Oracle hands out love and handcuffs to Sunware

A good use of $387m

Oracle will continue selling its own line of existing integration and SOA software to new customers instead of offering Java CAPs.

Java CAPs was the Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN) enterprise application integration (EAI) suite Sun bought for $387m from SeeBeyond and promptly open sourced in the belief it could make a profit at the expense of proprietary EAI giants like IBM.

Meanwhile, Sun's Project Kenai code-hosting site- home to nearly 40,000 registered users - is being killed as a public offering. Launched in September 2008, Kenai was billed as different from SourceForge because it also offered social networking features to members.

Farrell said that Kenai wasn't quite working and that Oracle is bringing it in house, where it would use it, "flush it out," and add some features. Farrell said Oracle may re-release Kenai for public use if it finds some value in the project.

Kenai was one of the projects Sun's management urged employees to continue building in order to to stay motivated and chipper while Oracle's purchase was held up by European regulators.

Sun's Project Hudson is a lucky survivor of the acquisition: Hudson will be added to JDeveloper, to provide enhanced application lifecycle management capabilities.

Sun's open source was always of only selected interest to Oracle, which has a track record of evaluating products and keeping only those it considers better than its own.

As a Java middleware vendor, though, Java was one of the key assets in Oracle's $5.6bn Sun acquisition. Judging by the plan outlined by Oracle's executive vice president of product development Thomas Kurian on Wednesday, Oracle's extending Sun's existing work on Java by adding more manpower and money. Part of the reason for this is Oracle has inherited the chief-steward status of Java SE, Enterprise Edition, and Mobile Edition from Sun.

Kurian committed to continue existing efforts on Java SE around modularity, while also focussing on real-time monitoring and optimized garbage collection. Java EE, based on Java SE, will also see that existing work on modularity plus efforts to run dynamic languages in the VM.