What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean For Java, MySQL, Developers

An IBM-Sun merger is a tantalyzing possibility; snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that an IBM/Sun merger could crown Big Blue king of enterprise software development. 'Acquiring Sun would make IBM the clear leader in Java, as it would become the caretaker of the open source reference implementation of the JRE,' which, along with GlassFish, would become entry-level gateways to IBM's WebSphere stack. Moreover, MySQL would give IBM's database division a significant entry-level hook, and NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM's front against Visual Studio. 'All in all, this move would solidify IBM's role as "the developer company,"' McAllister writes. 'In other words, if this merger goes through and you're an enterprise developer and you're not an IBM customer now, get ready — because you soon will be. Better bring your wallet.'" And blackbearnh writes with a short interview with Brian Aker (who came to Sun as MySQL's director of architecture, and is now the lead for MySQL fork Drizzle) about what life would be like under Big Blue's control.

Comments

What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[teknopurge]

At first I lulz'd, then I wept.

Schwartz please, for the love of god, don't let this happen.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Z00L00K]

It's just natural selection at work, companies grows bigger and bigger and devour all competition and suddenly they are big enough to collapse and the cycle starts over again.

And I for one can just consider that Visual Studio sucks compared to Eclipse when it comes to how user-friendly the tool is.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Like the so-called "Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy", to wit:

If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel of sewage, you have sewage.
If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine, you have sewage.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Kozz]

IBS.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Hurricane78]

Oh my... And I thought Eclipse would suck very hard. How horrible is Visual Studio then?
Like developing for the IE... by using MS Word for layouting... with a large portion of Radeon driver quality... on a Windows ME / VMS mutant... running on a retro Edsel in-car original Pentium/VAX hybrid?

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[harry666t]

> Visual Studio sucks

Oh gods, I've used NetBeans, Eclipse, Dev-Cpp, KDevelop, MonoDevelop, and a couple of smaller IDEs. I've broken a few keyboards while using Emacs, and I've even tried Vim. I've also tried a shitload of small console-based editors such as nano, joe, jed, vi, and even ed. And I'd say, when it comes to editing source code, I think only ed sucks more than Visual Studio.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Let this be a lesson to all you companies out there that are not IBM. Stop being not IBM. IBM will not tolerate any companies that are not IBM, so if you value your shareholder value, stop being not IBM. Any companies that persist in being not IBM will eventually be forced by IBM to stop being not IBM.

I repeat, if you are not IBM, then you must stop being not IBM immediately, or else.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[thetoadwarrior]

He, unfortunately, almost has to let it happen as it'll probably be the best thing he's capable of doing aside from maybe getting a haircut.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[thetoadwarrior]

Eclipse's UI isn't that bad but it's performance is rubbish. My only fear is that some how NetBeans will get killed in such a move despite being superior to Eclipse.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Hurricane78]

Ok, start screaming if you notice what part I got totally wrong. ^^

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully the end to shitty platforms.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Except they don't collapse anymore. They become to big to fail...

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[not already in use]

I've used eclipse and Visual Studio both, professionally. Visual Studio blows eclipse away, and C# blows Java away. I gotta admit though, I use Visual Studio with the resharper plugin, which is developed by JetBrains, which adds a lot of functionality of IntelliJ IDEA (Java IDE), which blows eclipse away. Either way, just thinking about eclipse makes me shudder.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[teh moges]

In terms of performance, I'd say empirically that NetBeans is worse than Eclipse. I can't comment too much on usability, as I've used Eclipse so much that I'm used to it (I press CTRL, SHIFT + F to auto-format text when I'm writing in any other editor now). NetBeans does have better tools built in, such as support for Web Applications, which would be a big boost if these tools were made compatible across each other.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[TaoPhoenix]

Mary Poppins re: Microsoft:

"A spoonful of WINE makes the sewage go down, the sewage go down, the sewage go down..."

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Chrono11901]

I use visual studio for my hobby side stuff and Eclipse for my everyday work. While its true eclipse is more portable and expendable. Its slow bloated and buggy compared to VS.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[R3d M3rcury]

Sun and IBM--SUM?

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[rackserverdeals]

I'm not sure that Sun's in such a bad position that they might need a buyout.

