Sun Microsystems has scheduled a special shareholders meeting for July 16 for a vote on whether to accept Oracle’s US$7.4 billion proposal to buy the company. Sun’s board has unanimously recommended the transaction go through.
The industry has been abuzz with speculation about how Oracle, which made its bid in April, will handle Sun’s assets and influence, particularly its stewardship of the Java programming language and the open-source MySQL database. [Via PC World]
As most of my friends know, I’m very much about open source software platforms. I feel that they are more secure, generate community safeguards, and in the long run, are far more cost-efficient than their pay-for-play counterparts. If Oracle (which has their own DB based on SQL) acquires Sun, the MySQL platform could be mothballed indefinitely, or more troubling, it could become a proprietary software system with license fees and sky-rocketing maintenance costs. Let’s hope that they just want Sun’s talented pool of engineers and programmers.
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