Pardon the gap in transmission, I've been working very hard on papers for school. My weekly essays are all one-pagers about current news articles, so it hit me today - why not post them in my blog?

This is my first paper from four weeks ago. The teacher docked one point out of ten for being too opinionated in the response. Haven't made that mistake yet. I'll publish each of my other papers later, perhaps this weekend.

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Article

Title: Oracle gets clearance by Justice Dept. for Sun acquisitionDate: Aug 20, 2009, 5:01 p.m. EST

URL: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-gets-doj-clearance-for-sun-acquisition-2009-08-20

Summary

The US Federal Governement has approved the purchase of Sun Microsystem by database software company Oracle. Although many different sites reported the event, I opted to write about the article in Market Watch because they restated a very important fact I had since forgotten - "Sun acquired MySQL AB, the developer of MySQL, for $1 billion in early 2008."

Reaction

The purchase brings good news to Sun, whose stock price dropped drastically in 2007. The software company that maintains the Java programming language will likely find some new stability as a result. I am concerned about the impact on the MySQL community, as well as implications on competition between the two database technologies. Will Oracle eventually kill off development on MySQL? What does this mean for the billions of companies (like my own) that rely on MySQL to do business?