21 April 2009 - 14:07A defining moment for Java

I still cannot fully absorb the news that Oracle is buying Sun. First, I don’t understand the rationale for it (since when Oracle wanted to become a hardware vendor???). Second, because I see the development environment I grew used to (an environment which gives the developer a lot of freedom in choosing how to work, what components to use, how to integrate them, etc…) threatened with change. 

Reading the press release I came across this worrisome snippet: “Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips.
I had the opportunity to deal with a highly optimized stack from Oracle - JDev integrated with Oracle DB - and I know that I don’t want to deal with anything similar to it again, from what I remember developing on JDev means basically being taken hostage to a set of capabilities.

I think that this deal is best defined as the acquisition of the largest open source company in the world, Sun managing these OS assets: MySQL, Java, Open-Solaris, Open-Office,  Open-Sparc. Oracle should treat these projects and the communities built around them with care and not antagonize them because quite a few competitors would love to be put in a position to efficiently fork Sun’s OS assets in order to acquire a new community and a new customer base.

Another point I would like to make is that Oracle is buying Sun when Sun’s grip over the Java community is waning away. As outlined in a post by Rod Johnson development in Java is moving away from EJB containers to specialized solutions which means that the EJB assets bought by Oracle are diminishing their worth.

I think that this transaction will define Java for the near future. Sun did an outstanding job of building a community around Java, a community which delivered an impressive stack of libraries, an open community which could work together in order to avoid duplication, a community which turned R&D projects into viable commercial projects. It would be a shame if this changes in the future.

Later Edit: mySQL just got forked, I thought I may add a “Fork Watch” for the Sun OS products which Oracle has just acquired. It would be interesting to watch how this will unfold…

• First fork of mySQL by the Open Database Alliance.