A few people seem to be sweating about MySQL. It would not be stressing about MySQL too much. It could get spun off, who knows. It’s even possible, as some commenters on Techcrunch say, that Oracle might use the free MySQL offering to hammer Microsoft’s database market from the bottom-up

It’s more touch-and-go in the app-server market (what Oracle likes to call ‘middleware’) which is already suffering a little from Oracle’s transition over to BEA Weblogic from its older products. Sun has excellent products in that area, i.e. Glassfish. I have used all of these products (plus Websphere and JBoss) and Glassfish is easily the nicest (in fact I would say it’s the best app-server I’ve used, apart from plain old Tomcat).

And what will happen to Java? Of course, Oracle wants Java, that’s part of the reason they are buying Sun in the first place (as well as their hardware business). But will IBM play along now it’s most critical competitor owns Java (and IBM has previously bet its software integration farm on the Java stack)? And what of the JCP?

Even more worrying for some, is what will happen in the IDE space. Of course, I’m a confirmed Eclipse man, but it is always a worry when competition is reduced. What will happen to Netbeans? And dare I say it … JDeveloper is fairly horrible compared to Netbeans but will that save either of them? Oracle’s got a lot invested into it’s tooling, which all runs on JDeveloper. As much as I prefer to just write code, that use wizards, Oracle does seem to have at least some customers in that area. Oracle’s development model tends to focus a little too much on magic wizards. From the IDE-JDeveloper-to-the-app-server single click-to-deploy, drag-and-drop to create-the-control, easy-peasy wizardry, which I hate, because I think it gets in the way of craftmanship. It’s the Bunnings Warehouse of software development. Show me the command-line Oracle! you should remember, that Sun is most definitely a company built around the Unix shell prompt. Even with Oracle middleware, it’s definitely possible, I’ve just been working on command-line deployment automation for their older Orion-based app-server, they just don’t like to promote it.

I’m hoping that Sun can reverse-ferret them on that score and teach them about Ant, Maven, /bin/sh and the goodness of installations that are as simple as tar xcf in the spot you want to install it.

Sun Microsystems is getting some love from Wall Street after its sales and earnings topped estimates, as detailed by Bloomberg. Software sales jumped 21 percent year-over-year.

What is fueling the growth? The same thing that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has doggedly said would lift Sun’s fortunes again: open source.

via Open source makes Sun’s quarter shine | The Open Road – CNET News.

If this approach is validated going forward the next year or two, will it change the software industry radically? Quite possibly. Remember this is not a five-man company selling training and consultancy services leveraged off it’s founders’ successful open source software effort, nor even a much larger company set up solely to market and sell services and support contracts based around packaged open source distributions. Sun is a big vendor, which has had to turn its ship of business around almost 180 degrees to get where it’s going now. And maybe, just maybe, it’s on a winning course now.