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

For $6.5b

[sanosuke001]

I'd sell in a heartbeat. In this economy, there's no guarantee anything will go well for a specific company. 100% markup on their stock? Even if they do make it through this downturn, no guarantee their stock will hit that level again anytime soon.

Now, if only the US gov't will allow it. IBM+Sun would be a huge company.

Re:For $6.5b

[Reality Master 101]

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

Re:For $6.5b

[Peter Cooper]

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.

Re:For $6.5b

[necro81]

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.

Re:For $6.5b

[Znork]

IBM is able to pick up a good company with solid products

Are there any specific products that Sun sells that IBM doesn't have equivalents of? Sun has some good products, but I'm not sure IBM is after any specific products rather than just buying customers in certain segments and getting rid of some competition as a bonus at a fairly good price.

a good long-term strategy

Sun has a long-term strategy? Not one that's the long-term strategy of the month, but something, eh, more long-term? Having worked with Sun stuff for more than a decade, that's one of the more irritating habits the company has; sudden changes in strategy, often accompanied with a total re-branding of large parts of their product series.

Re:For $6.5b

[SnapShot]

Are there any specific products that Sun sells that IBM doesn't have equivalents of?

Java?

I realize that this isn't a product, per se, but it seems to me that IBM has focused their company on the services and consulting side and many of those projects are Java-based. They'll be able to go to their clients and affirm that the next multi-billion dollar enterprise project will be built on "their" language that they are fully behind.

P.S. Can we please not start a Java teh sux thread! I'm mostly just curious what the value of being the "owner of Java" is to a company...

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 :)

Re:For $6.5b

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:For $6.5b

[Cheeko]

And HP's market cap is slightly larger than IBM's.

In terms of the competitive Landscape its really HP and IBM with Dell a distant third.

While Sun has decent market share it's been dwindling for years. Obviously there are some things to be reviewed in terms of competition, but I doubt it would hold this deal up. Fairly similar in terms of size/scope to the HP-Compaq merger.

To me this seems like a move to buy Sun's market share, pick up stuff like Java, and be able to strip some tech out of Solaris. I would expect that most of Sun's hardware arch would eventually be phased out, maybe port Solaris to Power if anything. Kinda see Sparc going the way of Alpha if a merger goes through.

Re:For $6.5b

[Pharmboy]

44% of the server market is surely nothing to sneeze at, but my guess is that IBM still has dreams of getting on the corporate desktop (which is the gateway to the home desktop) and Java, Solaris, Open Office/Star Office, plus all their contributions to Free software is part of the ticket to compete with Microsoft in the next decade. This is particularly true if you believe that the OS will become less important as more applications are created as web applications, making it not matter if the OS is OS X, Win7+, Linux, Solaris or some "new" Java desktop.

Re:For $6.5b

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For $6.5b

[davecb]

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

Re:For $6.5b

[fm6]

There are many technologies at Sun that IBM might covet, but no one of them is worth that much money, or even a substantial part of them. They'll certainly want Java, but Java is mainly a server-side technology these days. It's client side tech is floundering, both marketwise and developmentwise. Same goes for Solaris. (Sun's workstation lineup is down to one system!) As for OO/SO, IBM already has a free office suite, and it's not doing any better.

Having a realistic alternative to Windows is every geek's dream, but I don't see anything that Sun owns really changing the game. And big companies like IBM don't really have any incentive to revolutionize the desktop — not that much money in it, and there are too many risks. Which is why IBM has moved away from desktop computing in recent years.

Re:For $6.5b

[davecb]

Alas, prefetching is a research area in computer science: I've done a number of experiments in that space, and (1) an ill-timed prefetch can eject a needed cache line, and (2) the benefit is quite small even if you set the prefetches by hand. That leaves you with the previous state, twiddling your thumbs for many many instructions while the cache fills. Thus the emphasis on either doing useful work in the meantime or speeding up the cache fill.

