I somehow lost track of this news item since the initial annoucement of Oracle’s intent to acquire Sun Microsystems came out. I know when the news was first annouced, I was a little concerned of what the impact of such an acqusition could mean for Sun’s open technologies such as Java and more importantly to me and many Open Source Software advocates, MySQL and OpenOffice.

Yesterday (January 27th, 2010), I received the press release announcing that Oracle had finally completed the Sun Microsystems acquisition. While I will not include the press release in its’ entirety, I will include the most important parts (in my opinion) :

“…our open standards-based technology will give customers choice. Customers can purchase our fully integrated systems, or easily integrate our best-of-breed technologies with their existing environments. Our open technology also enables customers to take full advantage of third party innovations.”

“We are very excited about this combination and look forward to delivering to you increased innovation through accelerated investment in Sun’s hardware and software technologies such as SPARC, Solaris, Java, and MySQL.”

“This combination transforms the IT industry. With the addition of servers, storage, SPARC processors, the Solaris operating system, Java, and the MySQL database to Oracle’s portfolio of database, middleware, and business applications, we plan to engineer and deliver open and integrated systems—from applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together out of the box. Each layer of the stack will be architected to improve performance, leverage innovation and centralize management so that IT will be more predictable, more supportable, and more secure. Customers will benefit as their system performance, reliability and security goes up and their system integration and management costs go down.”

More information, including product strategy, and replay of the 1/27 live webcast including Larry Ellison and other executives from Oracle and Sun can be found at oracle.com/sun.

So, a sigh of relief for now. It looks as though Oracle intends to continue to support and remain a contributor to the open source projects, as well as offer commercial licensing options for those that prefer to have commercial support and updates. I will follow up with additonal posts regarding some of the compelling and emerging solutions and technologies that Oracle+Sun are and will be offering.

Have a great day!