The end of the world, as we know it?

I guess you all heard by now that Oracle is buying Sun. I can only hope that Oracle will continue to invest in technologies such as OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, ZFS/OpenStorage and SPARC(R) Rock.

I'm not quite sure exactly what Oracle is after, but at least they can stop developing their own filesystem now that they have ZFS and Java is probably something Oracle would like to have more control over. It must also be convenient to get that little free database, they already have a quite complex licensing model, ready to be applied to another engine ;)

I guess it much better for Solaris than if IBM was the buyer, Oracle have had Solaris as their preferred platform for a long time and doesn't have any own hardware or Unix flavor. We have to hope that all the great minds of Sun stays with the ship and gets to continue their work.

At least some good news has come out of this:

"In our opinion, Sun Solaris is by far the best Unix operating system in the business. With the acquisition of Sun, we will be able to uniquely integrate Sun Solaris and the Oracle database." -Larry Ellison

Perhaps this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?