Oracle
Big news today in tech is the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Sun, powerhouse during the dot-com era finally gets gobbled another Silicon Valley gorilla, Oracle, who’s been on a buying spree of late.
Oracle buys Sun for $7.4 billion, making it a direct competitor to HP and IBM.
MySQL
What I’m wondering now is would this be the end of the free database wonder MySQL. In 2007, Oracle tried to buy MySQL for $850 million. MySQL was acquired by Sun in 2008 for $1 billion. With this acquisition, Oracle effectively got MySQL for free. Would this be the end of the free MySQL? That is the question.
Sun Microsystems
I started my tech career on a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation and moved up from there. It was also on a SPARC where I was introduced to Unix with it’s multi-user, multi-session capability, and from there to linux and BSD.
SUSE
It was also because of my introduction to a SPARC station that I started installing and playing with Solaris on a PC, which was not an easy thing to do. After that experiment Slackware and SUSE seemed like a cakewalk. So for those of you who are still complaining about OS installations, count your blessings. Compared Solaris and Slackware/SUSE, well there’s no comparison.
Sun was founder by Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla, and Scott McNealy in 1982 at Staford University. Tow years later, they had an annual revenue of $1 billion.
