The Dusk Of Enterprise Open Source? Oracle Acquires Sun
Several months ago we speculated about a possible acquisition of an open source ERP project by one of IT megavendors – IBM, Sun or Oracle. Much have changed since then, especially for Sun, who lost a lot of its value as a public company and became an easy target for an acquisition.
Rumors of talks between Sun and IBM surfaced a couple of weeks ago, but apparently IBM was not eager enough to put the money on the table. But Oracle was never (and will probably never be) afraid of acquiring other companies.
As of the time of writing it is not clear if it’s officially a done deal, but Oracle is to buy Sun for about 7B$. The implications on enterprise IT are huge, with two dimensions directly related to open source ERP – open source and enterprise applications.
Sun was the leading open source software vendor. It released several high end software products as open source ( the Java programming language, the Open Solaris operating system and many other smaller projects). It also acquired MySQL, the leading open source database software a few months ago. Oracle ,on the other hand, is synonymous with proprietary software, especially in the ERP market.