Things aren't great right now. They've been cash flow positive for a while up until 2008. That was a big deal considering the beating they've been taking.

They have a decent amount of cash. Some of their acquisitions may take time to pay off. MySQL, I'm not too sure that was worth 1Bln.

The strategy Schwartz has takes a big investment and will take time to realize the financial benefits. Right now, with everything going on, it may take longer to realize the financial benefits, but the same conditions also make the acceptance of open source platforms more attractive so it could help spur developer involvement with Sun technologies.

They may not buy the support or the high margin hardware right now, but in a year or two as the company starts realizing the benefits of using Sun's open source stack, they might pick up support contracts and hardware. Maybe even some of their consulting services. If not, then they become a success story they can use in marketing.

Sun's big margin customers seem to be in the financial sector and we all know how that sector is doing. Their lower end servers have much lower profit margins. In that space, they have to compete with Dell, and they do pretty well on price. But if you need to scale vertically, you don't have as many options. If you want a big box for your application you also want Solaris on it too. It's the only OS on midrange servers that's worth looking at IMO.

I'm not sure Sun needs to be bought, but whoever does, if they handle the merger properly, would be getting one hell of a deal.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[merauder]

I think they just want to aquire ZFS, open source it, then sell SUN off again.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[try_anything]

SWT's performance varie depending on the toolkit used to implement it. Unfortunately, the GTK+ implementation is notoriously slow, and nobody outside IBM knows whether a Qt version will ever be released.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Sun.Jedi]

It means IBM is back in our datacenter in the midrange area after we spent years getting rid of those expensive, complete shitboxes called servers, AIX pSeries...

FTFY. ;)

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[labradore]

You're right that this debate is not much different than Vi vs. Emacs, but you can count this post as being for Visual Studio. It does have some warts, but Visual Studio is often more responsive and less cumbersome than Eclipse. It has a good debugger and it is on-par or better in terms of stability. I use VS, Eclipse and NetBeans, and by a small but real margin, I prefer using Visual Studio. Once you add in Whole Tomato's VisualAssistX (better auto-complete, refactoring, macros), Visual Studio becomes very productive. Without VisuallAssistX, I would probably opt for Eclipse, except for when doing Windows application development.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Anonymous Coward]

A poll of developers in progress: Would you pay money to keep Sun free? take the poll here and see the results here

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Or you could just say it this way: Cloud. Cloud is a service that Sun can charge for and people will pay for just because it's Sun.

Who has more sw/ net cred than Sun Microsystems? not IBM, that's for sure. Not Google, not in software. Not Microsoft, not in net and not in software either.

Since when does Wall Street accuratel value tech companies? Wall Street is either hyperbolic (Google) or depressive (Sun).

Sun has been up more than they've been down over the years. Their stock is worth more than when they started, although not near the boom years.

More to the point is Sun is stuffed to the gills with excellent software and developers.

So why doesn't Wall Street take a lesson from Buffet and learn to value companies by their underlying competencies and take a long view of Sun's prospects.?

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[rackserverdeals]

This is a crazy idea, but what if this was all a setup to make Sun an easy takeover target.

We've seen how the market can be manipulated. What if this was just a big scam so that IBM could buy Sun and get Java cheap?

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[PHPfanboy]

IBM has made plenty of money with Websphere. What would "owning Java" give them?

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[mcvos]

IBM has made plenty of money with Websphere. What would "owning Java" give them?

They get to call the shots.

Also, they get a lot more Java experts, so maybe they can finally fix some of their own crap.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[mcvos]

And I'd say, when it comes to editing source code, I think only ed sucks more than Visual Studio.

An IDE is not just about the editor. When I worked with Visual Studio (ages ago, fortunately), I used a gvim plugin as editor.

No IDE does exactly what you need. The real strength of IDEs is the availlability of plugins that add the functionality you do need.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[mcvos]

In terms of performance, I'd say empirically that NetBeans is worse than Eclipse.

