Oracle's reasons for buying Sun [LWN.net]

Oracle's reasons for buying Sun

Posted Aug 25, 2010 14:55 UTC (Wed) by Blaisorblade (guest, #25465)
In reply to: Other thoughts on Oracle by rfunk
Parent article: A very grumpy editor's thoughts on Oracle

> It looks to me (watching from a very long distance) that Oracle has been driving away a lot of Sun engineers one way or another. It could be that Sun's primary long-term value to Oracle is as a source of patents for trolling.

Notwithstanding with what most answers say, you're at least partially right.
Maybe this suit was not the primary reason for buying Sun, but it was in the deal[3]. That has been confirmed by at least one source. Miguel de Icaza made the same guess [1], and it was later confirmed by James Gosling, one of Java's creator [3], who said clearly that he couldn't explain, back then, why he left Sun; and it was for exactly this reason [2].

[1] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Aug-13.html - it quotes the following Gosling's blog posts.
[2] http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/time_to_move_on
[3] http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_h...

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