After weeks of speculation of IBM buying out Sun, which failed to produce a result, today Oracle have swept in and bought Sun. The deal is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt, with Oracle buying Sun at $9.50 per share.

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

This could be the most important decision made in the software industry for 2009. The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems all approved the transaction that is due to close this summer subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.Jonathan Schwarz is certainly happy with the deal: 

"This is a fantastic day for Sun's customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace," said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, "From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun's SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we'll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace."

It seems like a sudden move, and one that Sun and Oracle both did well to keep quiet. I wonder what this means for Java developers. Are Oracle better owners of Sun than IBM? It's good for Solaris, does it have any effect on Java?