Sun In Talks To Be Acquired By IBM

gandhi_2 writes "Sun Microsystems soared in European trading after a report that it was in talks to be acquired by IBM. The Wall Street Journal, quoting "people familiar with the matter," reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy the company for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company's closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment."

Comments

Re:IBM is NOT more pro-Open Source than Sun

[beelsebob]

Not forgetting zfs, OpenSolaris, etc...

What the GP is really complaining about is that he likes to use projects with an overly restrictive license (the GPL) which doesn't let anyone distribute the two projects bundled up together, because sun don't want to get infected with GPLitis.

Re:That would *really* suck...

[GargamelSpaceman]

Yes! Mod parent up.

Re:A boon to open source

[TheRaven64]

You know, if you want ZFS and DTrace, all you have to do is use a kernel that doesn't use a copyleft license, such as OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, or XNU. Or try to persuade the Linux developers to pick a less restrictive license for their work so you can incorporate work from other projects.

Of course, that will make Solaris die so much faster, but somehow I'm not going to shed a tear.

I'm a bit confused. You want Solaris features, but for some reason you want Solaris to die? Maybe you should work out what exactly about Linux it is that you like. If you value the license over the features, then I suggest you start contributing to GNU HURD.

Re:For $6.5b

[amorsen]

With such a dramatic overpricing, that's going to raise eyebrows with several government agencies.

Why do you believe that? If you need high performance, you can't use SPARC anyway, and if you don't need high performance, x86 is really really competitive.