Practical Technology

The big money software companies, like Microsoft, still rely on proprietary software for their profits. Things are changing though. While businesses like Microsoft and Sun are seeing their profits and growth decline, pure open-source play companies like Red Hat are actually gaining customers and profits in a down economy. Take Red Hat for example. In [...]

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Last week, I argued that the European Commission, the European Union’s top competition authority, was wasting its time delaying Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Since then, I’ve heard from Henrik Ingo, the COO (chief operating officer) for Monty Program Ab, the MySQL fork headed by MySQL’s founder Michael “Monty” Widenius. He has a different take on [...]

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The European Commission, the European Union’s top competition authority, has opened an in-depth investigation into Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion takeover of Sun, and, until they’re done, it won’t approve the Oracle/Sun acquisition. Are you kidding me? This is so wrong-headed in so many ways. First, the commission’s reason for doing this, explained Competition Commissioner Neelie [...]

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You can’t make up results as bad as this. Sun Microsystems, in its last days as an independent company has announced absolutely horrible preliminary numbers for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, which ended June 30, 2009. According to the company, Sun expects revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 in the range of [...]

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People outside of IT seldom think of Oracle as a Linux company, but it is. Not only does Oracle encourage its customers to use its own house-brand clone of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Oracle has long used Linux internally both on its servers and on some of its desktops. So, what [...]

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