And so it ends

After long months of head scratching the EU at last approved Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. James Gosling’s post captures the emotions perfectly.

It is sad to see the company go away but it never really managed to recover from the internet bust in 1999-2000 and then the financial crisis took away any hope that it still would so maybe this is the best outcome. It will be intriguing to observe what happens next. How will Oracle decide regarding Solaris/OpenSolaris, the SPARC business or rather the hardware business altogether, and of course Java?

Regarding the last one I am especially interested to see how Oracle will enjoy life sitting at the head of the table and now being the owner of all the various difficulties – compatibility, branding, open source, Apache, the Java ME royalty stream, JavaFX, etc etc – rather than one of the complainers (sorry Don). Oracle should have the ability to make some good decisions here; many that Sun always shied away from.

I also wonder what will happen with some of the great brains and personalities that made being part of Sun such a wonderful experience – people like James Gosling, Bill Shannon, Eduardo Pelegri and Jeff Jackson. Through the wonders of mergers and acquisitions many of the original JavaBeans team whom I joined in 1996 will be back together at the same company. I wish you all well in the months ahead while all the dust slowly settles.

Now I need to go and buy a t-shirt.