A few weeks ago, it was common knowledge that IBM was going to aquire Sun Microsystems. That deal has subsequently been canceled and today, Sun Microsystems anounced that they will now be bought out by Oracle.

Oracle is a large proprietary software company that specialises in large database applications. Sun Microsystems is responsible for lots of software we encounter often in the free software world, such as OpenOffice.org, MySQL, OpenSolaris, Java and projects such as the ZFS filesystem.

I was much more comfortable when IBM were buying Sun, either way, when large companies buy over other large companies, entire projects can be trashed or morphed to the point where they don’t provide the value to the larger ecosystem they they did before, especially when the technologies they buy compete with their existing technologies.

Fun times, I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out.