Today, the Apache Software Foundation announced it has agreed to sell all IP and assets of the foundation to Oracle. The agreement is a $1.5 billion all cash deal. The ASF board agreed to the terms after vigorous discussions last evening.

“We never considered the possibility of selling the ASF,” said Jim Jagielski, Chairman of the ASF, “but Oracle made us a simply fantastic offer. Larry himself flew out last week to meet with us to address our concerns.”

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As part of the agreement, Oracle obtains even more of the crucial LAMP-stack software products.

"It was Oracle's admission that the Web is more than 'just' Java or databases that finalized the decision for us," said Justin Erenkrantz, Director and President of the ASF.

2009 marked the 10th Anniversary of the ASF.

"We will be communicating updates about the status of our projects and our license in the near future. As a community based organization, we want to ensure the best experience for our existing committers, contributors, and users, under our new arrangement.", the Apache Software Foundation stated.

In Apache's blogs, some people raised the concerns that the development of some Apache projects may be slowed down since motivations of some members of the Apache Software Foundation may go down now that they get to received a huge sum of money.

The news was released on the Apache Software Foundation blog on the FIRST OF April 2010, a day where many unreliable news were release even by many reputable companies!

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After the completion of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle lay down its office productivity products strategy.

A web cast by Michael Bemmer (GM, Oracle Office Global Business Unit), reiterate that OpenOffice.org will remain an open source application and Oracle will remain the main contributor of the community. There will also be web based office suite which can be integrated into the desktop version.

However, StarOffice or StarSuite (StarOffice with Asian languages supports) will get a name change.

Oracle + Sun Product Strategy Webcast Series: OpenOffice (4 min.)

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