Just a quick note to point everyone toward the blog work of Pelegri, who has posted a thorough tabulation of just what Oracle has done with all of the open source projects it inherited from Sun. Main take-away? Only VirtualBox remains unmolested, and from what I hear, it remains a very useful and popular free tool. Everything else? Not so much...

Last week Reuters published an extensive interview with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Ellison took the opportunity to lambast Sun's prior executive team, accusnig it is mismanagement, as well as making bad sales deals and poor management decisions. Ellison also took a shot at former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, saying, “Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.” Ouch. Ellison sure laid it out there, but here's what I think he really meant to say, 'We paid too much for this stinker, and i'm pissed off.'

For those of you in the Java world, my colleague Alex Handy has confirmed that there will be a JavaOne this year. Alex reports that it will be co-located this year with Oracle OpenWorld, which is scheduled for Sept. 19-23 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, home to JavaOne for many years now. Neither the OpenWorld Web site nor last year's JavaOne site make mention of this, and it will be interesting to see if the same members of the Java ecosystem support the event now that it appears Oracle will own Sun well before then.

To the strains of “Sun” music, the first keynote of Oracle Open World signified the first joint effort between Sun and Oracle. So much so, that the front rows at Larry's opening chat were packed with the likes of Scott McNealy, James Gosling and John Fowler. Before the night was over, it would be these three who talked the most, while Ellison simply kicked mud at IBM.

Blackhole Sun, by Soundgarden, wailed over the PA system as everyone gathered in for the real Sunday keynote.

Scott McNealy took the stage before Ellison, after a long montage of very candid moments from Scott's past at Sun. He began his speech by disparaging the lawyers who said he couldn't talk about what he really wanted to talk about. He then broke into one of his famous Top 10 lists. Mostly, he plied the audience with jokes at the expense of IBM, Apple and Linux.

McNealy said Sun had “kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, and we changed computing forever.” Engrave that on Sun's tombstone.

“We're not a capital equipment company with big fabs. We are all about innovation. You have to keep inventing. You have to keep creating. We did that with a lot of great people. We were one of the world's top R&D companies. Think about putting Oracle's large R&D budget with our R&D budget, and you have one of the biggest R&D budgets of all time,” said McNealy. He's right: Sun spent over a billion dollars a year on pure R&D. Its problem was that little, if any, of it yielded new revenues, let alone profits.

McNealy did eventually discuss the things we all wanted him to, though he only addressed each aspect of Sun's business through some quotes taken from Larry Ellison. Here's Larry in the room, 10 feet away, and McNealy is showing his words on the screens behind him.

Then, McNealy threw numbers at us: “There are over 216,000 SPARC servers out in the markrt today. Seven million processors shipped this decade. We went and asked Oracle what are their plans. They are going to spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now. What about Solaris? This is the No. 1 platform for Oracle. We're everywhere. We have OEM agreements with Dell, IBM, Fujitsu Seimens and HP. Don't take our word for it. Larry says we're going to spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now, so feel comfortable about that innovation,” said McNealy.

The most interesting intimation came next: “The one thing I hear a lot about is MySQL,” said McNealy, pointing out the biggest sticking point for the European Union's approval of the acquisition. “Is it going to get clobbered? I don't think so. Larry has said it doesn't compete with the Oracle database, which is true. This competes with Microsoft. This competes with Microsoft SQL Server. It doesn't compete with Oracle or DB2."

He then pointed out that Oracle had previously purchased Innobase, which builds one of the most popular transaction engines for MySQL.

“We shouldn't be worried,” said McNealy. “MySQL is GPL. If Oracle messes with it, the world will fork. There's not quite an issue here, we're not sure why it's held up, but we're working with the authorities to make sure they understand that.”

Java was another hot topic, and McNealy then brought James Gosling, vice president and the father of Java, on stage to discuss the future of the programming language and ecosystem. Long story short, the pair agreed that everything would be peachy for Java.

They bantered about how they now have a huge collective pool of programmers when Sun and Oracle mix their developer networks.

