According to an article by the BBC, the UK Government has announced that it will be supporting plans meaning everyone in the UK will have access to at least 2Mbps broadband, by 2012. The plans, proposed by Lord Carter earlier in the year, have been backed by the government. The chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, said "I am allocating extra funding for digital investment, to help to extend the broadband network to almost every community."

The extra funding was announced as part of the new budget for the UK today. Money not spent from the BBC Digital Switch-over scheme may be used to partially pay for the service. Part of the cost of making the service more widely available may be pushed over to Internet Service Providers.

There has been much debate about broadband availability in the UK recently, with various different plans announced. Some argue that money should be spent on making broadband widely available, whilst others argue the money should be spent on making the already existing broadband faster, in order to keep up with other countries.

The final report, named the "Digital Britain" report, is due this Summer, which will reveal more details about how the UK will keep up with technology

News source: Neowin.net

Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation announced today they have entered into an agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, with Oracle purchasing Sun stock with cash for $9.50 per share, a premium of nearly $3 per share over previous market value.

Sun’s stock (JAVA) jumped nearly 33% after news of the purchase was released.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, described Java as "the single most important software asset we have ever acquired."

By purchasing Sun, Oracle is elevated into the ranks of Dell, HP and IBM, giving them the ability to sell hardware as well as more fully exploit some important Sun software. It also puts them in a better position to compete with Microsoft by giving them control of both a major server operating system and some major business software begin run on it.

In their joint press release, Sun and Oracle cite "substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris." Sun’s Solaris operating system is the most widely utilized platform for Oracle databases, which is Oracle’s largest business sector. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris.

There is some worry for proponents of the major open source projects that Sun heads up, like OpenSolaris, MySQL, VirtualBox, OpenOffice and Java itself. It will remain to be seen what Oracle intends to do with these projects and how, if at all, they’ll integrated them into their product offerings.

IBM previously expressed interest in purchasing Sun, for $7b, but withdrew the offer after reviewing Sun’s books and finding out how much they’d been paying their senior employees.

Sun’s Board of Directors has already unanimously approved the transaction and it is anticipated to close this summer, subject to stockholder and regulatory approval.

News source: Neowin.net