Oracle to buy Sun in $7.4 billion deal

[greggh]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10223044-92.html

Oracle, not IBM, will be buying Sun Microsystems.

Oracle and Sun announced Monday that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. That puts the value of the transaction at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt.

This should raise antitrust concerns and not be allowed to go through. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Oracle wants Sun just so it can do what it can to try to harm and kill MySQL.

[Patrick]

Wow

[MattKingUSA]

So, is this bad news for Virtualbox? I use VB a lot. And open office too.

[greggh]

So, is this bad news for Virtualbox? I use VB a lot. And open office too.

I think so. It's clear to me that Ellison has only one interest in this deal... damage MySQL. The other stuff I don't think he cares about either way. All of Sun's other assets will languish with no investment if owned by Oracle, except for MySQL, that alone they will actively try to destroy.

It's interesting that this price is higher than the $7 Bil IBM offered before Sun rejected it and IBM walked away. I have to think that Oracle was in this game talking to Sun behind the scenes from the get-go. But Sun strongly pursued IBM as a buyer because they realized the anti-trust problems that would be raised with Oracle and that the deal would probably be blocked. Maybe this is a desperation move by Sun because they realized that there are no other buyers out there for them. At least I'm hoping that's the case, and this deal is stopped.

[eddie]

FORK!!!

Oracle still runs on a lot of Sun equipment. I am surprised that Oracle did not make the move sooner. I hope that linux does not lose in this big corporate poker game.

[CptnObvious999]

MySQL could always fork, and we have PostgreSQL anyways which from what I hear has more features anyways.

[eddie]

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7435 ... tml?kc=rss

[Tsuroerusu]

MySQL could always fork, and we have PostgreSQL anyways which from what I hear has more features anyways.

It has already sort of forked, after Michael Widenius (Monty) left Sun, he's started something he calls MariaDB:

"MariaDB is a community developed branch of the MySQL database that uses the Maria engine by default."

Source: http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB
http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

[doublejoon]

MySQL could always fork, and we have PostgreSQL anyways which from what I hear has more features anyways.

It has already sort of forked, after Michael Widenius (Monty) left Sun, he's started something he calls MariaDB:

"MariaDB is a community developed branch of the MySQL database that uses the Maria engine by default."

Source: http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB
http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

In addition to MariaDB there is a fork called Drizzle
https://launchpad.net/drizzle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(database_server)

[eddie]

"Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. 'We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,' said Oracle President Safra Catz."

GAAP = Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Apparently Sun intends to allegedly use non-standard bookkeeping techiques to make themselves look good. I wonder what the SEC might think about such a ploy. The average reader might not reaiize the significance of the fifteen cents.