Larry Ellison is a famously activist exponent of competitive strategy. An avowed student of Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Oracle chief executive has long followed an approach that sets Oracle's interests against those of its main rivals, with Microsoft, IBM and SAP cast as the enemy.
With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, however, he is about to walk on to new terrain where some of the methods that defined Oracle's traditional approach to strategy no longer apply.
Sun's main software assets - and the jewels for which Mr Ellison said this week that he had agreed to pay $7.4bn for the company - are all closely tied to the open source world: the Java programming language and development tools, which are partly open source, as well as the Solaris operating system and MySQL database.
That makes them unlike the roughly 200 software properties that Mr Ellison has acquired in the past. They are made freely available, and rely partly on the efforts of a wider group of developers to extend and support them. Their future success, in fact, relies on a technology community that stretches well beyond Oracle - and includes companies such as IBM, which also relies on Java as a core technology
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Thursday, April 23, 2009
Oracle faces culture shock in Sun's open source world
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Sun's open source Java move gets mixed reviews
Two years later, availability is up, but Sun remains in charge of its future
In November 2006, Sun Microsystems began making all of its Java technology implementations open source, offering them under the GPL. More than two years later, reactions are mixed as to what exactly has been the impact of this momentous change.
Some, including the chief executive at Eclipse Foundation and Sun's own James Gosling, considered the father of Java, have seen little impact. "That was mostly about community relations," says Gosling, who is CTO of the client software group at Sun. "So far, I think it hasn't had too much [effect]," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse, which was spawned in an IBM-based effort to build Java tools.
But Sun's Jeet Kaul, senior vice president for the Java client group at Sun, sees it differently: "We have gotten a lot of people who have taken up the code and started building solutions with it. So the adoption that we have had, the adoption curve has grown dramatically ever since we did open source," he says. But he could not cite specific adoption figures.
"Sun's revenue for Java has increased ever since we did open source and has increased by double-digit numbers," Kaul says. Opportunities have increased in areas such as support, services, and solutions, and Java revenues will grow in 2009, he adds.
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Sunday, September 14, 2008
Sun launches open-source virtualisation platform
Sun has launched an open-source virtualisation platform for servers under the banner xVM Server.
Although the product is free to download, support for the new application — including access to patches and training — costs $500 (£280) per physical server per year.
xVM is built to work on Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems, including Sun's Solaris, and is also interoperable with VMware, allowing workloads to be moved between the two platforms.
Keeping with the open-source theme, Sun also launched the xVMServer.org yesterday, an online open-source community to develop and improve the product.
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Monday, June 23, 2008
Sun : Java to be 100 percent open by year's end
Following the announcement of Sun's plans to make Java free and open under the General Public License (GPL) at JavaOne 2006, there have been a few struggles on the path to open source. At the time of the OpenJDK release in May last year, around five percent of the code — the portion not owned by Sun — was still closed.
Simon Phipps, chief open-source officer at Sun, said: "We released under the GPL everything we had the rights to release under the GPL, and that was last summer. There were a couple of holdouts there. One was the area to do with raster graphics and 2D graphics. That turned out to be owned by a company that didn't want us to release that code as open source. We negotiated with them and because they've said: 'Yes, you can open source the code', I can tell you they're Codec..."
"The only element that's left now is actually a sound-related component within Java. We finally decided that the vendor that's involved there just isn't going to play ball and we're rewriting the code from scratch. That's going to be done within the next couple of months," said Phipps.
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Monday, June 9, 2008
Sun Moves Gingerly Toward Open SOA Platform
CAPS 6 blends open source code from the Open ESB (define) project with the closed code of the 5.x set of releases.
It is architected around the Java Business Integration (JBI) standard, which "reduces vendor lock-in -- when things go south with one vendor, enterprises can move to another because their value is in the content, and not the middleware," Mark Herring, Sun's vice president of software infrastructure marketing, told InternetNews.com.
JBI is a Java-based standard that facilitates SOA (define) integration of Java-based applications.
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Friday, May 2, 2008
Will market reject Sun’s open source vision?
Good question. But it depends on what we mean by open source. (Copies of this lovely poster are for sale at eBay.) And what we mean by saving.
As I noted here in January, while Sun sits at the bottom of the open source incline, having embraced GPL licensing, it actually sits near the top of the open source development incline.
This means Sun’s projects are essentially proprietary efforts. Sun decides the strategy, Sun controls the code releases. Sun “owns” mySQL, and takes that ownership seriously.
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