Oracle Completes Its Acquisition of Sun Microsystems
The January 2010 transaction that put Java, Solaris, MySQL, and major server assets under Oracle—and reshaped their communities.
Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems on January 27, 2010 after regulatory review. The transaction combined Oracle’s database/application business with Sun’s Java platform, Solaris, SPARC systems, storage products, and stewardship of projects including MySQL.
Ownership did not produce one uniform outcome. Some products continued under Oracle; community responses contributed to forks and independent governance, including LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org and Illumos from OpenSolaris code. Java governance continued through the JCP and OpenJDK ecosystem under a different corporate balance.
Nine months from announcement to closing
The deal was announced on April 20, 2009: $9.50 per share in cash, valuing the transaction at roughly $7.4 billion, or about $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. It followed the collapse of acquisition talks with IBM earlier that same month, and it landed while Sun was losing money in the wake of the 2008–2009 downturn.
The U.S. Department of Justice cleared the merger in August 2009. The European Commission did not: on September 3, 2009 it opened an in-depth investigation centered on one question — what would happen to MySQL, the open-source database Sun had bought in January 2008, inside the world’s largest proprietary-database vendor. The Commission issued a formal statement of objections on November 9, 2009. Oracle responded in December with ten public commitments about MySQL’s future, including continued GPL releases, maintained storage-engine APIs, and increased development funding for several years. On January 21, 2010 the Commission cleared the deal without formal conditions, reasoning that other open-source databases and the realistic prospect of MySQL forks would continue to constrain Oracle. The acquisition closed six days later.
The nine-month limbo had its own cost. Sun’s losses continued while customers deferred purchases, waiting to learn whether Solaris, SPARC, and MySQL would remain strategic products — an object lesson in how a long regulatory review weighs on the company being acquired.
The exodus and the forks
The clearest signal of community sentiment was who left and what got forked. XML co-creator Tim Bray left in February 2010; Java creator James Gosling resigned in April 2010; DTrace co-creator Bryan Cantrill departed in July 2010. In August 2010 it became clear that Oracle would stop releasing OpenSolaris, and the community’s answer was Illumos, which still underpins distributions such as OmniOS and SmartOS. In September 2010, leading OpenOffice.org contributors formed The Document Foundation and forked the suite as LibreOffice; Oracle donated the remaining OpenOffice code to the Apache Software Foundation the following year. After Oracle applied for a trademark on the name of the Hudson continuous-integration server in December 2010, the project voted on January 11, 2011 to rename itself Jenkins. MySQL’s original author, Michael “Monty” Widenius, had already seeded MariaDB before the deal closed. In each case the fork, not the original, is where most community development ended up.
Java under new management
Java stayed — and became the acquisition’s longest-running storyline. In August 2010, Oracle sued Google over the use of Java API declarations in Android, litigation that ran more than a decade until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April 2021 that Google’s copying was fair use. On the platform side, Oracle shipped Java 7 in 2011 after a five-year gap between major releases, kept OpenJDK as the reference implementation, and later moved the platform to a six-month release cadence. Solaris and SPARC fared worse: development was progressively wound down, and the 2017 layoffs in those groups effectively ended new SPARC hardware.
The acquisition ended Sun as an independent company but not the technologies or communities it had created. Related: The Unix Wars: AT&T, BSD, Sun, OSF, and the Standards That Outlived Them · ARPANET’s First Message: Why ‘LO’ Reached SRI Before the System Crashed
Sources: Sun’s April 2009 merger announcement (SEC 8-K exhibit), Oracle completion announcement filed with the SEC, European Commission merger decision