Oracle to buy Sun: Implications

The acquisition of Sun (Java, MySQL, Solaris, Open Office) by Oracle (database) makes rather negative reactions on forums.

What are the implications for users and webmasters of this acquisition?

Solaris

The Solaris OS is the most often used to run an Oracle database. Becoming possessor of this open source system, Oracle has now less reason to get involved in Linux, so this is a bad news for Linux.

Java

Java is open source, and a GNU version exists for the library functions.
The acquisition should not change much for the language, but NetBeans, the excellent development tool competes with Oracle's JDevelopper which is also member of the Eclipse Foundation. So bad news for NetBeans.

MySQL

The MySQL database competes with the light version of Oracle, Oracle Express. It is not in the interest of the new owner to develop it.
But even if Sun has the brand name, we do not know what it has effectively with MySQL, because in fact the database is open-source and there are several versions maintained by independent groups of developers, sometimes more sophisticated than the version of Sun.
MySQL is also in competition with another free software, PostGreSQL that is better.

Open Office

By buying Sun, Oracle becomes the owner of Star Office, the commercial version, rather than of Open Office, the free open source version. Open office was in fact primarily maintained by Sun developers.
We do not know what are Oracle's intentions towards Open Office. The spirit of the company would rather to be to develop Star Office to compete with Microsoft.

Conclusion

For webmasters and many actors in free software, this announce is a black day and they would have preferred an acquisition by Google.
The merge creates a direct competitor to IBM which has had made a bid also, estimated less interesting.

Official announcement: Oracle to buy Sun.