Sun was a tech juggernaut for nearly three decades. Our memorial slideshow gives this former titan its due.

To view the memorial slideshow at its source, please refer to The rise and fall of Sun Microsystems

Now that the deal is complete, Oracle claims it will put more research money, more development money and more marketing money behind MySQL. Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, said that the merger with Sun will primarily provide extended market reach for Oracle. At a media event today, Phillips met with customers and the press to explain where the merger would take Sun.

It's official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly.

Oracle may fire as many as half of Sun Microsystems’ employees, or almost 13,800 people, when its $7.4 billion acquisition closes in the next few weeks, an analyst at UBS has said.

Oracle probably will have to cut jobs to squeeze a profit fromSun, Brent Thill, a UBS analyst based in San Francisco, said Wednesday in a report. Sun employed almost 27,600 in September, according to a company filing.

Sun declined to comment, said Karen Kahn, a spokeswoman. Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle, did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.

It's not officially a done deal, but eWEEK has learned through knowledgeable sources that the standoff between Oracle and the antitrust regulators of the European Commission has been broken and that an agreement is probably imminent.

Oracle said in a Monday release that it "has engaged in constructive discussions with the European Commission regarding the concerns expressed by the Commission about the Oracle/Sun Microsystems transaction, and in particular the maintenance of MySQL as a competitive force in the database market."

The European Commission, the EU’s competition authority, has threatened to block the deal because of concerns that Oracle might be able to eliminate Sun’s MySQL database product as a competitor, according to an EU document. Oracle will counter the EU’s case at a closed-door hearing this week in Brussels.

A top legal expert on open-source software has told European antitrust regulators holding up Oracle Corp's $7 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems that their analysis of the deal is partly flawed.

Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen said that he has found errors in a document from EU regulators that outlines their concerns about clearing the deal.

The assessment from Moglen, whose views on the software industry are often sought out by regulators, could bolster Oracle's efforts to persuade the EU to clear the acquisition after months of delay.

Oracle has received help from lawmakers seeking to speed up the review by the European Commission of its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Fifty-nine U.S. senators have asked the EC to quicken its investigation and have accused the EC of stalling to hurt U.S. businesses.

The EC has been vocal about the $7.4 billion acquisition, saying it may be anticompetitive, and last week pushed the deadline for its review to Jan. 27 from Jan. 19. Some people familiar with the inner workings of the commission said Oracle's hearing could be as early as Dec. 10, according to Reuters. 

Oracle's case for buying Sun Microsystems has failed to convince the European Commission, which issued a statement of objections to the deal on Sunday (15 November).

The European Commission statement said that Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems would harm competition in the profitable database market, marking a departure in competition policy from the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US, which cleared the deal. 

This week carries a new episode in the Sun/Oracle/EU saga: The EU Comission has issued a statement of objections on the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Since I am a Sun employee, I will just provide the basic links, no matter how tempting it might be to go beyond that...

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to In This Week's Episode of the Sun/Oracle Saga...

Yes, thank God that true Open Source (as we knew it 10 years ago) can't be controlled by anyone and everybody has the right to fork the software (as has already been done by forking into Drizzle or MariaDB). 

According to the filing, the company lost $120 million, or 16 cents a share, on revenue of $2.24 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 27. During the same period a year ago, Sun lost $1.68 billion, or $2.24 a share, on $2.99 billion in sales.

Oracle, (ORCL) which is trying to buy Sun Microsystems (JAVA) for $9.50 a share, has been concerned that the smaller company's financial position will be hurt by delays in the acquisition. On Friday, Sun filed its 10-Q report with its results for the third quarter, and the numbers proved that Oracle was correct to be concerned.

Reading Sun's investor earnings release for Q1 FY10 here we can see that one of the few billing line items that has grown quarter by quarter throughout FY08, FY09 and now into FY10 is the MySQL/Infrastructure. As fiscal year FY09 came to a close we can see that billings for MySQL/Infrastructure where $313m up from $208m the previous fiscal year.

On April 20, 2009, Oracle announced that it has agreed to acquire Sun Microsystems. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and until such time as the transaction closes, the companies remain separate and independent companies and it is business as usual.

"Yes, Oracle plans to continue Sun’s “desktop to datacenter virtualization” strategy and integrate with Oracle’s virtualization products. By unifying management across desktop virtualization, server virtualization, storage virtualization, and network virtualization, Oracle and Sun provide comprehensive, flexible, eco-efficient solutions to maximize utilization, consolidate to reduce costs, increase productivity, and decrease management complexity.

Oracle recently updated their FAQ document on the acquisition of Sun Microsystems  (JAVA on NASDAQ currently trading at $8.20 against a $9.50 purchase price by Oracle).  There is a lot of encouraging news about OpenOffice, Glassfish, MySQL, Solaris and SPARC.

There is no shortage of people calling for Oracle to sell MySQL. I keep reading that Oracle should sell MySQL to "a suitable third-party" or to a "neutral third party." I understand why these people feel passionate about this, but "loose" terminology like this is always dangerous.

I am going to take the words of my colleague Tim Bray to explain my own position regarding the acquisition of Sun by Oracle:

[Disclosure: I have no non-public information on any of the MySQL-related
aspects of the Sun/Oracle transaction, nor on the current anti-trust review,
and I am not speaking for anyone but myself.]

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union told Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) on Wednesday that it has failed to produce hard evidence to placate concerns that its purchase of Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O) would hurt competition.

The comments by EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes suggested that Oracle would not win approval for the $7 billion acquisition any time soon, and sent Sun shares falling 2.8 percent.

What happens when a large software company like Oracle acquires a struggling hardware company that has passed its prime like SUN?

Here some answers out of the web:
The advertisement is a sign of how seriously Oracle views the Sun customer base as part of the value of Sun. At JavaOne, Ellison said Oracle has sold many database systems to run on Sun servers. Linux servers make up its fastest growing business, but Sparc/Solaris platforms remain its largest installed base, he said.
www.informationwee.com

Oracle has much to say to Sun Microsystems customers in a front-page advertisement it placed in Thursday's European edition of The Wall Street Journal.

The advertisement commits to greater investments in Sun hardware and Solaris software, but has absolutely nothing to say about MySQL. Is this a necessary omission to appease European regulators, or is it a sign of Oracle's intentions?