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If you would have asked me this question a few years ago I probably wouldn’t have given it much thought. Sun still stood for commercial unix, RISC workstations and servers, and Java. Sure, they were making feints at becoming linux-oriented, but whether it ended up being Solaris or linux, they would have been the same old Sun.
In 2009 the picture is quite different. The giants of commercial unix have gone away for the most part; gone altogether, restructured into something unrecognizable, or picked up their chips and left the table. DEC was first, acquired by Compaq and then absorbed by HP. HP has abandoned their own unix os and hardware. IBM still has some uber dollar Power PC based AIX servers and towers, but you can almost hear the clock ticking there. SGI no longer develops MIPS hardware or it’s own flavor of unix. SCO? heh heh heh.
Sun, however, has stuck around. While their desktop products have all gone Intel, their servers are still available in Sparc and Intel varieties. Solaris is the one commercial unix that is still going strong, with added interest created by OpenSolaris, an open source version created to spark developer and user interest.
However, 2009 sees Sun not just as a os and hardware company. Sun isn’t just about Java.
As an end user why do you care about Sun?
Sun has become the largest corporate contributor to open source software projects. How many of you are running OpenOffice.org? In 2009, OpenOffice.org is not just a free alternative to MSOffice that runs on many platforms, it’s a rapidly maturing productivity platform that very well could replace MSOffice as the de facto standard.
How about VirtualBox? Not as full featured as VMWare, but that’s the beauty of open source. It will be. Not everyone wants to spend $80 to run a Windows app or two, or play with an alternative os without making a hardware commitment. VirtualBox doesn’t support some of the nifty features that VMWare does, but being open source one can only assume that it will, eventually. I’ve been using VirtualBox for the last week, and while I miss a couple of VMWare features, I like supporting free software.
OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox are free. Even if Oracle decides to kill them off, all that needs to happen is a group of people get together and fork the code, and voila, we’re back to where we were pre-Oracle. Besides, neither project is the sort of thing that makes anyone much, if any, money. The worst that happens is that Oracle has no interest in either, in which case we could see a name change (or not) and the projects pick up where they left off.
MySQL is another story. MySQL is a open source database that has 6+ million installations. Are you a blogger? Do you work with internet content of any kind, whether it’s site design, content generation or ecommerce? Guess what? Your content management system uses MySQL.
Ohmigosh, Oracle is a database company and they just bought the free database that everyone uses. Surely they want to kill MySQL and sell us a really expensive replacement database. The sky is falling!
Not.
Like I said before in regards to OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox, there’s no worry about this with open source software. Even if Oracle wanted to squash MySQL, which is unlikely, all that would need to happen is a group of enterprising software developers fork the code and voila, we have MySQL with a new name. Also, MySQL isn’t the only database software out there, and your web software could all be patched to use say, PostgreSQL.
Again, since MySQL is open source software, the only money to be made from it is from selling support. Sun made $200+ million off MySQL support in 2008, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s not enough to make or break Oracle. It’s more likely that Oracle is merely interested in adding that revenue from the low end of the database market to their bottom line.
The likely outcome of all this is that:
- Oracle becomes more like IBM and Apple with the acquisition of it’s own os and hardware. I don’t look for Oracle to dump Sun’s hardware business. Instead they will dump money into Solaris and Sparc, which is the leading platform for Oracle Database. Perhaps Oracle becomes the surviving unix software and hardware vendor after the dust clears. We’ll see, it hasn’t worked out so well for IBM and HP
- Oracle increases Java licensing fees and makes a lot of money off Java
- Oracle adds MySQL support revenue for a small, but not inconsequential, bump to it’s bottom line
- Oracle figures out a way to turn a buck off OpenOffice and VirtualBox, or expect to see both dumped
- Oracle streamlines existing operations at Sun. Hope you all have your resumes up to date, just in case
So, don’t freak out about Oracle, a company who traditionally squeezes every last penny out of it’s acquisitions, buying Sun. Even if it tried to undermine the quality open source projects under Sun, they would simply fork and have different names. Any projects that it does deem to dump will find a home elsewhere and things will proceed relatively unchanged. That’s the beauty of open source software.
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