Oracle's plans for Sun technologies: Java, MySQL, SPARC, Solaris, Sun Cloud, and OpenSSO

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 4, 2016

Here's a brief look at several news stories related to Oracle's purchase of Sun, along with direct links to Oracle documents detailing their plans for Sun technologies like Java and MySQL on the Oracle website.

Oracle plans for Java

Looking at various Oracle/Sun news stories, it looks like Java is safe for the time being. As one reporter at ZDNet says it, Oracle's Java strategy is 'business as usual'".

Also interesting from that story is the sort of thing Oracle says that scares me, including this comment about NetBeans:

... NetBeans, which Oracle's middleware chief Thomas Kurian characterized as a "lightweight development environment" ...

(Of course they recommend that you buy JDeveloper.)

That article and the following articles also talk about the Java Community Process, though I don't see that anything clear is stated about Oracle's intention for that process.

Oracle on Java and JavaOne

Here are a few more interesting Oracle quotes regarding Java and JavaOne, this time from an Infoworld article:

All our next-generation applications are written in Java. We have a vested interest to see that Java remains successful.

Sounds good to me.

JavaOne, the annual Java technical conference historically held in June, will continue but will instead be held as part of the Oracle OpenWorld Conference September 19-23 in San Francisco.

So JavaOne isn't a standalone conference any more. I haven't gone to JavaOne in several years now, so this isn't a big deal to me, but if you don't use Oracle and you want to go to JavaOne, that seems awkward.

Oracle plans for MySQL

Oracle is currently saying all the right things about MySQL support, and for that matter, most of Sun's hardware platforms. Here are some bullet items from their website:

Oracle plans to spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now.
Oracle plans to spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now.
Oracle plans to spend more money developing MySQL than Sun does now.

You can find these quotes and more information on Oracle's website page related to the Sun acquisition.

Oracle: Sun Cloud is dead

In a separate article, Infoworld clearly reports that Sun Cloud is dead:

"We're not going to be offering the Sun Cloud service," said Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect.

If nothing else, that's very clear.

Oracle and OpenSSO

Oracle doesn't explicitly come out and say that OpenSSO is dead, but they do seem to imply that Sun's identity management products will be rolled into Oracle's identity management products ... I initially interpreted this is Oracle killing off OpenSSO, but I just added some comments below that, if true, indicate that this is not correct.

I hope OpenSSO has a long and healthy life. I have enjoyed working with it, and of course it just won the 2009 security product of the year award from developer.com.