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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."
I always thought they would end up being bought by Fujitsu before anyone else. I figure the 100% premium for their stock is :
... the talks are not yet final, and IBM is neither stupid, or in the mood to spend money it doesn't have to.
a) a jumping-off point for talks
b) because the value of Sun's stock has more to do with their earnings than with the value of their IP, which is likely what IBM is really after.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Now, if only the US gov't will allow it. IBM+Sun would be a huge company.
IBM + SUN would be a huge company, but only slightly larger than IBM.
IBM: Around 400,000 employees. Sun: 33,000 employees.
IBM: $104 billion in revenue. Sun: $14 billion.
IBM: $125 billion market cap. Sun: $3.7 billion
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
While Sun has finally come around on open source. They still seem to do it with trepidation and even hamper some of their own works. If IBM purchases them, hopefully that will change. I would love to see them take the cuffs off of Java, OpenSolaris, MySQL, and zfs. By cuffs, I mean different things about different projects. (licensing, open up development, etc)
ZFS is not under strict licensing or hampered in any way. The CDDL is not restricting it at all, it is the GPL that is not allowing it into the Linux kernel. Most of the BSD world has adopted ZFS with open arms, as well as Apple. I personally would not like to see Sun go, and as a student I'd like to take advantage of their OpenSPARC program while I still can.
Come on!
Sun has open sourced:
NFS
OpenOffice
GlassFish
Java
Java Enterprise Edition
Netbeans
What has IBM open sourced? Oh...uh...Eclipse
IBM has tons of closed source products:
Websphere
DB2
Rational
Lotus Notes
etc.....
Give me a break!
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IBM is already a huge company. Market cap of $124bn. Sun won't make a dent. Market cap of less than $4bn. Yep, Sun is only 3% the size of IBM - it'd be like a dog eating a fly.
What would happen to Solaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, etc?
The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is a killer combination for developing Java EE/J2EE applications. I would hate to see those two products disappear, since they compete directly with Eclipse and Websphere from IBM.
Netbeans and Tomcat? Or what about Eclipse and Tomcat?
Last time I checked, Tomcat was just a servlet container, not a full J2EE stack.
J2EE is more than just parsing jsp files, it's also JDBC, RMI, javamail, JMS, web services and friends with several API specs, as well as Enterprise Java Beans and Servlets/Portlets...
It annoys me ever so slightly when people think Tomcat is this magical replacement for anything "java for the web". In fact, JBoss uses Tomcat as a servlet container.
In fact, even Glassfish uses Catalina, if I recall some stack traces I have seen in production...
Fujitsu and SUN co-developed/sell the Mx000 series servers. Whichever way SUN goes, I'm pretty sure Fujitsu still has that product line.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Perhaps, but I think that IBM would be getting one hell of a sweet deal
Although it is a 100% markup from Tuesday's closing price, that's still only a share price of $9 or $10. Barring the insanity of the dotcom bubble, when Sun was selling at $100-$200, it has been in the range of $12-$20 for the last 15 years. Between the dotcom bust and the global economic clusterf%#k, it had been solidly above $15. So, the way I see it, IBM is able to pick up a good company with solid products, a good long-term strategy, and an enormous IP portfolio for a 30%-40% discount.
IBM aren't moving away from hardware. IBM are moving away from commodity markets. Most hardware is now a commodity market (look what nVidia did to SGI) but not all, especially not in the mainframe area or the high-end SAN and supercomputing markets. IBM are also no longer in the commodity software market (they were never very good at it).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Sun's folks created a GPL-incompatible license specifically to have some pieces that Linux doesn't have.
Wrong! The GNU folks created a license that was incompatible with other licenses. The CDDL is similar to the Mozilla, Apache and BSD licenses.
GPL 3 is compatible with the Apache license, but guess what? Linus and company don't like it.
So please explain to me why Sun must make the CDDL compatible with GPL 2, and not the other way around.
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Haven't seen the Notes 8 client have you? Yeah it's built on the Eclipse framework so Notes and Java are already quite friendly.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually IBM gives Symphony away without charge... http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/products
IBM does have equivalents of OpenOffice and Java. Their OpenOffice equivalent is called Lotus Symphony and is based on the OpenOffice codebase. Their equivalent of Java is called Java and uses exactly the same codebase as Sun Java.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_walks_away_from_yahoo_deal.php
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Er... IBM did once have a competing JVM implementation. You can still download it. http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-56888
IBM's contributions to the open source community are much, much greater than any actual donation of developer time and money.
They've defended Linux and the GPL and sought to protect the Linux kernel from frivolous patent claims by using what is surely the largest warchest of patents ever accumulated. (Honestly, they're worse than the US or Russia during the cold war, as far as acquiring weapons goes.) It speaks a lot that they're willing to go up to bat for an ideal and a bunch of nameless, faceless developers who have all individually contributed a bit of code here or there, but lack the ability to defend that code as patent unencumbered in a court room.
