Oracle to buy Sun

[dougo]

Oracle is buying Sun. I know Sun's been on death watch for a while now, but it's still kind of sad to see them no longer exist as an independent company. I worked for Sun for a summer in college, and I would have liked to work for them again, e.g. in the Programming Language Research Group, but I'm not really sure if I'd want to work for Oracle (and who knows if they'll keep all of Sun's research teams, let alone start hiring again). I have a general impression of Oracle as kind of evil, but maybe that's just FUD.

Anyone want to speculate on the ramifications of this?

Comments

[prusik.livejournal.com]

Oracle? That's not who I expected at all. (I thought Sun would go back and make nice with IBM. Shows you what I know...)

My guess is that all the bits of Sun I like will disappear. (I spent 5 years doing microprocessors for them and they've always been generous with R&D funding.) However, that's probably been happening for a while now.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

I worked for Oracle, and they seemed kind of evil.

Mostly they seemed obsessed with beting Microsoft and not kowtowing to things like good design and user interface.

Java

[mhnicholson.livejournal.com]

Let's hope the borg-ing of Sun doesn't kill the viability of Java.

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

It seems very strange for a software company to buy a hardware company. I was hoping for an Apple/Sun merger, which would single-handedly create a company with the most scalable Unix and the most user-friendly Unix.