And write behind can delay while you evict a cache line to make room (;-))

--dave

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.

Re:For $6.5b

[curunir]

Java is mainly a server-side technology these days. It's client side tech is floundering, both marketwise and developmentwise.

This is a situation that could change if Sun were acquired. Sun has been pushing developers to use Swing on the client side and, while Swing may be popular with developers, users don't like it because of performance and the non-native feel. But IBM would likely push developers to use SWT instead. It's being used in a surprisingly large number of applications. That most people don't realize it's being used is a testament to both it's performance and it's ability to appear native (because most of the widgets are native with a Java API). SWT gets a bad rap because its poster-child application (Eclipse) can be a resource hog and run slowly in many situations, but from my experience that's not a failing of SWT and more a reflection of the complexity involved in writing and IDE and the design decision to make the IDE so heavily extensible by third parties. If IBM did acquire Sun, I would bet that one of the first changes made to Java would be to include SWT and JFace with the 1.8 JRE.

Java's failings on the client side are, IMHO, a reflection of the lack of ubiquity of SWT and Sun's NIH syndrome when it comes to Java technologies produced outside of Sun's control. Those two barriers can be broken down if IBM acquires Sun.

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.

Container?

[MortenMW]

So, can I finally get a 20' container with IBM servers in it?

First Thoughts ...

[Anonymous Coward]

are that this is probably the best that Sun can do but I have to say that the reduction in competition in that space would be concerning.

I've been wondering for a while what Sun was going to do, let's be brutally frank, they were never going to get rich from Java or MySQL, especially as open source, but had little choice in keeping them closed source. I just hope IBM keeps Java, Open Office and the rest as they are and doesn't start to try to make money off them.

Re:First Thoughts ...

[Mark Round]

"I just hope IBM keeps Java, Open Office and the rest as they are and doesn't start to try to make money off them.".

While this is a valid concern (remember, Sun is by far the largest open source contributor out there), that'd be the least of my concerns. I'd be more worried if some software or hardware would even be continued.

I can't see a merged company running duplicate lines of hardware OR software, and whichever way it goes, people are going to be pissed. Just look at the HP/Compaq train wreck, and that was relatively mild in comparison (Tru64/HP-UX etc.). With Sun and IBM, they've got to choose between either a massive duplication of effort, or pick one of Solaris/AIX, MySQL/DB2, SPARC/POWER, Galaxy/iSeries, Storagetek (including the ZFS-based products like Thumper/Amber Road)/IBM storage, Websphere/Glassfish, Netbeans/Eclipse - the list goes on.

Both companies produce such an enormously varied range of hardware and software, I just don't see it working without some serious cuts and massively pissed off customers. Those Tru64 customers didn't all just take it on the chin and migrate over to HP-UX like the good customers they were supposed to be, for instance. If you were working in a x64 Solaris shop, and got told that your migration path was to AIX on POWER, would you move ? Or would you take your business elsewhere ?

Re:First Thoughts ...

[questro]

Actually IBM gives Symphony away without charge... http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/products

Re:First Thoughts ...

[John Bayko]

IBM has a long history of not only tolerating, but actively developing and promoting non-mainstream products. They still develop several operating systems (z/OS - from mainframe System/360 days, i5/OS - from AS/400, and System 38 and System 36 before that, AIX), and support others (Windows, Linux, Solaris), all to give customers no excuse for switching to a competitor. They support x86 servers, POWER based System p and System i (recently unified), mainframe System z. As well as blade versions of some.

This is in sharp contrast to HP, which gleefully killed off good products (and customer satisfaction) for feeble marketing reasons (like a market strategist would even know the difference between an Alpha and Itanium).