They both freeze on me. But I used Eclipse on Windows, and NetBeans on a Mac, and in OS X, every application that wasn't specifically developed for Mac behaves like badly written bloatware. My guess would be that NetBeans would perform better on Windows or Linux. Then again, my Eclipse was loaded with plugins, whereas my NetBeans has only the most basic Ruby stuff, so I'm comparing apples with oranges.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Finite9]

When MySQL was sold to Sun, the lead devs probably thought it was great... they made a few bucks and they probbaly rationalized away the fact that they were giving free software to a bad corporation and it would eventually hurt their users and the entire free software community. Sun probably buttered them up and said it would never happen...here have a few more million to take your mind off it. NOW look at the situation: the main guys quit Sun due to "conflict of opinion" and started a fork of MySQL to bring it back to the community, and then Sun, the company who said not to worry, gets bought out by a company that has absolutely no interest in making MySQL competitive with their own DB2. How much are we willing to bet that MySQL sees no major new development from now on (if they buy Sun that is)? The recently 'forked' version has been set back, and it may take years to get to the point in development that it *could* have been if it had remained free. Note to lead devs: thanks for dropping the community in the shit. Hope you enjoy your millions.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Visual Studio blows ... and C# blows

I agree completely!

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Hurricane78]

It has one huge problem though. It only works on Playmobil OSes. ^^

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Hurricane78]

And of course: Playmobil professional 7. :P

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[carnalforge]

More likely the opposite, maybe this was all set up to get Sun's stock _up_ ? Maybe some relation to Cisco's announce to enter the server market?
Whatever. Time will tell

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[rackserverdeals]

Gee that's a whole lot of assumptions you're making there.

How about what is publicly available on the matter. Sun buys MySQL. Shortly after the MySQL guys announce some new features will only be available in the paid version or with paid support.

Sun's CEO says, no, it's going to be part of the open source trunk.

Sounds to me more like the MySQL guys didn't want to be part of Sun's overall open source strategy and instead wanted to be their own profit center instead.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[moosesocks]

ZFS *is* open-source, just not GPL.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Industry's Biggest Mistake

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[Luke has no name]

I'm sure they do, and I would, too.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[badkarmadayaccount]

Advanced plug-in system? Can't somebody tweak Firebug and Vimperator, throw in HTTP support in git, and call it a day?
I know FF isn't by far the snappiest, but at least it's not running in a JVM (I think...;)
Maybe port the whole lot to Greasemonkey for cross-browser availability.

Re:What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[badkarmadayaccount]

Next up: IBM plans to buy Nokia
*cough*Qt technologies*cough*the ex-Trolltech*cough*

Can't imagine (sorry)

[Anonymous Coward]

The company culture between Sun and IBM are too different for a successful merger. The trend that anything big blue acquires seem to die a slow and agonizing death isn't helping either.

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[CannonballHead]

The trend that anything big blue acquires seem to die a slow and agonizing death isn't helping either. [citation needed]

I haven't heard about the trend lately. IBM seems to be doing generally pretty well.

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[Neil Watson]

The transition to Notes alone is likely to send Sun talent running for the hills.

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[davecb]

Sequent: it was painful enough NASDAQ publicly ported to Sun.

--dave

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[Anonymous Coward]

CSCOhttp://www.google.com/finance?q=CSCO will be buying SUNhttp://www.google.com/finance?q=JAVA before April ends. Then watch out blazing for networks!

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[Anonymous Coward]

Sequent: it was painful enough
NASDAQ publicly ported to Sun.

Kind of a feeble trend if your only example is almost 10 years old.

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[AliasMarlowe]

The transition to Notes alone is likely to send Sun talent running for the hills.

They're dedicated professionals and they'll adapt to Notes and other aspects of IBM culture in a professional way: by curling into fetal position under a desk in the corner of the office and whimpering pathetically.

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[Tanktalus]

Apparently, IBM wants that business back.

Seriously, IBM didn't buy Sequent for Sequent. They bought it for NUMA. And that lives on in AIX (can't recall if it's iSeries or pSeries or both).

I'm trying to recall something that IBM has bought that died when IBM wanted the technology to live (as opposed to ransacking the company for technology and/or patents to integrate into other products). Lotus? Still alive and kicking (no matter how much some want it to die). Rational? Yup - even displaced some of IBM's software (ClearCase displaced IBM's CMVC). Cognos? Too new to tell. Informix? Still alive and kicking even though that one obviously is something IBM bought to ransack.

