, Daniel Wall, a lawyer at Latham & Watkin representing Oracle, said that “we were almost able to resolve everything before the Second Request deadline. All that’s left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed that is never going to get in the way of the deal.” So, what does Oracle owning Java mean to technology companies? The answer depends on if your perspective.

First from an economic point of view. Oracle is making money in the recession. That equates to job growth. That of course is a good thing.

First from a consumer point of view, it means Oracle any where. Not just mainframes, and server farms, and website databases, but all the way down to your cell phone. Combined with the recent acquisitions such of BEA (J2EE) and Virtual Iron (Xen based virtualization). That provides a monopolistic view down to the core library device level for that the DoJ should be taking a good long look at, the only real large scale direct Java competitor will be IBM. Other competitors that lose significant market share are Microsoft, SAP, and Cisco Systems.

Java in general may take a big short term boost forward as IBM and Oracle go head to head.

Open source in general, may take a hit. Like IBM, Oracle will have little interest or need for open source middleware or service oriented architecture (SOA) components. Further, given Oracle's early and deep interest in Eclipse and OSGi, the Java tools will stay free and open. The tussle for influence between Oracle and IBM in Eclipse and the Java Community Process (JCP) will be great fun to watch in coming years. Or then again, maybe Oracle will adopt Netbeans and start a wave plugins for supporting Oracle. But Oracle historically is not hug supporting driver in Open Source.

OpenJDK would take a big boost, except that it is a GNU license. Dealing with GNU license is always an issue, but will save as a seperate blog topic, other than to point out that java license issues is where the DoJ got stuck.

Well if you have to make a short term decision on what path to take for your java based products, things just got a lot tougher for the next 6 months till it becomes more apparent what Oracle does with the Sun product line.