REDWOOD SHORES, USA - In a move which is all set to redefine the software industry, Oracle has finalized the deal with Sun Microsystems, thereby completing the US$7.4 billion acquisition deal finalized in April last year.

Founded in 1982, Sun Microsystems was headquartered in Santa Clara, California and operated a wide range of products ranging from servers and workstations to software solutions including Solaris, Java, MySQL and NFS. Perhaps the most notable contribution of Sun was in the open source community with its acquisition of StarOffice German company StarDivision in 1999 and its subsequent release as OpenOffice under open source license in 2000. Throughout the last decade Sun has been an active player in open source industry, starting with its phased release of OpenSolaris, its high-end operating system, followed by acquisitions of MySQL, Virtual box, etc. in the open source domain. Further, rumours suggest that Sun was even toying with the idea of releasing its own Linux distribution but it never materialised.

Other than its contribution to the open source community, Sun's most visible contribution is its cross-platform programming language - Java.  A language which revolutionized the software industry with its reach extending from web technologies to  mobile applications. In fact, every major software company uses Java in at least one of their products. Further, in the pre-iPhone days, Java application and games dominated the smartphone segment bringing productivity and gaming suites to a wide range of mobile platforms.

The acquisition of Sun by Oracle has been one of the most widely debated topics especially in the European Union. The bone of contention being the clash of interest between Sun's open source database management solution MySQL and Oracle's RDBMS. With several software companies using the freely available MySQL solutions within their products, Oracle's acquisition of its competitor raises a question of fair trade practices. Oracle may phase out MySQL in order to promote its priced variant RDBMS. While at this stage it is too early to predict such a drastic move, a slow phaseout of MySQL can be expected over the years, giving a deathblow to open source community as well as several of the product partners presently using MySQL.