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

Fate ofSun's products that compete with IBM?

[heffel]

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.

Hardware

[millwall]

Interesting move as I thought IBMs long term strategy was to move away from the hardware market altogether. I wonder what their intentions are with Suns hardware divisions.

A boon to open source

[C_Kode]

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)

Re:A boon to open source

[mzs]

I'm really walking a fine line here. I need to express that everything I state and stated is my personal opinion. Also Sun was my first real job after college and I owe everything I learned about being a good programmer thanks to the fantastic engineers I worked with. Working with them taught me everything, nothing I learned in college was right. I entered Sun as not very good at my job and left finally trained for success. It was a fabulous place with even better people and I owe the fact that I am a decent coder now to those few valuable enjoyable years as Sun.

You only looked at one aspect of what I described. I may be revealing more than I should. The fact is that 2001 one very key engineer brought-up a question. It was in fact should Sun release solaris under a license specifically incompatible with the GPL to protect Sun. The consensus was reached that Sun should not in a day or so. So you see right then and there the anti GPL as the prime reason is debunked. In fact there was a number of people that felt that the GPL was best (others liked more MIT or BSD likes) because it guaranteed Sun could use what was distributed by others. Unfortunately the lawyers then brought-up all the patent and contracts crap-ola when open sourcing solaris became a formal process with semi-regular meetings. At that point some people were tasked with combing through ON to decide what could be released and what needed changes. That involved the person in the post you responded to that I wrote before. This was a huge task. During that work the per file aspect of a potential license became a clear requirement.

At the same time Danese (if what she said can be trusted) or someone she asked contacted someone high up in FSF (no not Stallman) and some effort was made to get GPL to address the patent garbage. People with business sense soon realized that there was no way that this would be done in time. The lawyers were squirmy at if a new bullet proof GPL could even be created. Sun was a potential huge target for lawsuits after all. So out of this the CDDL was born. The faq I previously linked to gives the same information in a responsible way.

Danese's comments were untrue and hurtful to Sun and its employees. They have been used as evidence by GPL zealots at spreading this FUD for years now. My guess as to the reason she made those comments was that she was upset about the GPL not working out. In the times I saw her she thought very highly of herself and her point of view. Again that is all my opinion.

Finally before all of this a person that was at that point a VP at Sun was convinced of the value of open sourcing solaris for the future of Sun by a handful of engineers. He worked very hard to convince the other people at high levels. That had more to do with open solaris than anything else in the end. There were no fear of Linux sentiments at that point early on, dot com was still doing great at that point, it was more of a Sun needs to do what IBM and RedHat are argument.

You do not see people commenting on this publicly from inside Sun because that is not the right thing to do. I hope what I have written here does not cause me grief in the future but I think it is important to get my opinion of what happened out there because over the years there have been less scrupulous people making damaging comments.

It might be useful to remember the past

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I remember about 9 years ago when IBM bought out Sequent Computer Systems . My employer at the time was a Sequent customer and I knew people who worked at Sequent's corporate office. They were at first all gung ho about joining IBM, but the reality that set in wasn't pretty. As often happens in business, a big company buys a competitor simply to shut the competitor down. Click on the Wikipedia link provided to get some more info on the deal and alternative explanations for the decision to close down Sequent. If I worked for Sun, I wouldn't hold my breath that this would be a good deal for me, but the stock holders and upper management at Sun may come out well from this.

Re:Good idea!

[KiloByte]

Except, it was Sun's guys who designed CDDL, and on the DebConf, said they specifically wanted it to be incompatible with GPL. So it's not GPL's fault, it's a conscious decision of Sun's executives.

Re:For $6.5b

[LWATCDR]

"Are there any specific products that Sun sells that IBM doesn't have equivalents of? Sun has some good products"
Yes OpenOffice and Java.
Too bad IBM didn't buy Troll Tech as well.
I think IBM still has so anger issues with Microsoft. I could see them really pushing for a Microsoft free stack from top to bottom even if it was FOSS. IBM makes a lot of money from services. A free stack just means more services to sell.
I wonder if they will buy Opera next.
Imagine Solaris, KDE, Openoffice, and Opera all rolled into a nice Free distro :)

another sign the 1980s are over

[peter303]

Sun's original forte was the personal graphics workstations with bitmap graphics and standard flavor of UNIX. (OK, there was Apollo nad MicroVAXEN too, but hey had lots of non-standard UNIX stuff in them.) The emphasis was "personal". Even though these cost 1/2 to 2/3 an engineer's annual salary at the time, this freed people from the tyranny of the departmental computer. Plus they had turnkey networking, having pioneered many of the newtwork software protocols. Also they one one of the first candidates for the mythical "3M Computer"- one megabyte of memory, one million operations per second, and one mega pixel display. Steve jobs wanted an Apple computer for this slot, but when Apple they balked (four-figure price), he started NeXT.

Sun had a brief renaissance in the 1990s with JAVA (Object-C done right), but it was too little too late.

Java

[Gary W. Longsine]

IBM figured out how to make money from Java, which is something Sun still hasn't done. IBM in this merger could be perceived as attempting to prevent their huge investment in Java from going down the tubes, in the not-unlikely event of a catastrophic Sun failure, or as preventing acquisition of Sun's Java team by a competitor.

