Andy Updegrove may have cracked the code on Oracle's seemingly insane decision to start charging $90 for the formerly free ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. That's $90 in a minimum pack of 100, plus a 22% support fees for updates. Does Oracle really think that this will fly with companies, is Oracle trying to kill off the product entirely?

During a conference call yesterday after his $7.4 billion acquisition deal was announced, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said one of the primary reasons Oracle is interested in Sun is because of its Solaris operating system, a widely distributed version of Unix that has a large installed base and has long been the dependable platform for Oracle's popular database.

At the European Court in Luxembourg, Monty Widenius has brought proceedings against the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Oracle's acquisition of Sun raised a lot of questions about the future of Sun's core technologies. Oracle says that it is committed to Solaris and Java, but some open source advocates are concerned about the implications for OpenOffice.org and MySQL. Ars looks at how Oracle and members of the open source software community have responded to the acquisition.

Most of you may already be aware of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. It just dawned on me earlier yesterday: What will be the future of ZFS and Btrfs, seeing how Chris Mason, the lead developer to Btrfs works for Oracle?

Your editor wishes to take no position on whether Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems should be allowed to proceed by the European Union. Such a decision certainly involves a number of antitrust considerations which go beyond the free software community. That said, some of the positions being taken around this acquisition shine an interesting light on how parts of our community work.

MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who left Sun Microsystems early last year, remained very vocal throughout the long machinations leading up to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, even mounting a letter writing campaign. With the Sun acquisition going forward, we reached out to Monty for an interview and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with us.

Oracle and Sun Microsystems announced, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4B Deal with lot of major software products including Java and Solaris.

European regulators have given Oracle the tentative green light in its long-delayed merger with Sun Microsystems now that Oracle has assuaged concerns about the stewardship of the open source MySQL database.