This week, it became clear that Oracle buys Sun. Personally, I think this is much better deal than if the IBM-deal had gone through. Just by looking at the corporate culture, it must be a hell of a lot easier to merge Oracle and Sun than trying to squeeze the laid-back-California-minds of Sun into the business suits of The Big Blue.
Oracle has a great history of software acquisitions and Java is so important for Oracle that it is probably in the best of hands.
However, to my knowledge, Oracle has hardly any Open Source suites they maintain. Their “Unbreakable Linux” is just a rip-off of RedHat. I am afraid that they’ll try to lock java down some way or another, and that we’ll be running on Dalvik (or something similar) in the future. I would (believe it or not) have slept much better if google had stepped up as a buyer.
Lets hope I’m mistaken 🙂
You have a point there, but thanks to OpenJDK I do not think there will be a problem with Java itself. I am more concerned about the future of NetBeans since Oracle has chosen Eclipse as their development platform.
If you ask me: NetBeans rocks! Eclipse sucks!
I agree. But what about JDeveloper? I thought that was Oracles main (free, but not Open Source) development platform.
I can’t really see Oracle wanting anything else from Sun than the hardware, Solaris (with ZFS, wonder how ZFS and BTRFS compare?) and Java. Now Oracle can sell the entire box, including hardware, Operating System DB Server, Java server, etc.
Unless netbeans is deemed much better suited for the future needs than JDeveloper, I believe Oracle will stop maintaining it. And the same goes for glassfish and mysql as well. I do however believe that the Sun VM is better than JRockit (at least it has a better name).