Oracle swallows Sun: a bad dream turns into a nightmare

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

Maybe I shouldn't be so cynical, but after pondering the perilous notion of IBM buying Sun and effectively shutting it down, the master of all acquisitions, Oracle, has gone ahead and gobbled up Sun leaving many questions unanswered. The first and most important question is: will an Oracle-Sun (Oracun? Sunacle?) software and hardware vendor be better for IT customers than keeping the two separate?

And the answer is obvious – no!

Oracle is not an open source company. It's an open standards company, but the amount it contributes to the open source software ecosystem is negligible for a company its size (it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft contributed more).

Sun, however, is an open source company. Over the past decade Sun has progressively open sourced more of its server and client stack to compete with the likes of Microsoft and, more recently, Oracle.

Sun's strategy with OpenSolaris, GlassFish, and its mind-boggling acquisition of MySQL, may not have been directly aimed at Oracle, but it sure would been a compelling (and “free”) alternative to Oracle's enterprise database and Java products once they matured.

When viewed from that angle the acquisition looks more like Oracle defending its turf from the most likely and disruptive competitor. That said, the move doesn't mean Oracle will jump to a knee-jerk reaction and kill off Sun's open source portfolio. After all, Oracle reinvented itself as the de facto enterprise database vendor for Linux and aggressively competed with Sun in the process. Ah the irony.

If Oracle doesn't downsize Sun's open source development practice, we can expect it to the glory of Sun's big-bang, open sourcing activities.

Oracle is used to paying big bucks for software companies, but it's not stupid enough to pay billions for open source startups with almost non-existent revenue.

My gut feeling is Oracle will quickly scale back paid development of Sun's competing open source products. They will all live on, of course, but as community projects and not quasi-commercial offerings supported by a vendor.

Then there's the hardware side of things.

By acquiring Sun, Oracle is now a hardware vendor. Granted, this outcome is not as bad as if IBM had snapped it up, but it does raise questions about whether Oracle is willing an able to produce computers in the long run after so many years as a pure-play software vendor.

Like Cisco's grand entrance into the server market last month, Oracle the server company now positions it firmly against its hardware partners like Dell, HP and to a lesser extent IBM. Not that Dell and HP should have trusted their business to Oracle as much as they did, but they now have less of an incentive to collaborate with Oracle and more of an incentive to invest in – or partner with in the case of a vendor – open source products. Again, the irony.

Technology arguments aside, the takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle is the manifestation of two stark trends in the industry: a poorly managed open technology company looking for a path tor profitability and a cashed-up proprietary software company looking to prepare itself for the onslaught of open computing.

And, as always, a big merger will have one grand loser – us, the customers.