IBM and Microsoft: symbiotic relationship

[Gary W. Longsine]

It seems to be "common geek knowledge" that IBM has this unified corporate animosity to Microsoft -- often blamed on fallout from their split during the OS/2, Windows NT days. This is a seriously naive impression of IBM. It's a giant corporation with entire business units (some probably bigger than Sun) which make enormous sums of money by introducing complexity into the customer environment, and up-selling integration services to "manage" that complexity.

IBM LOVES LOVES LOVES the fact that Windows is a font of unnecessary complexity.

IBM exists as a giant IT behemoth today, precisely because Windows sucks, and they know it. They will do nothing to jeopardize the Windows cash cow.

Even back in that brief window of time when OS/2 could be perceived as a viable alternative, IBM was busily rolling out their internal Windows-based desktop systems infrastructure, in most cases replacing an X-Term infrastructure. OS/2 never even had a chance in the real world, even though it had strong proponents for many years, they were all outside of IBM. Inside of IBM, OS/2 was relegated to a POS terminal system, then trimmed back to an ATM system when the POS systems went Windows.

As recently as a few years ago, when IBM senior managers were betting big on Linux, and bragging publicly about investing a billion dollars a year (and probably more these days) on Linux, IBM customers couldn't even get IBM to submit proposals based on Linux for simple tasks for which Linux was very well suited. IBM instead proposed convoluted, unstable Windows-based "solutions" which cost more. Customers could BEG IBM for Linux based solutions and not get them. IBM actively fought against efforts at their customers to actually use Linux.

Re:First Thoughts ...

[Moken]

You're right about the competing product lines and there are a lot of questions raised by it. However, I don't think it's Solaris/AIX, it's Solaris/Linux ... AIX is still alive and kicking, but inside IBM there is a lot of movement and development on Linux. AIX is receiving incremental updates for newer POWER machines, but nothing new. For example, there isn't an AIX port for the Cell architecture, but running Linux on Cell was a given from day one.

That said, I don't think there's a question of which OS would win in an IBM buyout of Sun... Linux trounces Solaris because IBM has put millions of dollars into Linux for truly first class support of POWER, getting the kernel to support all of the nice features like hotplug memory add / remove and other really neat hardware support. Solaris would have to be ported to POWER from scratch and, in turn, have millions spent on it just to get it up to par with Linux which doesn't make any sense. And even with cool features that Linux doesn't do (ahem, DTrace), it would take far less effort to just update and improve existing Linux based tools (SystemTap) or develop a new tool from scratch, rather than dumping money into the OS just to get them.

Re:For $6.5b

[jipn4]

Perhaps, but I think that IBM would be getting one hell of a sweet deal

I don't think so. Sun's core server and OS business is in deep trouble, and Java is under threat as well.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:For $6.5b

[Eravnrekaree]

Solaris and Linux are hopeless as far as providing a windows alternative. As far as a realistic alternative to Windows, Linux wouldnt know how to do it if it hit them in the head. For Linux to really be a viable Windows alternative it is vital that it makes it easy for binary only drivers and apps to be made for Linux and to provide stable driver ABIs. Linux has to stop being so arrogant in assuming everything they use will come with a distro, and realise that real users will want to use third party software and drivers. They also have to assume that a user may want to choose between using different drivers and will need to be easily be able to choose a manufacturer supplied driver. basically the user has to be able to throw in a disc, click install and have the hardware or software work. Gnome meanwhile have entirely the wrong idea about what makes software useable. I dont know where they got the idea that making software rigid, inflexible and feature sparse makes it more useable, but it doesnt. Gnome is an inflexible memory hogging disaster that has only gotten worse. The idea of good design is to make software configurable and flexible as possible, but place lesser used features in advanced screens. useability is all in layout, not in number of features. Software should work out of the box with reasonable defaults with no configuration but user should be able to fine tune them if they wish. This allows users as little or as much control as they need and allows them to grow into the software.

Re:For $6.5b

[fm6]

It was too busy "competing" with MS to focus on it's core market - high performance computers.

Sun did waste a lot of effort on desktop initiatives. (Still does.) But that's never dominated management's attention. It's just what got the most press, because the issues of hardware manufacturing and sales don't make good copy.

(Right now, I'm working on a system that's in the process of being upgraded from Hypertransport 1 to Hypertransport 3. Doesn't that send chills up and down your spine? No?)

The problem is not that management didn't pay attention to the hardware business — they paid plenty. The problem is that they kept selling to the 1998 marketplace long after the game changed. In 1998, there was so much demand for computers, and people were so unpicky about costs, Sun could sell expensive systems just by boasting how powerful they were. Then the dotcom bubble burst, and people either went out of business or survived by looking for ways to do business cheaper. And a big way to cut costs is to switch from proprietary architectures (SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC) to the commodified x86.

Took Sun a long time to come to terms with that. When the bubble burst, the party line at Sun was that it was a temporary downturn and they could just ride it out. Well, the downtown was indeed temporary, but the customers never came back. They wanted commodity systems, and Sun was only working on SPARC systems. Yes, they had acquired Cobalt, but the SPARC-uber-alles mindset at Sun soon drove the Cobalt people away and destroyed a product line Sun had spent $2 billion acquiring. When they finally admitted to themselves that they had to change with the marketplace (and there are lots of Sun people who still haven't drunk that koolaid) they had to build up the business all over again, partly by outsourcing design, partly by buying up yet another x86 company. Ironically, that company was founded by Sun co-founder Andy Bectholsheim, who had left Sun partly because of this very issue.

So, despite the attention it got in the press, the Sun-MS feud was just a sideshow. What really hurt was their inability to adapt.