Oracle buys SUN

The news is simple like that: "Oracle buys SUN", but it means a lot! Today Oracle changes the history of the information technology acquiring one of most important technology players in the world: SUN Microsystems. SUN created the Java programming language, the most used programming languages on the earth, and the Solaris Operating Systems, a very good Unix system for servers and definitively not good for final users. SUN was originally a hardware company with good ideas in the software world.

Recently, SUN invested most of its energy to strength their software area, being an important open source contributor and service provider. Even with the support of the community, this strategy didn't work in the corporate world. SUN couldn't attest the profitability of services for open source products and their stocks fell down until a level that they had more money in cash than in market value. It literally meant that they could buy themselves :). I don't know more details, but with this low price IBM was the first company to declare publicly their intention to acquire SUN. They gave up of the deal claiming that SUN was negotiating with other companies in parallel. Today we knew that IBM was right ;). That's what I saw in SUN's website this morning:



It's too early to predict what is going to happen with SUN's products. I don't care about MySQL because there is always a good open source alternative out there, but I'm personally afraid about Glassfish, a very good JEE Application Server, that is threatened due to the recent acquisition of BEA Systems by Oracle. Oracle Weblogic Server is a profitable proprietary product and Glassfish is a strong competitor in the same market but with a lower cost. I imagine three scenarios:

1. nothing is going to change and Glassfish continues threatening Weblogic (improbable);
2. Glassfish is destroyed to increase the Weblogic marketshare (difficult but possible);
3. Glassfish is offered as a new toy for beginners, which is the IBM's strategy with Apache Geronimo and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (big chance).
   

My concern is that I'm using Glassfish in most of my projects now and if it is discontinued I will wast a lot of time migrating my projects to JBoss. Let's follow the news.