Sun Microsystems News & Articles

Oracle (news, site) has announced that it has received regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun Microsystems (news, site). The final hurdle -- unconditional approval from China and Russia -- is expected soon, after which the deal will be finally closed.

The deal was originally announced last April when Oracle and Sun finalized a financial package that included US$ 9.50 per share in cash. The transaction was valued at approximately US$ 7.4 billion. At the time Oracle said the deal would give clients long term strategic advantages as it would give them effective ownership of Java and Solaris.

Important across the entire software industry, for Oracle it’s something of a must. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle said the deal would result in continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the, high-end features of Solaris.

The company will host an all-day live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27th, 2010 at 9:00 AM Pacific time, at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. Stay tuned for more details and analysis of the deal and what it means for content management.

Former Sun Microsystems (news, site) CEO Scott McNealy is credited for stating: "Privacy is dead - get over it!" And while being reminded that our confidentiality is quickly drowning in the digital age can't hurt, whether or not we should "get over it"--or better yet, whether or not we even have a choice--is now at the forefront.

For example, analyst Seth Schoen recently published an article in the Electronic Frontier Foundation highlighting research from Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, Latanya Sweeney. Sweeney found that the mere combination of gender, zip code and birthday was unique for 87% of the U.S .population. Meaning? All those "anonymous" surveys we fill out from time aren't so anonymous after all.

Open source offerings and associated services are getting better and starting to seem less risky, while IT budgets are shrinking. Result? What's bad for economy is clearly good for open source.

A recent survey shows that web content management is one of the prime "targets" for disruption by open source.

Open source vendors rejoice, closed source companies nod in agreement and utter the magic word "interoperability."

Automattic gets a US $29.5M round of Series B funding.

Alfresco secures a US $9M round of Series C funding.

Sun Microsystems pays a cool US $1 Billion for MySQL.

What’s the common thread?

Forrester has released a list of 10 reasons why Apple’s iPhone is no friend to IT.

You can probably think of a few already: the prohibitive cost, the first-gen factor, and fidelity to AT&T.

In English this time: IBM has joined OpenOffice.org, reportedly to “collaborate on software development for the Open Document Format (ODF), an ISO standard that governs the creation, storage, and exchange of documents,” says Mark Long of newsfactor.com.

IBM will start by sharing the code it’s been developing for its Lotus Notes software, including certain accessibility fixes that may allegedly help OpenOffice “reach parity” with Microsoft’s current offering for disabled workers via Office.

While Sun vigilantly stormed the ECM gates, competitors Microsoft, Palm and European developer Symbian were strutting for the wireless Internet market.

Well, now Sun’s beams are back on mobile, and the long-dormant Internet innovator is bringing some new tricks along with it.

While our host waxes poetic about dinosaurs, I’m going to take an opportunity to update you on all the good that’s gone down this morning.

Sun Microsystems senior staff engineer Tor Norbye kicked us off this morning with Ruby Tooling: State of the Art. For those expecting the him to get dangerously gung-ho about Ruby’s merits (Sun is, after all, getting quite intimate with jRuby), we (yeah, we) were mildly disappointed.