So there's a good chance that IBM would keep alive a lot of Sun hardware and software, only consolidating as needed. For example, System/36 and System/38 were merged into AS/400 smoothly enough to keep both sets of customers happy. And OS/2 was kept on life support for years just for those customers who had comitted to it, even if there was no new development for it. Maybe AIX and Solaris could be merged (AIX has a lot of partitioning magic and reliability tricks useful for IBM hardware that could be added to Solaris), the two companies' Java versions would do well with just one, and so on. But I doubt that Sun products would be wholesale slaughtered by IBM like some other companies might.

Re:First Thoughts ...

[kimvette]

IBM's version of the OpenOffice.org suite (Symphony) is horrible, though. If they get their hands on Openoffice.org I hope someone else (Novell) builds up a community for their fork of the suite and everyone in the project switches to the fork.

That's not to say that Openoffice.org can't use some TLC - a lot of the legacy code is really, really crappy and disorganized (which discourages many from getting involved) but I do like the direction OpenOffice is going now. Under IBM, it could turn real ugly real fast if Symphony is any indication.

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.

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.

Re:Fate ofSun's products that compete with IBM?

[mr_da3m0n]

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...

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.

Re:Hardware

[TheRaven64]

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).

Lotus Notes and Java...

[Anonymous Coward]

...together at last!

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

[kungfuj35u5]

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.

Re:A boon to open source

[TheRaven64]

Mod parent +1 funny.

Sun finally come around to the idea of open source? Sun, the company founded by early BSD developers, which actively contributed to BSD back before there were x86 chips capable or running a real UNIX? The company that bought StarOffice to open source it, and still contributes about 80-90% of the developer time to OpenOffice.org? The company that open sourced their entire enterprise UNIX stack, to the benefit of other systems (DTrace and ZFS in FreeBSD are really nice. It's a shame Linux has a license that's too restrictive to allow it to incorporate other features, but if you pick a restrictive license you have to live with the consequences). Not to mention Java and all of their Apache-related contributions, or their work on PostgreSQL and their purchase and continued support of MySQL.

Still, IBM has open sourced AIX and Notes, and their database systems. Oh, wait, they haven't. They've put a little work into the Linux kernel, some into Xen, and a bit more effort into Eclipse and a few Java-related projects, but they've made smaller contributions to the Free Software community overall (unless you count marketing dollars) than Sun in spite of being almost two orders of magnitude larger.

Just because IBM shouts louder than Sun about their commitment to open source doesn't make it a fact.

Re:A boon to open source

[TheRaven64]

Reality is that the CDDL has restrictions on derivative works that are very similar to the GPL restrictions

Not true. The CDDL and GPL both have restrictions on derived works, but that's not the problem. The GPL also has restrictions on things that are not derived works and happen only through linkage. If the kernel had been LGPL'd, then the CDDL would not be a problem. You can link CDDL'd code with code under any other license without the CDDL causing issues. Apple links CDDL'd ZFS code against APSL'd XNU code, for example. Neither the CDDL nor the APSL is GPL-compatible, but in both cases it is due to the GPL containing clauses which cover more than the code that was originally GPL'd.

The fact that OS X and FreeBSD, with very different but not copyleft, licenses can both use DTrace and ZFS shows that it is the GPL, not the CDDL which is the problem. The GPL is the license which imposes restrictions on code linked against it. The CDDL imposes conditions in the CDDL'd code itself, but has no problems being linked against code under any other license, unless the other license objects.

Re:A boon to open source

[mzs]

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.

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.

Sad, but not unpredictable.

[NotBornYesterday]

I always thought they would end up being bought by Fujitsu before anyone else. I figure the 100% premium for their stock is :

a) a jumping-off point for talks ... the talks are not yet final, and IBM is neither stupid, or in the mood to spend money it doesn't have to.
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.

Good idea!

[Main MAn]

Why nobody though about that before?

1- Buy Sun
2- License ZFS under GPLv2
3- Sell Sun
4- Done

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:Good idea!

[mzs]

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.

We're the dot in dot com

[andy1307]

IBM.com that is...

