Oracle's surprising US$7.4 billion deal to purchase Sun this week gives Larry Ellison and crew a big stake in the hardware market as well as control over Java and other well-known open source technologies. But it also spells the end of an independent Sun Microsystems, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies.
Sun Microystems, which announced Sun Cloud in March, is taking a different tack than the Java clouds from Google, Aptana, and Stax because it wants to be more than just a Java provider. The new cloud will create new clusters of machines from any disk image, including some of the most popular versions of Linux and Solaris. Java, of course, will be found in most of these images, but you don't need to use it if you want to, say, run some emulated version of Cobol on a version of Puppy Linux. Unless Sun Cloud is interrupted by Oracle's acquisition, it should be available in a few months.
Oracle Corp.'s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. is raising questions among users on, well, just about every aspect of the deal.
Oracle has signed a deal to purchase Sun Microsystems for US$7.4 billion, plunging the enterprise software vendor into the hardware market and making Sun the latest company to be subsumed by the Silicon Valley giant.
Google's chief of open source believes an IBM acquisition of Sun could benefit the Java community, which has occasionally protested Sun's leadership role over the technology.
The founder of the popular Spring Framework for Java, Rod Johnson, said Thursday he does not anticipate much impact if a possible acquisition of Java founder Sun by Java advocate IBM comes to fruition.
IBM's reported interest in buying Sun Microsystems has Java and open-source community members expressing both hopes and worries about the implications of such a deal on the tools, applications and open-source projects they use every day.
In November 2006, Sun Microsystems began making all of its Java technology implementations open source, offering them under the GPL. More than two years later, reactions are mixed as to what exactly has been the impact of this momentous change.
A Sun Microsystems executive has provided a glimpse into the company's future plans for open sourcing JavaFX, its recently released technology for building RIAs (rich Internet applications) for the desktop, mobile devices and other platforms.
Everypoint is launching a mobile application platform Monday called Nemo, which is intended to give Java-based phones iPhone-like visual capabilities.
There is still a little time left, but it doesn't look like Apple iPhone users will see Adobe Systems and Sun Microsystems get Flash and Java up and running on Apple's handheld device by Christmas.
Sun patched at least 14 vulnerabilities in Java Tuesday as it updated the popular software to version 6.0, build 11.
In separate moves this week, Sun and Microsoft both proceeded with previously stated plans to boost their software development environments
After a nearly two-month delay, Sun announced this week availability of Java Platform Standard Edition 6 Update 10, which offers an improved startup for applications and applets and drag-and-drop capabilities for applets.