“I've never worked for a software company, so I am looking forward to it,” said Gosling.

“It won't be a software company after we get done with them,” replied McNealy.

In an attempt to prove this, John Fowler was then brought on stage to disucss a wildly powerful new flash storage array, and to discuss the future Oracle database systems they are building. Privately, Fowler remarked that Ellison had been keeping the Sun systems unit busy with new performance mandates.

Ellison then came on stage and went over, point by point, the ad that Oracle released in August, which promised monetary commitments to Sun's existing product lines. He added a new line to the previously four-point list, this one promising MySQL would also receive more money for development and research.

He then described a lengthy benchmark-related dispute between Oracle and IBM, culminating in an actual benchmark of the new Sun Oracle database server.

“One man's sunset is another man's sunrise,” said Ellison, before launching into a lengthy enumeration of the problems with IBM's servers. He even played one of IBM's own ads, which advocated the use of its computer systems to find new oil wells. “In the immortal words of Sarah Palin, 'drill baby, drill,'” said Ellison.

If any companies want to fund the development of their new database-driven application, Oracle will put up $10 million for anyone who can build an application that will not run twice as fast on Sun gear as it will on IBM gear. He then asked IBM to enter the contest for said money.

After that swaggering gauntlet throw, McNealy came back on stage and rehashed his starry eyed endorsement of the acquisition.

“I believe our shareholders made an exciting decision given the choices that they had. I am counting on Larry and the Oracle team to take very good care of a very important legacy of mine, and of the founders, and the employees and shareholders of Sun Microsystems,” said McNealy.

And with that, the beer and music began, and the new Sun/Oracle database system was forklifted off stage and put back in its crate.

At 10:05 a.m. Pacific time today, Sun Microsystems' fate was sealed. At that exact moment, shareholder voting closed, and the motion to accept the acquisition offer from Oracle was approved. There was little fanfare. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, and Scott McNealy, its chairman, were both absent. Schwartz was said to be sick. I can't help but think it was psychosomatic.

As the meeting began, a room full of old folks, suited investors and a healthy helping of Sun employees quietly took their seats and chatted politely amongst one another. When Craig Norris, vice president of corporate law and assistant secretary took the stage, the room went silent. As the brief call for votes took place, the room was dead quiet, save for the click click click of investor-relations women walking in their high heels from investor to investor, collecting ballots.

The whole event took less than 10 minutes. And when it was over, most folks quietly funneled out of the room, looking vaguely dejected.

There are many more bureaucratic hurdles for the acquisition and mountains of paperwork to be completed, to be sure. But make no mistake about it: This was the last real day of Sun's existence. The acquisition itself has already happened: It is backdated to April 19 and June 5. The vote today changed history, slightly, effectively giving Oracle power over Sun since this past spring.

Make no mistake about it: This was the end. Such an ending it was, as Schwartz andd McNealy couldn't bring themselves to show their faces. They know what is going to happen to this company, and I expect they both feel guilty and responsible for the result. How could you not feel responsible after presiding over almost 10 years of declining revenues and profits? There were moments of light along the way. But there is no denying this singular fact: While other technology companies are growing, Sun was barely keeping up, and usually shrinking.

But the shrinkage that is yet to come is far greater. Analysts are expecting a 33% cut in headcount at Sun, and I think that's conservative. Oracle expects to make more money on this deal than it did on its deals with BEA and PeopleSoft combined.

And that is why Schwartz isn't here, I believe. Because he genuinely loved Sun and its employees. And because he can't stand to look them in the eye knowing that most of them are about to lose their jobs.

Sun Microsystems is vanishing on Thursday. That's the day that shareholders will assemble in Santa Clara to vote on the acquisition by Oracle. I'm not expecting any turmoil or difficulty for the board of directors: Sun's stock has been sinking more reliably than Old Faithful in recent years. The company has tried everything it can think of to save shareholder value, but nothing has worked. Not even changing the ticker symbol to JAVA and consolidating shares to raise their prices. Sun says three are more milestones along the garden path, but the real symbolic end is this Thrusday.

