Chaos Program

Not long ago when there was a rumor that IBM might by Sun Microsystems (see All the Failure Money Can Buy) I gave the opinion that this was a bad thing that IBM should not pursue. IBM didn’t pursue it and life went on.

Now today we have the news that a deal has been reached for Oracle to buy Sun instead (Oracle To Buy Sun For Approximately $7.4 Billion – Hold On To Your Hats). So the question is, is this as bad for Oracle as it would have been for IBM? Short answer: Not as bad, though still not great. Most of my reasons for thinking Sun was a bad buy for IBM apply to anyone who would buy Sun. I just don’t believe Sun has much of a future.

Weirdly, Sun claims that Java is an incredibly important part of the purchase. If I had any stock in Oracle, I’d sell it on the strength of that pronouncement alone (but I’m poor. I don’t own stock in anything, thank God). There is another aspect of the purchase that has to be taken into consideration, however. It’s called Mysql.

Mysql is a (mostly) free database package that comes included with most Linux installs and runs a ridiculously large percentage of Internet websites and applications. Sun bought Mysql a little over a year ago for $1 billion (Sun to Acquire Mysql). That’s right: They paid a billion dollars for a (mostly) free product. Shortly thereafter they started looking for somebody to buy the whole company because they were losing ground fast. Can we say, “Oops?”

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I usually stay away from the popular news of the day but this one was so funny I had to say something about it: IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add to Web Heft (Note: This link keeps coming up with an excerpt and a “subscribe” link, but when I opened it from Google search results it gave me the whole article. Interesting, huh?). The short version of this is that the two companies are in talks and there’s a possible price tag of $6.5 billion.  As of this writing, no actual deal has been announced. They’re just talking. Interestingly, according to the WSJ article, Sun has been looking for a buyer for some months. This makes sense to me since I’ve considered Sun to be doomed for several years.

I’ve worked with Sun’s Solaris operating system quite a bit. I like it. It’s terrifically stable. In fact, the times when it seemed to fail there was always an underlying hardware problem. Sun hardware is pretty good, too. Some of their Sparc stations run practically forever. That said, I don’t see Solaris to be all that much better than Linux and it costs MUCH more (On any hardware. Linux has been ported to everything except my mailbox but it’s not much of a mailbox). The extra cost for Sun just isn’t worth it.

When I worked at the newspaper the editorial software we put in during my first year ran on Solaris 8 on a pair of V880s the size of one of those mini office refrigerators. At the time, that editorial system depended on Oracle for the db and was not available on Linux. It was a powerful, very stable and fabulously expensive system. That editorial software is now available on Linux. It’s still fabulously expensive but the cost of the hardware and the operating system are a fraction of what they used to be.
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