News is popping up that will interest those interested in the Sun/Oracle deal.

I’ve made peace with Jonathan Schwartz but those who haven’t will no doubt love to bash on his pay. The first data I’ve seen in a while comes fresh from the AP: Sun CEO’s pay package cut by a third in ’09. According to the article, his 2008FY compensation was $11.1 Million, and it looks like 2009FY will come in at only $7 Million, information which came from the Sun Proxy filing with the SEC on Wednesday. One thing I have always wondered is what his personal driver costs… apparently he is company provided and costs over $45,000 per year (figured by the $55,000 spend on both driver and 401K match).

So, hey, even guys who make millions of dollars per year try to max out their 401K…. what does that tell ya? 🙂

Based on the same proxy filings, El Reg reports yet more on the compensation front. They report that Scott McNealy owns approx 2.3% of Sun. They estimate that if he excercises 3.1M in options by the end of Dec his cut will be $164.5M. Going on, El Reg reports that Jonathan has almost 1.5M options and 592K shares… so he comes away with $19.8M.

The Reg also counts up the total number of layoffs in the past 12 months at 8,000 (I assume that includes the 3,000 currently being chopped).

We got some nice news from Oracle this week by way of a FAQ: Oracle and Sun Overview and FAQ (Dated October 27, 2009). My questions regarding X86 and Solaris were included:

 What are Oracle’s plans for Solaris?

Oracle plans to spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now. The
industry leading capabilities of the Solaris operating system make it the leader
in performance, scalability, reliability, and security – all of which are core
requirements for our customers. Oracle plans to enhance our investment in
Solaris to push core technologies to the next level as quickly as possible. Today
there are more applications available on Solaris than any other operating system
in the world. In addition, the combination of Oracle and Sun engineering
teams in database and operating system open up a new set of opportunities
to create exciting innovations for customers with respect to performance,
operational efficiency, security, and cost of ownership.

 What are Oracle's plans for x86?

The extremely broad and volume use of x86 makes it an important
building block for servers as well as other parts of the combined Oracle
and Sun portfolio. We plan to continue to engineer server and appliance
products based on x86. In addition, x86 is of course a key element of both
Sun and Oracle's software portfolio, with Solaris and Oracle Enterprise
Linux as well as all of the software of both companies robustly sold and
supported in the x86 marketplace.

So this fits perfectly in line with what we’ve heard to date, namely that Solaris rules and X86 is a critical offering as part of other offerings.

Finally, the Financial Times is reporting that Russian Anti-Trust is making life rough and FT perhaps foolishly plays up the headline by asking “is the deal about to unravel?” Read it for yourself but I’m not jumping to any conclusions.

Will this never end? Despite Oracle’s pledged $9.50 per share, JAVA has dropped to $8.27 today, suggesting a lack of confidence. And I think most of us in the various communities have come to terms with the prospect of Oracle and are ready for things to get moving. There is a lot to suggest that Oracle is already calling the shots at Sun to various degrees, as we saw at Oracle OpenWorld recently. Besides that, at this point Sun is damaged beyond hope of repair… if this deal doesn’t close soon we’re all going to be in a world of hurt.

Lets get this deal done! Give the execs their money so they can retire and stop f***ing the company, and lets go kill IBM.