Oracle wins unconditional EU approval for Sun buy and will reshape the high-tech landscape, with Oracle, the world’s No. 2 business software maker, moving into the hardware business. Sun is the top player in the $17 billion high-end computer-server market.
I’m not an Oracle fanboy so let’s keep this simple. Sun has developed quite a few noteworthy applications and here are some that I personally use. If they can be taken care of and given the freedom to continue to improve and spread their wings and kept out of Oracle’s range of bloatware, that would be great.
Sun’s Useful Free Open Source Softwares
MySQL
The most popular open source relational database management system (RDBMS) acquired by Sun back in 2008. Let’s hope Oracle doesn’t kill it since it competes with Oracle in the database market.
Oracle promised in December 2009 to keep the market open for others to make storage engine software for Sun’s MySQL database and to boost investment in the unit after the European Commission launched an in-depth investigation of the deal. It also pledged to set up a separate customer advisory board of MySQL users.
Netbeans
Seriously, Netbeans is simply the best free IDE I’ve used so far. Again, it competes with Oracle’s JDeveloper but I’ve never used JDeveloper so not much to say about that. If you happen to used both, please leave a comment and let me know what are the pros and cons of both.
VirtualBox
Free open source virtualization software. I don’t see a threat from Oracle here, but who knows?!
Java
Did you know that JDK 6 is open source? Oracle has written lots of software in Java for a long time and if there’s really one thing good that can be drawn out of this acquisition, it’s simply the merge of technology and exchange of knowledge between one of the company that writes lots of Java /software applications (Oracle) and the core Java programming language itself.
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