The Linux Ninja

I have speculated previously about what would have happened to Sun’s projects if IBM bought them, but had never considered Oracle a serious contender for acquisition. Well, they surprised me and they have acquired Sun for $7 billion. This appears to be not great news for MySQL as Oracle’s main product is their database. I’ll be following this story closely over the next few days as more details come out and we get a better idea of what Oracle plans to do with Sun’s properties. Hopefully this works out well for both sides and no massive layoffs / project cancellations come of it…

Sun released the 2.2 version of VirtualBox, their desktop virtualization software, a few days ago. This is a major update for VirtualBox that includes Open Virtualization Format (OVF) import and export, 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris virtual machines, hypervisor optimizations, and host-only networking support. The OVF import and export is the feature that I find most intriguing. This will allow users to configure machines in a test environment and export them to a production environment or possibly even easily share virtual machines between VMWare, VirtualBox, and other hypervisors that support the OVF format. I’ve used both VMWare and VirtualBox, and while I still prefer VMWare Server/Player, the new features that VirtualBox continues to add with each release narrows the feature and performance gap with VMWare.

Multiple news outlets are reporting that IBM has walked away from their proposed $7 billion acquisition of Sun. Some outlets late last week reported that a deal was imminent, but apparently those reports were premature. One reported reason that IBM has decided against a deal was that many more senior executives than expected had ‘hold over’ clauses that required them to be retained in the event of an acquisition. Another issue was IBM dropping their price per share offer from $9.55 to what is believed to be  $9.40, not even a $1 premium on Sun stock that closed at $8.49 on Friday. There were many other concerns with the deal as well including potential anti-trust issues and IBM walking away during anti-trust investigations.  Some reporters are also proposing the idea that this is a negotiating tactic by IBM to get Sun to give in to its demands for a lower price or offer other concessions in return, so we will have to wait until the coming week for the next chapter. This news is sure to have a negative effect on Sun Microsystem’s stock that saw a recent rise in value due to the acquisition rumors.

EDIT: corrected the potential amount of the acquisition from $6.1 billion to $6.5 billion

There’s been alot of discussion about IBM being in talks with Sun Microsystems about a $6.5 billion acquisition. Initially Sun’s stock (ticker: JAVA) shot up significantly while IBM’s stock (ticker: IBM) initially dropped a few points before recovering to only a small loss. While this may or may not be good for each company, I started to wonder what would happen to some of the projects that Sun manages, specifically MySQL but also ZFS, OpenSolaris and others.

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