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AFAICT, Oracle bought Sun to get at their (really x86_64) hardware business, to compete with HP/IBM. One quick ref that kinda shows this angle: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Oracle-buy-Sun

The rest of Sun was just extra. So Oracle's seeing if they can use them. If they find that they can't they'll just dump them. As they're doing now.



I thought they bought Sun for Java, especially the (then-ongoing) lawsuit against Microsoft?


Sun's hardware business is mostly irrelivant, and both IBM and HP are in the process of switching away from providing hardware (Especially IBM). SPARC was already mostly dead by the time that Oracle bought Sun.

The prize Oracle was after is Java, and they have already begun the long process of squeezing large enterprises with Java "commerical" features flags.


The challenge I have with believing that theory is they paid an _awfully_ large sum for just the hardware business.


Perhaps MySQL too as it would be one more major database product under their control.




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