It's sad, and yet, it's also a sign of hope. Thinking that Sun could soon be part of a larger whole is somewhat comforting, when you consider that the alternative was for this beheamouth of a company to lumber on down the road, dribbling useless products from almost every orifice. Even when Sun did create a worthwhile product, its sales people seemed to be some of the least effective in the business. There's certainly something to be said for the soft sell, but when we're dealing with large technology companies staffed with some of the most vicious and dedicated sales people in the world, soft sell doesn't usually work.

So it is with a heavy heart that I write this preliminary obituary for Sun. I've been covering them since 2005, and I must say, it's been interesting. During this time, the company struggled desperately to reinvent itself as an open-source software company and a storage powerhouse. But in every case, Sun couldn't move quickly enough, nor could it generate enough sincerity to convince the zealots.

After all, Sun practically invented cloud computing with its Sun Grid offering after the turn of the millennium. Of course, Sun is also the perfect example of a pioneer getting scalped. Kind of like DEVO.

So long Sun. I'd say we hardly knew you, but I think we actually knew you all too well.

A well-placed source has told me that Microsoft will be discussing interoperability at its JavaOne keynote on Thursday. Allegedly, the announcement will revolve around the Apache Stonehenge project, which Microsoft participates in. 

Stonehenge is made up  of companies and developers seeking to test the interoperability of Web standards implementations. Project contributors are expected to provide sample code for applications that work across platforms, and to work around differences in their respective standards implementations. Microsoft donated some code to the project in January.

The Stonehenge incubation project was announced in November 2008 at ApacheCon. Apache, Microsoft, Red Hat and WSO2 are listed as contributors. Word is that Oracle/Sun may be jumping into the mix. I'm not certain that is the full extent of the news or what Sun's participation will be. I look forward to learning more from Microsoft. More interoperability is good news for customers.

If you've ever wanted to watch a massive Internet forum battle as it unfolds, you must check out this story that just popped up on Slashdot. It points out that Sun has introduced a new garbage collector for Java 1.6.0--14, but it is demanding payment for use in production environments. That's probably a gross overstatement and over-simplification, but the article touched a nerve. Already there is a lot of debate in Slashdot as to the continued plans for openness in a post-Oracle world. This will surely be seen as an incendiary point for Java folk who have time to scream at each other online.

Best comment so far: 

by jlechem (613317)  on Friday May 29, @03:02PM (#28142063) Homepage Journal 

Seriously Java?

You used to be cool. 

Followed closely by:

by thomasdz (178114)  on Friday May 29, @03:05PM (#28142099) 

In this day and age of "green" businesses... 

Shouldn't we have "recycling collection" instead of "garbage collection"?

C'mon guys all those big 1MB and 4MB malloc()s are being shipped over to third world countries to be disassembled into bits and bytes. We should be recycling things HERE.... not throwing them away for Java to come and pick up. 

I feel for the folks at Sun Microsystems right now. This is the end of the road. Make no mistake about it. There will be blood. A lot of blood. While a surprising amount of Sun may just live on under the Oracle logo, there's no denying that a massive portion of the company will soon be out on the streets, looking for work.

Speculating on just what Oracle will keep is an enjoyable passtime, even though it is rather gruesome. There's a lot inside of Sun, and while we did this with the IBM rumors, there are a lot more questions about what exactly Oracle wants here. So let's begin.

First, there's MySQL. Obviously this is the jewel and, really, Oracle paid about US$7 billion out of the total $7.4 billion offer just for MySQL. Watch with horror, or glee, as MySQL slims down, sheds enterprise features and generally morphs into a Microsoft SQL killer. 

Next on the list is Java. I find it hard to believe that Java as a product can be monetized by Oracle, even with its obvious understanding of the corporate sales process. It's not easy to sell a language, especially when much of the language is made up of frameworks and APIs that have competing open-source alternatives. Java's database stuff is really first rate, so I don't expect Oracle to change that side much. As for the Web and Java EE, I'd imagine Oracle will leave them both alone after the Java EE 6 update arrives. I'd even imagine that Java EE 7 won't materialize at all. If the OpenJDK ever arrives, Oracle might just use it as a "We love open source" flagship and be happy not to have to worry about the JCP anymore.