I suspect IBM is looking to buy Sun for Java and OpenOffice (which they're already rebranding as Lotus Symphony), and getting MySQL would be considered a freebie. This makes sense when you realise that IBM is still a little sore about losing the PC OS war, and are doing everything they can to combat Microsoft (e.g., pledging not to pursue patent claims against open-source software, defending Linux against SCO). Java is still seen as a platform to make desktop OS irrelevant, and OpenOffice is a direct attack on Microsoft's other main source of income. Cripple those two aspects of MS, and you've crippled all of MS.

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Here's your citation.

XyWrite

Oh and Lotus products seem to be doing well too...

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[vic-traill]

Here's your citation. XyWrite

But IBM never acquired XyWrite, did they? Although, IIRC, they screwed XyQuest and left them holding the bag when IBM bailed. Can I find a citation? [ ... on hold music here ... ] Here 'tis: http://yesss.freeshell.org/x/_xywhat.htm

Too bad - I was a XyWrite fan.

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[geminidomino]

*Twitches*

I loved XyWrite too, but the name always brings me back to nightmares of the windows 3.1 days when the lusers would refer to Win3.1's RTF editor as "AWRITE" because the fuckwits thought the icon was part of the name...

Damn you, slashdot, for making me want to murder people through time...

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[Anonymous Coward]

Having been a part of PricewaterhouseCoopers that was taken over and having seen its "spirit of enterprise and endeavour" being strangulated by the mediocrity and stuffiness of Armonk -- I have no doubt at all that smart technology will once again be demolished by the combined power of Excel and Powerpoint ( btw: most of IBM uses MS Office products, not Lotus Smartsuite )

Re:Can't imagine (sorry)

[JAlexoi]

As a fully integrated collaboration solution and application delivery platform, Notes is actually quite good for the end user. The damn thing needs half a gig just to run, but then who am I to judge, most laptops have 2gb min now.

Keep Sun Independent!

[javacowboy]

Here's a poll to vote on maintaining Sun's independence from IBM:

http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/426985/results

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[The Hooloovoo]

Online petitions work on companies like Facebook because pleasing as many random people as possible is their business model. A Web 2.0 company's product is its users. Nobody pays for Facebook as an end user -- the people paying for Facebook are paying for your ad views, marketing data, etc.

IBM and Sun shareholders, on the other hand, couldn't give less of a hoot about your feelings. Companies buy software based on a number of factors, but these factors always tie back to the bottom line. Are you going to stop visiting your favorite website because it would be using "IBM Glassfish" instead of "Sun Glassfish"?

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[ByOhTek]

OK. I voted. "No".

Sorry, I've never been very impressed by Sun, and to be honest, for the longest time, I had better luck with IBMs JVM. Given the choice (and my prior experience), I'll take an IBM product over a Sun product any day.

Then again, I also have had a Mac and went back, as your sig mentions, so maybe I've just had different experiences, and have different priorities.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[Runaway1956]

I don't think I care very much if Sun is acquired by another company, or even which company. Lemme think, a moment or two here. Let's start with "IBM compatible". Yes, IBM was instrumental in creating the personal computer. Somehow, they didn't end up as the great hulking monopoly of personal computing as a result of that. IBM has contributed a lot to computing since then - certainly more than Microsoft, and probably more than any other software company. Big Blue contributes both HARDWARE innovations, as well as software. And, they haven't capitalized on that to become a monopoly. I scratch my head, and wonder, just how much harm can IBM do to personal computing? Or, business computing, for that matter. Granted, some other shops may do a little more with some branch of research. Some other shop might see things in a different light, thereby coming up with something that IBM misses. But, IBM certainly doesn't seem to be the people to outright stifle innovation. I can point to a number of patent trolls (Microsoft, anyone?) who actually DO stifle innovation. Maybe it would be beneficial to keep Sun independent of IBM, but it certainly can't make THAT GREAT a difference to me, the end user. I mean, it's debatable whether Sun's best known product is even useful. Everything Java is a resource hog, for instance. Java is still mighty damned quirky in a 64 bit environment. I don't want to slam Sun, but hey, it is debatable whether they have contributed anything as important as IBM has contributed to computer sciences. The one Sun product that I use more than any other, Virtual Box, was not a Sun development - they bought that. What else has sun created, that the world "can't do without"? Solaris is cool, but there are several replacements, with equally good support. Will we really miss Sun, if they disappear? Personally, I think we'll miss them a little bit, for a couple years. Then, Sun will be just another trip down Nostalgia Lane, like Amiga. No big deal, in the grand scheme of things.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[DrSkwid]

You might want to thank Compaq for breaking open the IBM PC market.
The market also resisted MCA and grew it's own VGA cards when IBM dropped the ball whiel trying to fence everyone back in.

