After Successful Sun Integration, Oracle Looks to Open Source for Future Profits

Despite a host of headlines about how Oracle (ORCL) would fail with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and that company's open source heritage, Oracle has done pretty well. Since the deal was done in January 2010 Oracle has outperformed enterprise computing rivals IBM and Microsoft (MSFT), with the stock rising over 50%. At its Monday opening of $30.58 per share, Oracle also sports a much higher price-earnings multiple than its rivals, 18.38.

Despite the good news, Oracle is still considered cheap by the Investment Underground, which recommended it here last week. The lesson here is not to confuse press headlines with reality. With Sun, Oracle acquired three of the “crown jewels” of open source – Java, mySQL and OpenOffice.org. Here is what happened with these assets. Oracle gave OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation, after the developers forked the code to LibreOffice. That's a dead loss. 

Oracle has released a new version of the Java Platform, Java 7, incorporating community contributions, as well as a new Java Developer Kit. Oracle has announced a new version of mySQL, Version 5.6, and pledged to integrate it more closely with its operating system. In addition Oracle has made other moves to strengthen itself in open source:..