News just out: Oracle purchases Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion: http://bit.ly/t2qgA. I'm not completely sure how I feel about this acquisition yet, as I'm not convinced that Oracle is all that Open Source friendly. I would have preferred to see IBM acquire Sun because I believe that they would have completely Open Sourced Java and would have done a good job at managing the other projects like MySQL, VirtualBox, etc. Oracle has their own DB system, so why would they care about MySQL? I'm really hoping they'll just give it back to the community. Oracle has their own virtualization platform, so why would they care about VirtualBox? I suppose similar questions could be posed about an IBM acquisition. On a different note, I wasn't really impressed with Oracle's (seemingly) seperatist move on the Linux community with the development of their own Linux distribution in recent years: Unbreakable Linux (the name sounds so crass and arrogant to me). None the less, Sun's Board of Directors unanimously approved the agreement, so I'm assuming terms have been made that are in a good light for all things Sun. As the next few weeks and months pass, we'll see how certain things fair for the OSS community. I still hold to the position that coprorations have no business acquiring and owning OSS projects, unless of course, they create it themselves. What are your thoughts on the issue? How much faith in Oracle do you have?

Image Credits: Peter Kaminski: http://bit.ly/koRRk, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.