Earlier last week, an alumnus from the Georgia Tech Student Foundation asked what my thought were on the Oracle proposed deal to buy Sun, the company. Earlier we had seen IBM being looked at as the possible acquirer, but similar to the Microsoft and Yahoo deal, IBM decided not to go for the acquisition. . Oracle offered to pay $9.50/share from trading $6.69, the previous business day. Here are a few things to consider.

The Effect on Open Source

Sun currently owns numberous open source projects:

• MySQL (a database software that is a low cost, less implementation of Oracle Databases)
• Virtualbox (Virtual Machine engine for Linux)
• Java (was to be open sourced, now we will see)
• Open Office and Sun Office

Oracle has traditionally been more commercial in their interests (part of the reason they can acquire a company) so the question is how will Oracle treat these open projects, will they let them branch off, close them and cut support, or will they continue to open the software like IBM tends to do and offer services in line with them? Will oracle move toward a more open model with consulting as their business model?

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Pricing

The 42% premium that Oracle Offered Sun seems like a great pricing that will limit opposition to the takeover that could hurt both companies. Apparently,  Sun seemed appropriately valued and has some growth opportunities for Oracle. Their horizontal players in the software market don’t hurt competitive advantage against the likes of Microsoft SQL either.

Of course, now that the general stock market is going up (particularly the Nasdaq), perhaps Oracle is getting a steal!

acquisitions, competitive advantage, ibm, Java, Linux, mergers, Open source, Oracle, pricing, Sun

The Reason

So this last weekend, my brother was visiting from Washington State, and inconveniently enough his windows laptop started gettinga blue screen of death as it booted up. Apparently, windows update had automatically installed an update that did not work for his computer and he needed a Windows cd with a recovery console which he obviously didn’t have access to.

My brother is also a bit of a by the books person and demands that his computer be up to date with everything, windows update,. anti virus, a strong firewall, and anything else — which makes this even more satisfying — that when you try hard it can break things.

My Solution

So we are at my parents’ house and they don’t have a Windows XP disk either. I recommend that maybe Dan try booting from USB to Ubuntu — unfortunately, his Dell custom bios in a 2ghz P4 did not have an option to boot from bios! How!

Anyway, so he downloaded and burned the cd, which loaded amazingly fast on his 2gb of ram and to which he happily saw that everything worked, even his hardline ethernet that he had somehow turned off in overally strict firewall configuration, and his wireless cards which appear to be the driver that got updated.

He also thought that it was amazing to have a live cd, the wireless setup so easy, and everything to just work and be somewhat intuitive, especially with firefox in beta.

But Freedom Require Flexibility

Soon he was considering installing Ubuntu in another partition, but wanted to know if he could run his Norton system utilities in wine! This was very frustrating, and hard to explain, but he basically wanted to use only what he was used to, and basically said that he was going to switch back to Windows immediately only because he wanted to use the things that he was familiar with. Anyway, I came back to the city and grabbed a Windows CD to which he quickly cowered back to — to run his Norton checks, de-fragmentation, and service pack 3 updates.

Flexibility in Perspective

The world has only been using Windows XP since 2003, and 32bit Windows for 13 years. Despite the newer graphical user interfaces of Kde/Gnome/OSX that have shown themselves to be be more intuitive and easy for the unadapted people fixed in their ways are still afraid of change, despite the idea that that change might be better.

Dan, Flexibility, Linux, Ubuntu, Windows