Thushan Fernando Uncut

Oracle Corporation

Sun Microsystems

In what may come as a suprise to everyone, Oracle Corporation has bought Sun MicroSystems for a cool $7.4Billion benjamins. IBM was eying a buyout for quite sometime but (I reckons for the better of mankind) has failed to secure the epic deal.

Question is, what will happen to the buyouts such as VirtualBox (Oracle has a hypervisor which launched in 2007 and is based on the Xen Hypervisor), MySQL which was acquired by Sun a while ago (Oracle has this little RDBMS called Oracle btw), OpenOffice which will have another O  added to it (oooo  its OOo).

On the brighter side though, Oracle did kick off in 2007 the upcoming Btrfs filesystem and with Sun messing about with CDDL and patents in ZFS, maybe we can finally get something happenning to push ZFS into Linux?

Then theres the future of Java, DTrace, oh gosh so so many questions, so many unknowns. I guess we’ll have to follow the white rabbit and see how things goes Neo.

A few days ago OpenOffice 3.0 got released after 3 long years of development. You should download a copy and give it ago. To be perfectly honest, because of my MSDN suby’s I never really needed OpenOffice nor did I particularly like v2.x, but v3.0 is a breath of fresh minty air with a ray of bright Sun light beaming down from the heavens. The only times I’ve ever tried was under Linux, and even then I’ve often gone for Abiword instead to avoid the bloat.

It feels far more responsive than the 2.x versions I’ve tried, heck it even loads a helluva lot faster too and doesnt seem to chew up the resources 2.x did.

The Office Word compatibility has improved greatly. Learn more about OpenOffice 3.0 on the Linux Format article.

Then if that wasnt enough, Microsoft today launched Silverlight 2, which finally heads out of beta. Havent had a great deal of time to play with Silverlight but from the demos it looks kick–ass.