Oracle outshines Sun

This week started fairly quietly, but has got more interesting as the day progressed, especially with the news that SUN (one of our major suppliers) has been taken over by Oracle (another one of our major suppliers). It will be interesting (I hope not in the Chinese sense of the word) to see what effect that has. Oracle now owns Java, and more importantly, MySQL - a rival database to its own. It's already been referred to as myToast by the ZDnet blog. Should big users of MySQL, like Google, be worried?

What will happen to the SUN hardware that all of our systems run on? Given Oracle's relationship with other hardware suppliers including Dell, HP and IBM, will it all survive? The impact on open source software such as OpenOffice will also be closely watched.

As a major SUN user I'm glad they were taken over rather than just go bust, and I think the deal with Oracle will be better for us than if the IBM one had succeded, but I can't believe it's not going to affect us. The Guardian technology blog says that SUN boss Jonathan Schwartz has been known as My Little Pony, but Larry Ellison from Oracle is reputedly somewhat closer to Ming the Merciless - an interesting match!