IBM is NOT more pro-Open Source than Sun

[javacowboy]

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!

Define "Enterprise UNIX"

[NotBornYesterday]

Fujitsu and SUN co-developed/sell the Mx000 series servers. Whichever way SUN goes, I'm pretty sure Fujitsu still has that product line.

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.

A shiny day?

[KlaymenDK]

I find the big blue room so much nicer when there's a sun in it. Don't you?

Re:This could be Schwartz' greatest trick ever.

[Alomex]

To be fair, the decline of the Unix server market started about 12 years ago with the release of NT4.0 and the first true industrial grade linux servers. One by one all the big unix manufactures have fallen (apollo, sgi, ncd, dec, hp, aix) and now sun.

It is not clear if anyone could have arrested Sun's decline, short of acquiring Dell eight years ago...

I question the future of Open Office, Netbeans,...

[OTDR]

I genuinely question the future of Open Office, Netbeans, Java, et al if IBM acquires Sun. I'm not implying there will be a malicious or concerted effort to kill any particular product or anything, it's just IBM. Long before there was a Linux community I was a die-hard OS/2 user (the best single-user OS there ever was) and before that worked years for an IBM dealer. IBM was, is, and always will be a company of brilliant engineers that can't market water in a desert. Continually-shifting reprioritizations, undercutting of third-party support, you name it -- they kill their own products by their own sheer idiocy.

Re:That would *really* suck...

[ConceptJunkie]

Before you know it it'll become more complicated to use

Java? I didn't think that was possible. On the other hand, IBM sells Lotus Notes, so who knows what they are capable of?

hmmm

[buddyglass]

AIX vs. Solaris? DB2 vs. MySQL? This certainly bodes well for IBM's Java offerings and it means they can stop developing their own JRE, if they haven't already. They can also cannibalize Sun's server customers. On the other hand, it seems like this has to mean certain parts of Sun's business die. AIX and Solaris don't both need to exist within the same company. SPARC and POWER don't need to exist within the same company. DB2 and MySQL might, since they target different markets.

The Titanic Had a Lot of Momentum

[zandermander]

I've been expecting an announcement like this since at least 2002. I was at a recruiting event at Sun back in late 2002 and it was pretty obvious to me then that they had lost their way. They had no killer products or even rumors of such, they'd gone through a number of rounds of "cost cutting" measures (read: layoffs) and they were focused on yesterday's technology or pie-in-the-sky ideas. But, big things have a lot of momentum and can coast for a long time before reality hits. And, for some, reality will only hit when they feel the frigid waters of the north Atlantic.

Noooooooo!!!!!!!!

[S77IM]

OK, I've got no special love for Sun, but please God please, do not let them get swallowed up by the IBM bureaucracy.

"New in Java 8! XML-binding database security extension protocol modules for WebSphere integrated at every level of the language, providing automatic clustering, fail-over and performance profiling! To support this feature, a critical part of many customer solutions, writing a Java class will now require an additional 37 configuration files, and if you make a mistake in any one of them, a cryptic error will be thrown at run-time. For security reasons, we can't tell you what the error codes mean. Also, half of java.* and javax.* no longer work according to the specification and javadoc, and XML will now be stored in binary. IBM consultants are available to help you with the transition."

  -- 77IM

Re:This could be Schwartz' greatest trick ever.

[guruevi]

The decline of the overpriced server market started with the availability of cheap commodity (desktop) hardware being used for server-grade systems. People don't always need 100% uptime (as Windows is a great example that people don't even think about it) and they aren't willing to pay extra to squeeze every ounce of performance and reliability out of those machines. Those people are willing to live with a few hours per month of downtime or they just invest in a failover server. The Sun's (as well as SGI and DEC machines) are very 'expensive' but they won't fail as fast nor will the failure be as disastrous (eg. RAID controllers taking a whole array of data with them).

