Sun shareholders to vote on Oracle deal July 16

IDG News Service - Sun Microsystems has scheduled a special shareholders meeting for July 16 for a vote on whether to accept Oracle's $7.4 billion proposal to buy the company. Sun's board has unanimously recommended the transaction go through.

The industry has been abuzz with speculation about how Oracle, which made its bid in April, will handle Sun's assets and influence, particularly its stewardship of the Java programming language and the open-source MySQL database.

Some have also questioned whether Oracle is truly interested in Sun's hardware business and will instead sell it to another company. A proxy statement filed by Sun in connection with the merger states that Oracle's initial interest focused on "certain of Sun's software assets."

But in a May 7 interviewwith Reuters about the acquisition, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the company "is definitely not going to exit the hardware business."