From the Editors: Nervous about Sun's technologies

By SD Times News Team

May 15, 2009 —

As of late April, it appears that Sun Microsystems will be acquired by Oracle. What would this mean?

Oracle is clearly a big winner, as are Sun’s shareholders. Sun owns a great deal of valuable intellectual property, the most visible of which is Java and the Java Community Process. This technology will cement Oracle’s leadership in the application server market, thanks to its control over key industry specifications like the Java language, the enterprise Java EE platform and the very important Java ME platform.

Historically, Sun has been a relatively benign keeper of the Java specifications. Yes, SD Times has complained about Sun’s dominance of the Java Community Process and the Java ME/Java EE licensing terms. Expect Oracle to exercise that control. However, overall, Sun has done a good job.

We are concerned about how Oracle will behave with the ownership of a specification relied upon by competitors like IBM and Red Hat, and a large open-source community, as well as myriad customers.

Oracle does not have a tradition of playing well with others. The company is not known for embracing competitors or for collaborating with them to create markets. Instead, Oracle is known for playing hardball to dominate its markets. When everyone who works at the JCP Program Office has an Oracle business card, we worry that the JCP will turn into an R&D facility for Oracle’s own products.

Another danger point is MySQL. If Oracle keeps MySQL, expect it to be at the bottom of the heap as a lead-in for upgrades to Oracle's big-gun database products. If Oracle decides not to kill or spin off MySQL, that’s going to mean disruption for the community.

On the other hand, customers that pay for Sun's enterprise software may be happy with Oracle’s ownership. Oracle will take good care of them, though naturally there will be some product consolidation and migration. Software customers may like being serviced by a company that's focused on software, not hardware.

However, customers that use open-source or community-supported versions of Sun's software may not fare as well. Oracle is not in the free software business, except when that free software supports its paid software business. Don't expect Oracle to embrace Sun’s open-source business model.

Corks should be popping at the Eclipse Foundation. Oracle is heavily invested in Eclipse and would be unlikely to continue investing in NetBeans. The community probably couldn’t thrive if Oracle set it free.

Sun controlled a lot of popular technologies. Sure, it couldn’t make money at them, which is why the company was ripe for acquisition. Under Oracle, expect a lot of disruption.

Out in the open

The use of open source in enterprise development shops is on the upswing, based on recent research tracking that trend. And why not? Reusing something that’s already been created is easier and cheaper than building it time and again. It’s clear, too, that a developer’s time can be better spent working on the kinds of projects that provide real value to an organization, rather than writing lower-level functionality that already exists somewhere in the world.

Developers have known this for a while. Problems only cropped up in places where there was no policy in place for incorporating open-source software, and developers brought it into the organization unbeknownst to their managers. (That behavior simply is wrong; a developer has no place putting his employer at risk of litigation or loss of business by grabbing software that might have licensing restrictions.)

The economic benefits of open source are clear, but there are landmines there. Before your organization rushes out to buy governance software or IP protection software, make sure there first is a clear policy in place for the adoption of open source. First rules, then tools.

Related Search Term(s): Java, Oracle, Sun

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From the Editors: Java’s future as an open platform Will Oracle maintain Java as an open platform at all? Or will competitors come up with their own version of Java?

Oracle-Sun deal causes speculation, worry The future of the Java Community Process, and the MySQL database, are two main concerns as Oracle stands poised to acquire the shepherd of Java. Rod Johnson, creator of SpringSource, believes that Java will be able to survive Oracle's control over it.

Oracle completes Sun acquisition As Oracle maps out its future, greater attention is paid to PostgreSQL, which is considered a counterbalance to MySQL

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