Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company whose engineers created the Java programming language.
Java was developed at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s by a team led by James Gosling. Sun released Java in 1995, and its “write once, run anywhere” design made it important for enterprise software, web services, and later Android development.
Oracle announced its agreement to acquire Sun in 2009 and completed the transaction in 2010. The deal brought Java, the Solaris operating system, SPARC technology, and MySQL into Oracle’s portfolio. Oracle had already become a major database and enterprise-software provider.
A frequent wording mistake is to say Oracle invented Java. Sun Microsystems created Java; Oracle became its owner after the acquisition. Oracle is also known for cloud infrastructure and enterprise applications, businesses that helped it remain one of the world’s most valuable software companies.