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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'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.
-SaNo
So, can I finally get a 20' container with IBM servers in it?
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.
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.
Expert Java EE Consulting
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.
...together at last!
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.
Why nobody though about that before?
1- Buy Sun
2- License ZFS under GPLv2
3- Sell Sun
4- Done
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.
IBM.com that is...
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!
This space left intentionally blank.
I find the big blue room so much nicer when there's a sun in it. Don't you?
"Good news, everyone!"
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 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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
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.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.