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LAST week's audacious $US7.4 billion ($10.2 billion) play by Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems has drawn comparisons with General Motors' moves in the 1950s to consolidate the US car industry. Oracle has touted the bid as a game changer that will help establish it as the first company to sell software and hardware products end-to-end. Rivals are sceptical of the rhetoric and believe the real motive is to kill off Sun's competing software products, which they say has been a theme of Oracle's buying spree, which has reportedly cost $US34.5 billion since 2005. If approved, Oracle will acquire Sun's global...

While Oracle and Sun Microsystems are hailing Oracle's purchase of Sun [1] as a big boost for Java, others are not so sure, questioning what kind of control Oracle might try to exercise over the popular platform that has driven so many enterprise applications since it was first developed in 1995. Observers also expect Oracle to make a go of trying to make more money off of Java than Sun ever could. Sun has tried to leverage Java as a lead-in to selling services, but without much success. By contrast, Oracle is very disciplined about extracting money from its technologies....

Over the past 13 years, Sun Microsystems' Java language has become one of the computer industry's best known brands—and underappreciated assets. The tension wasn't lost on Sun's new owner, Oracle, which on Apr. 20 said it will purchase Silicon Valley pioneer Sun for $7.4 billion in cash. If Oracle has its way, Java will emerge not only as a strong revenue source but also a key component of plans to keep customers loyal for years to come. During a conference call with analysts Apr. 20, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called Java "the single most important software asset we have ever...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog_post/beyond_the_echo_chamber/ Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm Advice from "beyond the echo chamber" We just learned the economy lost another 600,000 jobs last month. It's a staggering number, and it underscores just how deep this crisis is – and, as the President pointed out this morning, it’s accelerating. That's why he created the Economic Recovery Advisory Board -- to solicit ideas from "beyond the echo chamber of Washington, DC." "I’m not interested in groupthink, which is why the Board reflects a broad cross-section of experience, expertise, and ideology," he said. "We’ve recruited...

Okay, I'll start: 1) Blagojevich walks scott free 2) My salary continues to remain stagnate 3) The bailout results in a massive debt to taxpayers with zero benefit to them 4) Iran aquires nuclear weapons and we (including Bush) failed to do anything about it 5) Jamie Gertz continue's to become even more attractive as she ages

Happy New Year's Eve to all at Free Republic!!! Make your predictions for 2008. Good Luck!!!

Oracle Corp. executives have finally revealed the names of 26 enterprise-class customers that have gone with that company for their Red Hat Linux support needs. However, the number of customers in that list doing wholesale migrations to Oracle's brand of Linux is much smaller. Only the International House of Pancakes is on the record saying Oracle Enterprise Linux completely replaced Red Hat in its data center. In a statement, IHOP CTO Patrick Piccininno said the switch from Red Hat to Oracle Enterprise Linux "couldn't have been easier." Yahoo was previously on the Red Hat-to-Oracle Linux migration list, but that migration...

Oracle Corp accused its German rival SAP AG of hacking into its computers to heist secret product information in a lawsuit that highlights the escalating tensions between two of the world's largest business software makers. "This isn't really about protecting intellectual property," said Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang. "This is all about the art of war." The complaint, filed on Thursday in the San Francisco federal court, alleges that SAP resorted to high-tech skullduggery in a desperate attempt to maintain its leadership in business applications software -- programs that help companies manage a wide range of administrative tasks. Long the...

Oracle announced a deal today to acquire Hyperion Solutions, which makes software that allows corporations to analyze and track their performance, for about $3.3 billion. The deal is the latest trophy in a long string of acquisitions by Oracle, the database software giant that has been struggling to grow from within. In December, Oracle posted strong earnings growth for its second fiscal quarter, but its growth in license sales disappointed investors. The company said at the time that it had failed to close some crucial licensing deals during the quarter. License sales rose 28 percent in the quarter, but that...

Red Hat dismisses threat posed by Oracle and Microsoft 11th December 2006 By Matthew Aslett Red Hat Inc's executive vice president of worldwide sales, Alex Pinchev, has dismissed the impact that Oracle Corp's entry into the Linux support business could have on Red Hat, insisting Oracle does not really know what it is doing. Pinchev also described Microsoft Corp's recent interoperability and patent peace deal with Novell Inc as a "non-event" and dismissed the suggestion that Linux users are at risk of a patent infringement lawsuit from Redmond. Advertisement "They rolled out something that they don't understand," Pinchev told ComputerWire...

