Oracle bought JAVA will it have impact on Java and MYSQL?

Posted by admin - 04/12/09 at 03:12 am

Sun Microsystems has been bought by Oracle which in turn means that Jave and MySQL have been   taken over by Oracle,any such major acquisition means that it’s time for all tech media to speculate on the future of the merger and of the products affected. Open source users will be more concerned with the fate of Java and MySQL

MySQL -
The acquisition raises serious questions about the future of MySQL, an important and popular database system acquired by Sun,its not evident if Oracle will see any incentives to continue developing the open source to its core database offerings. How ever, there are several factors that have to be taken into consideration before Oracle can even think about killing off MySQL, but continuing investment in its development could be profitable. MySQL is already somewhat fragmented and there are several branches and forks that deliver enough unique value to be profitable independently. This makes it seem unlikely that any one player will be able to retain centralized control of the software or unilaterally terminate its forward progress.

It’s very evident that there is a significant market for open source database software, and it’s a niche that someone will inevitably find a way to fill. This means that Oracle would gain little from killing off MySQL. Oracle has no means of stopping open source software from disassembling its main stream market, so the company has likely decided that it might as well profit from the trend. Oracle could also potentially view this as an opportunity to upsell some existing MySQL customers and transition them over to its proprietary products.
With MySQL, Oracle will have one of the leading open source databases, and a vendor that has been a bit of a competitor to Oracle over the last several years. It’s a win-win for Oracle and for the users.

Java -
Oracle is active member of the Java community. It is a prominent player in the Java middleware space and is a major stakeholder in the future of the programming language. Oracle has very serious incentives to ensure that Java development continues and that the language remains competitive on the server.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in his post acquisition call has stated that “Java is the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.” So it’s highly unlikely that Oracle will put Java on the back burner and not invest in the growth of Java.

Java is currently under the General Public License (GPL), and even if Oracle should, for whatever reason, chose to return future Java development to closed source, it can be safely assumed that there would be sufficient interest in an open source Java to ensure its continued development.
Oracle is a software company and has invested a lot in Java as it is. So it seems to me that this is the strong connection point between the two companies and not necessarily the hardware. It will be interesting to see what Oracle’s vision is with Java, and in particular J2ME.

Conclusion -
It’s hard to predict the full extent of how Oracle’s acquisition of Sun will impact the open source software industry. There are plenty of questions to be answered,there are bound to be concerns and conflicts during the transition.
Exactly which parts of open source will benefit from Oracle’s move obviously depends on the details of how Oracle decides to absorb the company and to fit Sun’s products alongside its own. But as well as downsides, there is plenty of scope for major benefits to flow from the move. One thing is for sure: things in the open source world just got even more interesting.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 3:50 am and is filed under Java Articles. The entry is tagged under articles java developers, articles on java learn, Core Java, Java Classroom Training, Java J2se String, oracle java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.