Oracle

SAP CTO tries to liberate Java with hilariously self-aggrandizing blog post

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:04:56 -0500

Oh, I'm sorry, have you been bored by the Sun-Oracle merger drama because it's been all about MySQL and Java has been reduced to a baffled bystander? Well, get ready for some ancillary Java-related corporate drama that has the added benefit of being pretty hysterical!

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Oracle: Your Java-related products are going to be fine, just fine

Josh Fruhlinger — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:24:18 -0500

Hey, Java fan, are you still anxious about the fate of future Java-related technologies after the Oracle takeover? Well, fear not, because Oracle has put an updated FAQ on the subject! They actually discuss two of the products people have been most agitated about -- GlassFish and NetBeans -- by name, with varying degrees of reassuringness. The mentions are actually short enough to reproduce here in full.

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Java speaking for itself

Josh Fruhlinger — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:54:51 -0400

In the light of the delayed Sun-Oracle merger (and see the New York Times Dealbook blog for a brutal analysis of how the deal was structured to put Sun in a poor position in case of just such delays), there's been a lot of anxiety about Java's future. With the companies unable to really comment on future plans, of course, this has led to anxious seizing on any little tidbit to guide the way.

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Who Should Oracle Sell MySQL To?

dmarx — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:25:00 -0400

There is no shortage of people calling for Oracle to sell MySQL. I keep reading that Oracle should sell MySQL to "a suitable third-party" or to a "neutral third party." I understand why these people feel passionate about this, but "loose" terminology like this is always dangerous. It implies that this is an easy thing to do and that there is a line of suitors out there waiting to snap up MySQL for a fair market price.

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The Sun-Oracle merger is going great!

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:59:59 -0400

So in case you've (a) been under a rock and (b) have difficulty recognizing sarcasm, that headline is sarcastic. The Oracle-Sun merger is, in fact, not going well. Let's review all the ways it didn't go well this week!

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Oracle will be dogfooding it when it comes to Java

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:09:06 -0400

"Dogfooding" is a verb that derives from the phrase "eat your own dog food" -- which, in IT circles, means using the products you sell internally. A rather famous example was Microsoft's moves to shift the infrastructure behind its Hotmail service from BSD to Windows servers.

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Java in First Days of Oracle OpenWorld 2009

dmarx — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:30:00 -0400

In Oracle OpenWorld for the Java Developer, I looked at the relationship between Sun and Oracle and considered how Java might be covered at Oracle OpenWorld. In this blog post, I point to and summarize some of the blog posts starting to come out along these same themes based in Sunday and Monday at OpenWorld.

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Oracle OpenWorld for the Java Developer

dmarx — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:38:00 -0400

Many in the Java development community are hoping to glean clues about Oracle's vision of the future of Java (assuming successful acquisition of Sun by Oracle) at next week's Oracle OpenWorld (11-15 October 2009 at

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Oracle OpenWorld developer track promises to be super awkward!

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:05:56 -0400

To hear The Register tell it, Sun execs were very much taken aback by the spanner thrown into the Sun-Oracle merger works, thus extending the twilight period in which Sun spins its wheels waiting to be absorbed into Oracle and the products it sells and develops to be integrated into Oracle's roadmap.

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RMOUG: Beware Triggers and DBA Code of Ethics

dmarx — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:20:00 -0400

The Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) is well-known in the Oracle database administrator community.

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EU move a "gift" to Oracle?

Josh Fruhlinger — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:47:37 -0400

CNet's Matt Asay has a pretty provocative post on his blog today, saying that the EU's decision is a perverse gift to Oracle, like so: the delay will cause more and more customers and employees to flee Sun (a trend that's already happening), leaving Oracle to declare that, once the merger is approved, its original offer price no longer reflects Sun's diminished value, causing Sun to either accede to a humiliating reduction in price, or for the deal to flounder altogether (with Oracle swooping in to buy

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EU to examine Sun-Oracle merger; limbo continues

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:22:49 -0400

Well, as predicted, the European Commission has chosen to invoke its right to study the Oracle-Sun deal, with the fate of MySQL being the reason explicitly cited as the origin of the hold-up. Java watchers will have to stew for a few more months of limbo over a non-Java-related issue arising from an acquisition by Sun last year that may or may not have been a good idea at the time.

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Waiting for Steelie Neelie

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:29:32 -0400

Earlier this week the US Department of Justice approved the Sun-Oracle merger -- which would be momentous news, except that, in this multinational world, that wasn't the only approval required to make the deal happen. The companies must now wait on the announcement from the European Commission, led in this area by European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes (aka "Steelie Neelie").