There's also that whole Third Reich part but we can gloss over than and look straight at the patent portfolio warchest.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[Dogtanian]

Yes, IBM was instrumental in creating the personal computer.

Uh, NO.

IBM may have developed the original " IBM Personal Computer" (ancestor of the models we're still using today). However, they sure as hell did *not* invent the original concept of a personal computer. That had been around for years (arguably originating with the Apple II) and there were already dozens of personal computers by the time IBM's came out.

Even if we accept that you meant "personal computer" as the later synonym for IBM's PC and compatible rivals, these were nothing revolutionary in themselves, even at the time. The original IBM PC was almost entirely built from off-the-shelf and pre-existing parts (including MS-DOS which was originally based on a bought-in borderline ripoff of CP/M). Reasonably powerful- which it ought to have been at the price- but not revolutionary, and likely a success mainly because it was made by IBM rather than on merit.

I'm sure that IBM- at that time the evil behemoth of the mainframe era- only gave the go ahead to *their* PC because it was *already* clear by then that personal computers in general were the future regardless of what they did- and that if they'd left it any longer they'd have lost out on this and been increasingly marginalised. Given the choice, I'm sure they'd rather have killed the personal computer and sat on their mainframe laurels. The revolutionary thing was IBM even building a PC (and the informal way in which it was designed), but that was only because they were forced into it by an even bigger revolution.

Yes, IBM's PC became the de facto standard, but it wasn't the original personal computer, and the format's success had more to do with the name on the box (originally) and the very genericness of the hardware making it easy to clone (later on) than anything revolutionary about its design.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[evilpenguin]

I agree. IBM has been delivering superior support and Java tools for quite a while. Eclipse is the best IDE I have used, apart, perhaps, from the old Borland text-based IDE for Turbo C++.

And yes, I have used Netbeans and Visual Studio. And Kdevelop and Monodevelop and vim, vi, and emacs. And "brief" back when MS-DOS was the way to go.

And ed and Turbo Pascal back on CP/M. How many of you young punks used CP/M? Huh? Now get the hell off my lawn!

IBM is a stodgy old enterprise player, but they are solid and professional. They have been much friendlier to open source in general and Linux in particular than Sun has. I for one welcome our new Big Blue overlords...

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[ChunderDownunder]

Are you going to stop visiting your favorite website because it would be using "IBM Glassfish" instead of "Sun Glassfish"?

There may not be an "IBM Glassfish" if, after the merger, the ideologues decide that Glassfish does not mesh with IBM's proprietary Websphere offering.

Glassfish will not go away, it is open source, but it may wither through lack of funding and resources.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes like Tibet from China

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. IBM has been delivering superior support and Java tools for quite a while. They have been much friendlier to open source in general and Linux in particular than Sun has. I for one welcome our new Big Blue overlords...

Is this sarcasm? IBM's JVMs has been nothing but endless misery for us compared to those from Sun and HP. WebSphere is horrifically complex, expensive, and painful as compared to alternatives. IBM is also way behind in these areas, releasing their support for new J2SE and J2EE versions years after everyone else. As for open source, IBM talks a lot, but gives little. Sure, there's Eclipse -- so what. How about source code for IBM's JVM? How about source code for WebSphere? I'm talking about just for troubleshooting purposes here. IBM does not want openness or simplicity -- they want closed, hard-to-use solutions that they charge a lot for and that won't run without an army of their consultants.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Iran and Sun has blocked us from downloading their software. If this merging, make us free from these Sun's damn policies, I will be very happy to see it.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[sproketboy]

IDEA is far superior to Eclipse and NetBeans.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are the policies of the US Government, not Sun. Sorry, but if you're on a the Feds shit list, you're not getting the cool software.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the people at the poll saying they would dump money into Sun to keep it independent actually did do that, then they would give a hoot what those people thought.

