I think for Oracle to control Java couldn’t be a bigger win for them, and it’s almost worth the whole $5.7 bn purchase price (which is in cash, net of Sun’s cash and debt). Oracle’s whole model is to control the enterprise software stack, essentially all of which is integrated and glued together with bits of Java code. Corporate developers are the shock troops Oracle uses to keep its customers locked in, and Java is extremely important to those developers.
MySql is incidental. Solaris is critical because it’s one of the most important platforms for running Oracle’s database, perhaps the most important. The hardware business is nearly valueless.
This acquisition changes the world in very important ways. An acquisition of Sun by IBM would not have.
TNL