sun

Following a string of acquisitions the past few years, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is now setting his sights on buying into the semiconductor market.

In a Q&A at Oracle's financial analyst meeting yesterday, Ellison said he would be interested in acquiring a chipmaker as part of an effort to own more of the intellectual property behind computer chips. The CEO said that he wants to follow the approach of Apple, which has bought semiconductor manufacturers to help it produce the iPhone and iPad, according to Bloomberg News.

"Our focus is to build our (intellectual property) portfolio...… Read more

We know it's hot up there, but NASA wants to know a bit more about the sun and its atmosphere. And so sometime before 2018, the agency intends to send a spacecraft into the solar atmosphere.

This will mark the first time that a spacecraft from Earth will actually visit a star.

The decision to chart a mission to the sun also realizes a dream that astronomers almost realized a half century ago, when the National Academy of Science's "Simpson Committee" in 1958 recommended a probe to investigate. Several studies were subsequently carried out to test … Read more

An end has come to a major part of Sun Microsystems' attempt to transform Solaris from a proprietary version of Unix to an open-source operating system built by others, too.

Instead of becoming a rival to the broadly developed Linux operating system, control over the OpenSolaris project essentially on Monday reverted to its new corporate master, Oracle, which acquired Sun and its assets in January. After Oracle gave the group the cold shoulder, the OpenSolaris Governing Board voted unanimously to disband, according to meeting minutes.

Some of the initiative to build an open-source version of Solaris remains at a new project called Illumos, … Read more

Five years after Sun Microsystems began a bold effort to rejuvenate Solaris by attracting outside programming involvement, Oracle apparently is scrapping what remains of the OpenSolaris project.

Oracle acquired the Sun version of Unix in January, but has shown little of Sun's interest in building a vibrant external community of programmers around Solaris to match some of Linux's collaborative advantages. The OpenSolaris board has been left in limbo with no contact from the company for months. Even with no official communications, though, Oracle's inattention sent a strong indirect message that OpenSolaris wasn't on the company's … Read more

Sun executives were hardly happy when Google revealed how Android would make use of some Java technology without paying Sun any license fees. But it took Oracle's cold calculation and financial strength to turn that dissatisfaction into a lawsuit.

On Thursday, Oracle sued Google for patent and copyright infringement concerning use of Java in Android, setting the stage for an expensive, potentially protracted clash of titans. "In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly, and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property," the company said in a statement.

Although Android's success is new, its software components aren't. … Read more

Two Silicon Valley heavyweights are about to reenact the Java wars: this time, in a court room.

Oracle issued a press release late Thursday saying it has filed suit against Google for infringing on copyrights and patents related to Java, which Oracle acquired along with Sun Microsystems earlier this year. The terse release claimed Google "knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property."

A copy of the complaint (PDF), which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, says that "Android (including without limitation the Dalvik VM and the Android software development kit) and devices that operate Android infringe one or more claims of each of United States Patents Nos. 6,125,447; 6,192,476; 5,966,702; 7,426,720; RE38,104; 6,910,205; and 6,061,520."

A Google representative said the company had not yet been served with the lawsuit, and therefore couldn't comment until it had a chance to review it. An Oracle representative declined to comment beyond the complaint.

Back when Google first announced plans to develop Android in 2007, it immediately raised the blood pressure of Java developers at Sun. Google's Java implementation is different than the one advocated by a Java standards group, which worried those tech industry veterans who remember the problems that Microsoft caused for Java by following a similar path on Windows.

Of course, Java has been forked and fragmented many times over the years, destroying the "write once run anywhere" promise of the technology with different implementations on different computing platforms. Still, Oracle, on behalf of Sun, is arguing that Java is a mobile operating system competitor against Android, and that Google is using Java-derived technologies without a proper license.

Oracle also noted the interlocking history between Google and Java in its complaint, noting that "Google has been aware of Sun's patent portfolio, including the patents at issue, since the middle of this decade, when Google hired certain former Sun Java engineers." Google CEO Eric Schmidt led the team that developed Java at Sun prior to becoming CEO of Novell, and later Google in 2001. Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations and a Google Fellow, also played a significant role in Java's development in the 1990s, and apparently other Sun engineers have joined Google in the intervening years.… Read more

Since Sunday, four eruptions on the sun have sent plasma into space on a crash course for Earth, scientists at NASA have found.

The eruptions, dubbed coronal mass ejections, started early Sunday, NASA said. When the plasma ejected from the eruptions hits the planet, the particles will come down toward the North Pole and South Pole. As they do so, they will hit nitrogen and oxygen, creating a colorful spectacle of green and red lights flying through the sky. According to scientists, the lights will be visible in northern U.S. states, on up to Canada.

The eruptions were caught … Read more

A new developer survey report from open-source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft shows that there has been minimal fallout from Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and that Java and MySQL seem to be doing just fine in their new home.

These results contrast with the latest developments of the OpenSolaris project, which, under Oracle's watch, has seen its Governing Board threatening to disband.

MySQL and Java have a strong presence in modern open-source software stacks, both in the enterprise and in Web shops. Interestingly, the survey report suggests that, thanks to Oracle's commitment to Java, as part of … Read more

One of Sun Microsystems' ambitious dreams, a vibrant open-source community for the Solaris operating system to rival the Linux collective, is in serious danger of evaporating in the Oracle era.

Oracle is committed to Solaris, a version of Unix, but the future of the open-source OpenSolaris project is in limbo, and the OpenSolaris Governing Board that oversees the open-source community is threatening to disband.

Sun poured resources into the OpenSolaris project in an attempt to give it some of the new-era flavor and developer attention devoted to rival Linux. After Oracle's acquisition of Sun, though, the board is struggling … Read more