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EU, US regulators stretch out the waiting game

Josh Fruhlinger — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 03:21:18 -0400

As I argued last week, a good deal of the anxiety about the future of Java post-merger comes from just a fear of the unknown. It's not that Oracle is menacing, exactly, or any more menacing than a typically ruthlessly efficient and profitable multinational corporation is. It's just that nobody knows exactly what the post-merger landscape will look like, and this absence of knowledge is mandated by law, as the players can't talk about detailed plans until the deal between Sun and Oracle has been firmed up.

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JRuby guys jumped from fear of the unknown

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:28:55 -0400

Earlier this week we noted that the JRuby guys (and I find it charming that they are universally referred to as "the JRuby guys") jumped ship from Sun (who had hired them specifically to improve JRuby) to Engine Yard, which offers hosting to Ruby on Rails applications.

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Oracle building an elaborate house of cards?

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:43:22 -0400

If you thought Oracle's ravenous lust for buying more companies was sated by its purchase of Sun, well, think again, my friends. Today the company bought GoldenGate, which makes real-time data integration software; Oracle says the move will help it build a "comprehensive data integration platform," whatever that means.

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Oracle-SpringSource: The opening salvo?

Josh Fruhlinger — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:12:43 -0400

Ha ha, obviously Tuesday when I implied today was the end of Sun I was getting way ahead of myself.

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The end of Sun: Not with a bang, but with a whimper

Josh Fruhlinger — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:15:08 -0400

If all goes well, by the time I put my next post up Sun's shareholders will have voted the company out of existence. Sun is sputtering into the sunset, revealing a a worse than expected loss in its final quarter as an independent company.

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Oracle 11g: The motivation, not the fruition

Josh Fruhlinger — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:54:22 -0400

If you've been casually following the headlines from the last few weeks as Oracle released the Oracle Fusion 11g middleware suite, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Sun-Oracle union was already paying dividends. "Java development big part of Oracle Fusion strategy" cried Computerworld.

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DoJ taking an interest in Java licensing?

Josh Fruhlinger — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:29:35 -0400

We've been talking all this time about the Sun-Oracle merger as if it's a done deal, but the US government has the right and the responsibility to examine proposed combinations to make sure they don't violate anti-trust law, and the Obama Administration is rumored to be stricter on this point than the Bush Administration was. Thus, it was not entirely unexpected that Department of Justice put the brakes on the transaction last week.

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Oracle, an anxious Java community turns its eyes to you

Josh Fruhlinger — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:30:37 -0400

Someday, someday soon, the Oracle-Sun deal will close, and we'll have more than just speculation to go on when we talk about what's in the future. But until then, it's kind of fun to watch folks get anxious.

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Java a drop in the bucket for Oracle?

Josh Fruhlinger — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:39:39 -0400

I'm going to start off with a comment that Rich Unger left on one of my previous posts, in which I snidely derided Sun's (and Java's) money-making capabilities. Rich said, "As Sun software executives love to point out, Java is one of the only things at Sun that does make money. They license it to small device (e.g. phone) manufacturers, they bundle MS/Yahoo/whatever toolbar with the JRE, and get paid ridiculously too much for that. It's actually profitable." That's fair enough!

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JavaOne hangover over; commence Oracle-related panic

Josh Fruhlinger — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:27:03 -0400

JavaOne was full of happiness and fun; to read the many blog posts of the folks who were there, you understand why these trade shows are worth it to so many people. There really is a sense of community that comes when you get together with thousands of strangers interesed in the same things you are. And Larry Ellison even showed up to make comforting noises about Java's future!

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The once and future Sun merger drama

Josh Fruhlinger — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:50:46 -0400

The New York Times has a doozy of a story today on the drama that laid behind Sun's decision to merge with Oracle, which process already had quite a bit of public drama in the first place. We all know that IBM courted Sun, then lowered its buying price enough to back away, before being absorbed by Oracle. The whole tale is told in Sun's regulatory filing, and is couched in security by insufficiently obscure obscurity.

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Does JavaFX have a future at Oracle?

Josh Fruhlinger — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:29:15 -0400

In my initial reaction to the Sun-Oracle deal, I wrote JavaFX off as dead. After all, JavaFX aims to provide UIs for Java SE and ME apps, whereas for Oracle the holy grail is a Java EE-based all-one-thing appliance. But was I too hasty?

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