Security researchers irked at Oracle's tardiness at releasing patches for security bugs plan to name a different vulnerability in Oracle's enterprise software every day for a week in December. Oracle's quarterly security bulletins typically produce scores of bugs but yet more known bugs lay dormant and unfixed, according to Cesar Cerrudo, founder and chief exec of the Argeniss Security Research Team. Argeniss plans to release a bug a day involving Oracle databases next month in what's been dubbed "The Week of Oracle Database Bugs"(WoODB). Cerrudo said the effort, styled after Metasploit developer H. D. Moore's Month of Browser Bugs project...

Linux leader Red Hat’s stock price recovered slightly Friday, but its market value has still dropped 30% since Oracle announced on Wednesday that it will offer lower-cost support of its applications running on Red Hat.

While it wasn't quite the Linux announcement that had been expected, Oracle Corp.'s latest move will definitely see the company butt heads with the leading distributor of the open-source operating system Red Hat Inc. Oracle will offer "full support" for Red Hat's Linux distribution to both Oracle and non-Oracle customers, Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle Corp., said Wednesday. He was giving the closing keynote at his company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Ellison was widely expected to announce an Oracle-branded version of Linux. He kicked off the rumor mill about such a development back in April when he...

Repeat after me: "There is no Oracle Linux." I don't care how many times you hear stock analysts say that Oracle is about to launch its own Linux. It's just not going to happen. Spread the word: digg this story The latest example of wishful thinking comes from Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert, who wrote on October 13, "Our independent checks in the past two weeks indicate that Oracle seems to be close to introducing its own software 'stack.'" Jefferies, an investment bank, then cut its price target on Red Hat from $24 to $21. Red Hat's stock price...

Former Clinton political hitman James Carville, who recently touted New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for a 2008 presidential run, is reportedly behind an advertising campaign attacking President Bush for his 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock as well as his ties to the oil industry in general. American Family Voices, a group described by the New York Times as "secretive," has paid to run a 30-second commercial on cable news programs in Washington, D.C., and in New York through Thursday. The ad blasts President Bush as "sly like a fox" for talking down his dealings with Harken Energy, which Democrats...

Paul Hipp once played Buddy Holly on Broadway. On Monday night, he sang and played a song in tribute to media star Arianna Huffington in a stage-worthy Pacific Heights mansion on outer Broadway. It was all part of singularly odd way to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- a festive, A-list book-launch party for Huffington's "On Becoming Fearless." The oddness of the evening, hosted by Oracle Corp. founder and CEO Larry Ellison and his romance novelist wife Melanie Ellison, was intentional and carefully planned. Guests began gathering at the Ellison's city showplace with its floor-to-ceiling bay...

Harvard is still waiting for software billionaire Larry Ellison to make good on a $115 million pledge, a year after he announced what would have been the largest single contribution in the university's history. Harvard said on Wednesday it hasn't received a cent from the flamboyant founder and chief executive of software giant Oracle Corp. and that school officials have spent months trying to reach him to discuss the matter -- without success. "Larry Ellison never paid us. The donation was never finalized," said Harvard spokeswoman Sarah Friedell. The university has laid off three people it had hired to help...

(IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Oracle Corp. customers are intrigued by recent comments by Larry Ellison, the company's CEO, suggesting that Oracle might offer its own Linux distribution (see "Update: Oracle eyes launching its own Linux version"). Users would welcome the tighter integration offered by a complete Oracle software stack of operating system, database, middleware and applications, they said in interviews this week. "An Oracle-hatched version of Linux would undoubtedly be the most optimal when running Oracle [databases]," said Tony Jedlinski, vice president of administration and warehouse operations at Roman Inc., a wholesale giftware distributor in Addison, Ill. "I don't know...

Oracle is studying whether to launch its own version of the Linux operating system and has looked at buying one of the two companies currently dominating the Linux world, according to Larry Ellison, the software company’s chief executive officer. Such a move would redraw the software landscape and open a new front in Oracle’s long rivalry with US rival Microsoft. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Ellison said that Oracle wanted to sell a full “stack” of software that, like Microsoft, included both operating system and applications. “I’d like to have a complete stack,” he said. “We’re missing...

Over the next five years, Oracle is predicting annual growth of 12 percent for the open source OS Linux adoptions are to grow in the next three to five years at nearly triple the rate of Windows, according to Oracle. In an interview at the LinuxWorld conference in Sydney, the database company suggested Linux deployments had grown beyond an adoption phase, and were now becoming ubiquitous in small and large businesses alike. Monica Kumar, director of Oracle's Linux programme office, pointed to the open source operating system becoming mainstream as "businesses are looking to Linux as a way to save...