All in Favor of Putting Sun Out of Its Misery, Say Aye

The shareholders of Sun Microsystems have given the thumbs-up to the company’s merger agreement with Oracle.

At a special meeting Thursday, a 62 percent majority of Sun’s common stock owners–not including CEO Jonathan Schwartz and board chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy, who, oddly, did not attend–approved the deal, which calls for Oracle (ORCL) to acquire Sun (JAVA) for $9.50 per share in cash, a total of $7.4 billion.

The vote was quick and painless, I’m told. It began at 10:02 am PDT and closed at 10:05 am. The end of Sun’s 27-year history was decided in under five minutes.

Of course, the merger still faces antitrust scrutiny, but Oracle insists it will be completed by the end of the summer. Oracle is probably right. And with ownership of Sun’s Java programming language and the Solaris operating system, Oracle will be a systems and software powerhouse capable of taking Microsoft (MSFT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) to the mat.

[Image credit: Ars Technica]