On Monday April 20, 2009, Oracle announced that it had purchased Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. Highlights of the sale include the Java technology and the Solaris OS.
A History Lesson
We all know that the Java technology was created by Sun Microsystems. A lot of people don’t realize, however, that Java has been out of Sun’s direct control for the majority of its life. In 1998, just three years after its birth, Java was handed over to the newly formed Java Community Process (JCP), which was tasked with monitoring and directing the growth of Java. It seems that Sun quickly realized that Java was bigger than itself, and so they gave the community a chance to contribute.
This was all well and good, but of course Sun was still the only major stakeholder in the technology. It seems natural, then, that they would assume the role of overseer by way of the JCP Program Management Office, which is internal to Sun. In the early days, this was a good thing – a fledgling technology needs someone with a firm hand and a strong vision in order to help it realize its potential. Lately, however, some of the more prominent members of the JCP have been speaking up.
More and more, the feeling seems to be that Sun’s firm hand and strong vision is now inhibiting the growth of Java: what Sun wants, Sun gets; what Sun doesn’t want, doesn’t happen. Java’s growth caused other companies to take notice, and these other companies eventually became major stakeholders themselves. Limiting Java’s capabilities to what Sun wants, then, doesn’t seem to serve the greater good at this point.
What does this mean for me?
Java will, of course, survive the sale – it’s too firmly entrenched in the industry at this point for anything else to be a possibility. Oracle itself has a vested interest in seeing Java continue to blossom. As stated in a press release today:
Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.
It is in the Program Management Office that the impact of the sale will be most evident to Java developers. Since Oracle is now at the helm, it makes sense to assume that they’ll want to at least tinker with if not entirely dissolve the current PMO. Though no one can predict exactly how a change in leadership will affect the JCP, most people seem to agree that a change is needed. Hopefully, Oracle will not repeat Sun’s mistakes, and this sale will lead to a more productive and efficient JCP in the long term.
No really, what does this mean for ME?
Unless you’re the CTO of a large tech company, the preceding two paragraphs probably don’t change much for you. However, if you’re wondering what this means for your certifications, rest-assured that nothing will change anytime soon. Sun’s Java Certifications track is still the most well-respected Java certification program there is, and a change in ownership won’t change that. If you already have a bookshelf full of certifications, they will remain valid. If you’re thinking of going for a particular certification, I don’t see anything in this sale that would dissuade me from recommending that you continue on that track.
The IDEs of April
In every sale there must be some losers. In this case, I agree with Larry Dignan of ZDNet that one of the big losers will be MySQL – Oracle just has no reason to let it stick around and eat away at their own profits. The other major loser, as pointed out by Sean Michael Kerner at internetnews.com, could be NetBeans. For all of you Eclipse fans out there, this could lead to bigger and better things on that front.
Of course, with every change, there is some uncertainty, so don’t take any predictions, including these, without a grain of salt.
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1 response so far ↓
Tbee // April 21, 2009 at 6:28 am |
Oracle is a Microsoft type of company, Apple is too (judging from the way it behaves lately). That means that at their core they are very protective – closed source – of their assets.
Now, it might entirely be possible that Oracle may learn from the fact that giving Java away for free resulted in Sun being a major player on the IT market, and that they will keep Sun alive as a “strange duck” in the company that does things differently.
But the open source by Oracle are usually discarded projects. Eclipselink? Well, Toplink was losing ground to Hibernate. Sure, they put a few developers on it, but limited.
IBM has a better open source track record; Eclipse originated at big blue. So for me IBM would have been the better choice. Albeight also as a result of their own EDI (what was it called again) failing.
Never the less… The MSDOS approach is a great marketing model: through free use of your software gain a huge market penetration and profit from that. (Let’s face it, the illegal use of MSDOS and W3.1 made Microsoft big.) Atlassian is try this with JIRA.