But the real question around the OpenJDK is what happens to the governance committee? They're already far behind schedule. And with the OpenJDK still missing in action, it's unclear if it will even arrive at all. I don't see Oracle being the company to set up a long-term non-profit shepherding organization. I also don't see it wanting to run the JCP. If it were to do the right thing, Oracle would just spin the JCP off into a standards body-like form and give it the ability to run the OpenJDK as well. But I guarantee you that's not what's going to happen.

Remember last year when Oracle announced its first hardware offering? A big old database server rack that pushes SQL into the actual drive controller boards? Certainly an interesting idea, though one that seemingly admitted to the world that Oracle had hit a brick wall as far as concurrency and optimization were concerned. Still, it showed that Oracle was stepping into hardware. Now, I'd expect that Sun's entire hardware division will be molded in this image. The StorageTek stuff won't be touched, I'm sure, as that's the golden goose at Sun. It was a growing arm of the business and one that's undeniably bound for permanent growth. But the actual server-side of Sun's business is doomed. Watch Oracle cast off this area of the business after all of the existing hardware contracts are up. I'd imagine a few Department of Defense contracts may force Oracle to keep a few server areas open, but for the most part, I'd expect this whole section of Sun to be eviscerated slowly over time.

Sun Labs, unfortunately, will be the first thing to go. Oracle has no interest in building media storage boxes or in experimenting with intervals or music search software. On the bright side, this will spark a hiring feeding frenzy, as many of the bearded old geniuses at Sun will be reentering the jobs market. They'll just have to get used to the idea that they're no longer working somewhere that lets them experiment with whatever they want.

ZFS is a tricky one. Oracle's been touting BTRFS as the ZFS killer and has even managed to get the Linux Foundation to put it on the road map for the future. I have to wonder if Oracle will realize that ZFS is ready and BTFS is not, and will thus form around ZFS. Plus, ZFS has a ton of patent protections around it, and BTRFS is only just beginning to get that type of consideration. I'd actually imagine that Oracle will do the right thing here and jump on the ZFS bandwagon. Now, we just need to get some certified people in the field who understand that file system. As it stands now, anyone who uses ZFS in a commercial environment is beholden to Sun if something goes wrong, since they're the only ones who can fix it.

Cloud is another tough one to judge. Sun has been touting its cloud stuff for a few months now, though said stuff doesn't actually exist, yet. On the other side of the coin, Larry Ellison has made it known that cloud is a buzzword, not worthy of his attention. Does that mean the cloud project at Sun will be ignored and left to die? Probably.

Solaris? Who knows. I'd say kill it, but then Oracle might just want to base its servers on it. Nothing's more proprietary than having your own operating system, so Solaris may just end up being the database OS. 

Another thing to consider in all of this is the fact that Sun was purchased for a full billion dollars less than BEA. It's around $3 billion less than Peoplesoft. That's just remarkable.

Reports are widespread this morning that IBM's offer of US$9.55 per share for Sun Microsystems has been rejected by Sun's board, and that IBM has pulled it offer off the table. Sun's stock plummeted on the news, down to around $6 per share. It had been stagnant at around $4 per share before IBM's offer, and rose to $8.48 per share on Friday. The Wall Street Journal has the story about the $7 billion deal, which apparently is favored by CEO Jonathan Schwartz but opposed by chairman Scott McNealy.

Apparently, talks continue, but WSJ characterized them as confrontational—not surprising, given the companies' long history of dispute over Java licensing, NetBeans vs. Eclipse, the direction of the Java platform, and more. The paper also reports that there are no other apparent suitors for Sun, so this is IBM's deal. Meanwhile, Sun's board will have to answer to its shareholders if the deal falls through, considering IBM's offer was for more than double what the stock was trading at. So the intrigue and gamesmanship will continue. Both companies stand to gain with the deal, but only Sun would lose if it doesn't happen.