Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Following weeks of speculation over whether and on what terms IBM would purchase Sun, it's now database giant Oracle which is to take over the ailing business, with the result that OpenSolaris, Java, MySQL and OpenOffice are now under new management.

I'd thought about Oracle buying Sun. But, then I thought, "Larry Ellison isn't that dumb." Well, I was wrong. Ellison is that dumb. Oracle is buying Sun in what may be the most moronic technology acquisition of the 21st century. I've looked at the Oracle/Sun deal. I've read Ellison's explanation as to why the buyout makes sense. I don't see it. I don't see any upside to this deal. And, on top of that, Oracle, which spent $7.4 billion for Sun, vastly overpaid for the company. This deal will make money for Sun's executives and stockholders, but it will prove to be a disaster for Sun's users, developers, and employees.

More layoffs are expected at Sun Microsystems Inc. as a result of Oracle Corp.'s planned $7.4 billion acquisition, with one Wall Street analyst predicting today that as many as 10,000 people could lose their jobs at the Silicon Valley icon. Oracle expects that Sun's operations will contribute $1.5 billion in operating profits during the software vendor's next fiscal year and $2 billion the following year. That would make the Sun deal "more profitable in per-share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined," Oracle President Safra Catz said as part of the buyout announcement, referring to the three other large acquisitions made by Oracle in recent years.

Database giant Oracle has agreed to purchase Sun Microsystems in a deal worth $7.4 billion, according to a story in eWEEK. Oracle wants Sun more for its hardware than its software, and may choose to jettison Sun's open source offerings, including MySQL, says eWEEK. The $7.4 billion deal, or about $9.50 a share, is considerably more than the $6.5 billion that IBM had offered the struggling technology firm before talks broke down earlier this month, notes today's story by Nicholas Kolakowski in our sister publication eWEEK. Sun’s board of directors is said to have unanimously approved the transaction, which should close sometime this summer.

Martin Kool, a developer from Web applications specialist Q42, has released his open source multi-player game engine. Sarien.net is a "portal for reliving the classic Sierra On-Line adventure games" and is completely browser based. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome are all supported.

Qt Software and the KDE e.V. are happy to report that they are sponsoring a developer sprint for all North American students accepted into Google Summer of Code 2009 to work on KDE. The event will be completely free for all accepted students, with round-trip flights, lodging, and some meals fully reimbursed; all students that applied for GSoC 2009 are welcome to attend, although those not accepted into the program will not be reimbursed for travel and lodging expenses.

There are many things which could be said to be a part of the Unix philosophy. One of those, certainly, is that the operating system should stay out of the user's way to the greatest extent possible, even if said user is intent on doing something harmful. There is a classic quote attributed to Eric Allman:

"Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself -- and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure."

Have a spare PC gathering dust? Turn it into a multi-purpose server using the Linux-based ZeroShell. Firewall, authentication server, wireless portal, proxy, virtual LAN, DNS/DHCP, load balancing, and a lot more in a compact Linux distribution. Eric Geier shows us how.

The OpenEMR project has released version 3.0 on SourceForge. The new release has integrated practice management, improved multi-language support, and E-Prescribing. We have packaged a very easy to install Windows version using Xampp version 1.7.0. Thanks! “Friends of Apache.” What we have in the works is a Debian package, an RPM package and integration of the HHS required interoperability module, laboratory communication module, and with some infrastructure improvements are hoping to be compatible with CCHIT certification by the end of this summer. Sam Bowen, MD

Oracle Corp. may have decided to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. because it is worth far more to the database market leader than it was to IBM. It's not a question of the price — at $7.4 billion, Oracle didn't agree to pay much more than what IBM was reportedly considering. But Oracle may have more use for Sun's technology than IBM ever did. In explaining his decision to make the acquisition today, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison boiled down Sun into a company of two key assets: Java and the Solaris operating system.

The OLPC project developers have announced an upgraded version of their XO-1 laptop, the XO-1.5. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is a non-profit organisation who's mission is to provide children across the world with low cost laptops for the purposes of self-education.

Sun Microsystems — and what would happen to it — has been in the news for some weeks, amid rumors, then negotiations, then rumors, again, concerning the flailing company's future. The now-infamous IBM purchase and its spectacular failure earlier this month exponentially increased speculation — speculation that was put to rest this morning when it was revealed that database-giant Oracle will be adding Sun to its solar system.

Oracle Corp. plans to acquire Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion, picking up what might prove to be a software treasure trove that includes the popular MySQL open-source database as well as Java. Oracle said it will pay $9.50 per share in cash for Sun, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The move follows Oracle's purchases of a raft of companies in the past few years, including Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft and BEA Systems.

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked a federal judge to extend her antitrust judgment against Microsoft Corp. by at least 18 months in order to give the company enough time to fix problems in technical documentation required in a communication protocols licensing program. The DOJ today filed documents asking Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to extend her oversight of the Microsoft antitrust settlement. The antitrust order, originally scheduled to expire in November 2007, has already been extended by two years because of complaints about the state of the technical documentation.

Sun Microsystems Inc. would be willing to resume acquisition talks if International Business Machines Corp. makes a stronger commitment to complete the purchase, two people familiar with the matter said. The companies are locked in a stalemate after negotiations fell apart almost two weeks ago, said the people, who declined to be identified because the information is confidential. There were no discussions as of yesterday and each company is waiting for the other to make a move, the people said.

Microsoft and Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire this morning held a news conference in downtown Seattle to announce the company's donation of 30,000 vouchers for people in the state to learn new computer skills, positioning themselves for better jobs. As a point of clarification, officials were asked whether the vouchers would be good for learning non-Microsoft programs, too. For the record, that would be a big no. "Our programs are rather popular," explained Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, with a grin. Smith made it clear that the company isn't about to see its donation, with a value of at least $3 million on the low end, used to promote the use of competing programs. At the same time, he said Microsoft "would be thrilled" if other companies in the software industry took similar steps to promote training on their own products.

The Linux Foundation has finally chosen the winning entry for their "We're Linux" video contest. And the result is some coloured squiggles with a European accent telling us how awesome freedom is.

In late December AMD had published open-source R600/700 3D code that also allowed for 2D and X-Video acceleration, but was not of use to end-users interested in full OpenGL acceleration. AMD had then released the R600/700 3D documentation a month later and then the R700 ISA documentation just a few weeks back. Today, however, AMD is finally pushing some workable code into a public code repository.

OLPC is excited to announce that a refresh of the XO-1 laptop is in progress. In our continued effort to maintain a low price point, OLPC is refreshing the hardware to take advantage of the latest component technologies. This refresh (Generation 1.5) is separate from the Generation 2.0 project, and will continue using the same industrial design and batteries as Gen 1. The design goal is to provide an overall update of the system within the same ID and external appearance.

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, has announced in his blog, that the Common Public Licence (CPL) has been superseded by the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). The move comes as the result of cooperation between the Foundation and IBM to help reduce licence proliferation.