DOJ Clears Oracle-Sun Deal but Questions Remain
The United States Department of Justice has given the green light for Oracle to proceed with its $7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, Oracle announced Thursday. The European Commission is expected to make its ruling by September 3.
Apparently DOJ brushed aside concerns over the fate of the Java Community Process (JCP), despite inquiring about it last month. That inquiry was not expected to be a deal breaker, noted Burton Group analyst Ann Thomas Mannes at the time.
Perhaps we will see more clarity on the fate of the JCP, JavaFX, MySQL and the company's plans to assimilate the rest of Sun during Oracle's Open World conference, which begins October 11?
Meanwhile, don't expect the open source world to sit still. Could VMWare's pending acquisition of SpringSource (which this week launched Cloud Foundry) become a haven for Java developers? Will the Open Database Alliance bring forth viable alternatives to MySQL? EnterpriseDB and Ingres are already taking advantage of the uncertainty. You can be sure that Adobe and Microsoft won't let JavaFX rain on their parades either. And expect to hear more from Red Hat about how it will look to advance JBoss as a middleware alternative at JBoss World in Chicago Sept. 1. To be sure, those are just a few examples. Drop me a line with your concerns and observations at [email protected].
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 21, 2009