VS. 
All in one day last week, we heard about two major acquisitions that have a fairly strong impact on the LAMP development environment. Both Sun and Oracle made aggressive moves to secure their own somewhat proprietary stack.
Sun bought MySQL for a cool one billion dollars. This means that their stack includes Java, Glassfish, MySQL and Linux or OpenSolaris. Not to be outdone, Oracle announced their acquisition of BEA which includes Weblogic for $8.5 billion. That means that their stack includes Sun’s Java, Webologic, Oracle and Linux.
This represents a fairly major consolidation in the Java development ecosystem. It also marks a large crossover in systems, where these software companies have multiple specialties from databases to programming languages.
One of the major differences between these two companies is their stance on open source software and level of partnering with the community. Sun continues to become more open and collaborative, leveraging the feedback and efforts of the community. Oracle on the other hand, is holding onto the competitive edge of their proprietary code. That edge is eroding quickly and I think Oracle needs to become a better partner and community member if they expect to remain relevant in five years.
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