I have had experience you can say with every type of hardware out there. It's not unusual to see a Sun Workstation or Sun Server (where I currently work we still have a few Ultra's chugging) that have been purchased in the 90's. Even their hard drives haven't failed yet and have layers of dusts because people either forget about it or are afraid to touch it. However I have never seen a Dell that was more than 5 years old that either hasn't been replaced yet or had some major (hardware) problems with it. The same goes for hardware with PowerPC processors, those things keep living even after they've been off the market for years and the performance of an Apple with a quad core G5 is almost similar to the previous Mac Pro's (with Xeon processors) on most loads. Just now are the Xeon's (either the Nehalem architecture or the higher frequency versions of the previous) passing the G5's on such a level that you actually notice.

IBM kicks back a lot more code than you think

[Anonymous Coward]

Google "Linux Technology Center" or "IBM Internal Open Source Bazaar" and be educated. IBM just hasn't taken sides in the distro war. Instead of putting distros out there, IBM is kicking a lot of money and code into the Linux kernel and a lot of the core software that makes up your favorite distributions.

IBM probably contributes more code back to the FOSS community than Novell, potentially more than Red Hat.

Quite a few of the "who's who" of the FOSS world work at IBM writing the code that you're now using.

No. Not Now. Not Ever. I'm Coming For All Of You!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh would I love to be a fly on the wall when Scott meets the board of IBM:

Sam: "Scott, we are cylons, welcome to IBM, come on in here and meet the Boys."
Scott enters with buck-teeth grinning and nervously shaking hands.
Sam: "Come on in, resistance is futile, heh, heh, heh, have a seat, can we get you some coffee or a hot secretary with a danish?"
Sam pushes button, windows begin to black out, screen descends from the ceiling, lights lower and first two bars of Battlestar Galactica theme begins to play over and over again.
Sam: "Let us review."
Battlestar Galactica theme continues past first two bars as announcer says "previously on Battlestar": a video of Scott at just about EVERY Sun or COMDEX user's conference in the 80s and 90s on stage viciously blasting IBM and Microsoft. Video of Scott and leisure suit Larry (Ellison) together onstage at various trade presentations in 80s and 90s blasting IBM and Microsoft. Clip of Scott's mom blasting IBM and Microsoft. Video of Scott touting "the network is the system" and "dot in dot com" and "network computing". Battlestar Galactica theme climaxes, 2009 is displayed on black screen and a single kettle drum beat smashes and rolls, Carmina Burana begins playing and lights come on as a team of white coated doctors and nurses enter the room and approach Scott.

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.

a small few side-notes

[drolli]

in that case

-mysql and DB2 would be owned by the same company
-zfs and jfs would be ownded by the same company (yes i know jfs can also be licensed as GPL)
-jsp could be defined by the owners of websphere
-java technologies held by IBM and Sun could be merged

etc...

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:IBM and Microsoft: symbiotic relationship

[gtall]

"IBM exists as a giant IT behemoth today, precisely because Windows sucks, and they know it. "

I don't think so, IBM makes mainframes and has a very large services effort, neither of which compete with MS. If there were no MS, IBM would still continue to exist.

IBM might decide that MS cannot be left alone because MS is always on a continual jihad to bork everyone else, including IBM. So mere self-preservation would make IBM think of ways to compete against MS...not so much to beat MS but to keep them busy enough MS won't have what it takes to bork IBM.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

SUN stands for. . . .

[jafac]

Stanford University Network.

I think most people are lacking the historical perspective to understand the broader symbolic meaning of this buyout.

SUN represents everything about computer evolution, the computer is the network, Silicon Valley enterpreneurship, crusty - bearded old Unix guys, hacker culture, West Coast Innovation, etc.

IBM represents New York, East Coast, old-school business mentality, mainframes, closed-source, proprietary, white-shirt-and-tie cubicle-dwelling programmers.

It's the end of the Net as we know it.

If you look at the "1984" Apple Commercial: Big Brother just won.