IBM still has a competing JVM, though it is only at the 1.5 spec. It is what webshpere 6.1 runs on.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
That is the opinion of Danese Cooper. See this for the opinion of one of the engineers:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=55013#55008
I worked down the hall from an engineer very much involved in the whole open sourcing of Solaris at the time. The people that knew about this back then would agree that he was the principle engineer working on this, so much so that he had hardly any time for putbacks, so I got to see a lot of what was happening.
I really can't think of any engineer on that floor or the one below nor anyone I knew from England or LA that was opposed to the GPL because they did not want their work released under that license. That is the view that Danese expressed, and I believe she was incorrect. In fact she sullied the reputation of the whole lot of us when she made that talk and upset me and other people I am sure. Rather there were a portion of the engineers that felt that releasing under the GPL would be bad for Sun since Linux could take parts of Solaris and then destroy Sun. In any case it was not the engineers that made the decisions about the CDDL and not for those reasons (Sun could do whatever it wanted with the code its employees wrote), rather it was a committee with involvement from many other groups as well including many lawyers and most of everyone VP level and up with roots in the ON tree.
I knew about Danese when there and she came across as a zealot. She lost the argument for GPL and since then has behaved like a diva about that. Cooler heads prevailed. There were practical reasons that the GPL or LGPL was not appropriate and GPLv3 would not be ready for years. One big reason was the patent clusterf*ck and the other was that people at Sun wanted anyone else to be able to use open source solaris code in any way they liked as long as it was open source as well. That created the CDDL which was a file based license. It allowed you to mix in whatever other files you wanted and just those files that were CDDL to begin with remained so. There was no is it linked, statically linked, how much of the .h files are used, do you needed anything under a different license to build it, etc. That is the real reason that the CDDL was created. It is not the fault of Sun and certainly not the fine engineers that the GPL is incompatible with that.
Sure some people that were afraid of Sun collapsing if Linux could just take the good parts of Solaris wholesale and were worried about the future of the company because of that breathed a sigh of relief, but it was not because of them or that worry that the CDDL was created. The fact remains that if people high enough were not convinced that open souring at all was a risk to Sun's future, there would be no open solaris period.
That is my opinion and point of view of what took place. An official explanation of the CDDL is here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/licensing_faq/
It goes into details about the whys of CDDL and the why nots of other licenses. It is a fair explanation. So the point to take home is that there are those that think being incompatible with the GPL was the prime reason for the CDDL, other people think that is not the case and there were other prime reasons. The people that make the anti GPL argument are all big GPL proponents though. Also truthfully there were some people relieved when open solaris was not under the GPL, but for the simple reason that they were worried about the future of the company, not that they did not want the work that they had done released under the GPL. SUNW (back then) had gone from $110+ to less than $30 per share in that period afterall, people were twitchy. I can tell you that it was a great feeling personally when I knew other people could see and use the code that I had written.
Uh, no. You're dead wrong on that.
It may be legendary, but it also appears you made it up, since no such message exists in DB2.
Oh, you didn't mean it was a 'DB2 message', you meant it was the explanation of an SQLSTATE? The closest to that is state 22001, and the explanation is "Character data, right truncation occurred; for example, an update or insert value is a string that is too long for the column, or a datetime value cannot be assigned to a host variable, because it is too small."
So why did IBM write such a cryptic message? How about for the same reason MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft, etc did - because it is a STANDARD. Oracles explanation of this state is "string data - right truncation". Microsoft's is exactly the same as Oracles. I couldn't find where MySQL defines it anywhere.
So the only thing big bad IBM did differently is call it character (not) string data, and add the little explanation after the semicolon.
It was an ex Sun employee who said that. Many Sun employees that know that was not the truth. My guess is that she said it because she was upset that the GPL she was championing was not used but instead the CDDL was created. There are very many practical reasons that the CDDL was created and that Sun could not wait around for GPLv3 while hoping it would meet the requirements eventually:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/licensing_faq/
It was hurtful, that is evidenced by the fact that people believe the FUD more than two years later.
Other comments in this thread are incorrect. Here is the truth:
-- IBM still develops their JVM.
-- The IBM JVM is currently at the 1.6 level (which you can find in WebSphere 6.2 products). Same spec level as the latest recommended version of the Sun JVM.
-- IBM also develops their own implementation of the Java class libraries.
-- Writing a fast JVM is not "a few months work". It took both Sun and IBM years of development to produce JVMs with reasonable performance. You can argue that the research supporting them (and around VMs in general) is now fairly well-known, but implementing it is still nontrivial.
Thank you. Feel free to mod this up now, since I am apparently the only one who's gotten this correct.
It's probably fair to say that hardware threads are really just a zero-instruction-count way to do a context switch. This matters when you only get 5-9 instructions on the average between a fetch, store or branch. Even a single-instruction-time context switch would cost you 1/5 to 1/9 of your time (20% down to 11%). That's a brutal overhead, and something to avoid.
And they're shipping 2- and 4-socket boards in the T5240 and T5440 machines.
What you really want is the speed of the Power, the parallelization of the T5000s and the "scout threads" of the Rock (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net