Oracle buys Sun?

Oracle and Sun announced an agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun. What do I think?

It's better than IBM. And it is aimed at IBM.

IBM and Sun seemed to have a lot of overlap. Certainly IBM has a well defined hardware business, and acquiring Sun's hardware business doesn't really help. IBM is heavily invested in Java so I'm sure they would have enjoyed more influence over its growth and direction, but it didn't really seem compelling.

Oracle on the other hand puts the final piece of the puzzle together. Oracle is now a credible Enterprise IT partner. With the addition of Sun's hardware business, Oracle can compete with IBM at nearly every level. If I'm a large company, I can turn to Oracle for:

Storage Solutions
Servers
Database
Enterprise Software Packages
Custom Enterprise Software Development (Java, WebLogic, etc.)

If you are a large company, you can either hand your checkbook over to Oracle or IBM. Or Microsoft+HP.

As a user of Java and MySQL, I'm hopeful that they will at least continue on as is and hopefully improve. I don't expect any real changes in either for a while though.