Re:Keep Sun Independent!

[evilpenguin]

A little of both, actually...

Developers!

[castorvx]

... 'All in all, this move would solidify IBM's role as "the developer company,"' ...

No one tell Ballmer. I'm not sure he could handle this kind of let down.

Re:Developers!

[wbren]

That depends. Who has more chairs: Microsoft or IBM?

Re:Developers!

[mhall119]

Who has more chairs: Microsoft or IBM?

IBM. In fact, they have more than 3 times more chairs (well, employees, but a good proxy for # of chairs).

Heck, they probably have a dozen patents on chairs.

Re:Developers!

[Hurricane78]

Do chairmen count? They are a bit sloppy and slippery in the summer, but they make wonderful noises when thrown far enough.

Re:Developers!

[wbren]

True, but Microsoft could have more conference rooms, which could tip the scale in Microsoft's favor. There might be a 5 to 1 ratio of chairs to employees at a company like Microsoft, whereas a company like IBM might be closer to a 3:1 or even 2:1 ratio.

IBM is also very committed to the "work from home" lifestyle, so you need to take that into account as well.

I think IBM may still have a decisive advantage if/when their chairs are combined with Sun's. I hear Sun has a chair stockpile left over from the .com bubble.

Re:Developers!

[RobertLTux]

not to mention a few patents on "a means to propel a common office chair by..."

Re:Developers!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how many chairs are needed to change a light bulb at IBM, SUN, MS and all permutations of mergers betwixt them?

Re:Developers!

[JAlexoi]

Imagine that! If you account all of the chairs in all of IBM's employees' homes, since IBM has "work from home". IBM would really mean It Beats Microsoft ( - with chairs. Litelrally :) )

Too big to fail.

[tthomas48]

Have we learned nothing from the recent "too big to fail" mess? I realize IBM is already too big to fail, but do we want to let them add to it? Sun failing would be fine for the market. Lots of small companies would jump in to take its place. Sun being bought by IBM would stifle the marketplace and would exert far too much control.

Sometimes to have a free-ish market we have to think about unpleasant topics like anti-trust.

Re:Too big to fail.

[Yetihehe]

It's like with black holes. Once they are large enough, they won't shrink and will suck in anything nearby.

Re:Too big to fail.

[Sponge Bath]

they won't shrink and will suck

I think you have identified a fundamental truth.

Re:Too big to fail.

[ByOhTek]

IBM vs. Oracle: battle of the century?

Re:Too big to fail.

[MightyMartian]

The problem here isn't Democrat or Republican (after all, it was a Republican president who signed off on the first big money toss), the problem here is that no one has the balls to say what needs to be said "A company that's too big to fail should never be permitted to exist." We need a new generation of trust busters who would be empowered to forcibly bust up companies that got too big.

Re:Too big to fail.

[Bill Dimm]

Have we learned nothing from the recent "too big to fail" mess?

Obviously not, or one of the conditions for receiving government bailouts would have been that the companies break up into smaller pieces over some reasonable time frame, so they wouldn't be "too big to fail" in the future. Instead, it's business as usual.

Re:Too big to fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM vs. Oracle: battle of the century?

Hopefully 2 losers will kill each other....

Re:Too big to fail.

[tthomas48]

If it was socialism or communism we would have bought, re-orged and consolidated the banks. Sold off all the bad debt at fire-sale prices and moved on from this whole mess. If we were capitalists we would have let all the jackasses fail and let the secure banks that didn't dabble in these securities move into a huge and unrealized market. Instead we get the downside to communism (government propping up useless industry to save jobs) and capitalism (investors lose lots of money). And (to my dismay) I see no difference between Obama and Bush's plans.

You believe a bunch of myths about Democrats. You believe myths about capitalism being somehow enshrined in the constitution. The sooner you realize this, the sooner we can all become productive again.

Re:Too big to fail.

[geekoid]

IBM isn't too big to fail, and neither are the automakers.

An institution that backs almost all the loans in the world is; becasue if it fails* the loans stop, and many large industries can't get the loans they needs and production stops..pretty much globally.

There isn't anything IBM does that couldn't be scooped up by other players. OTOH, the practically own the patent on one's and zero's so I don't think they would ever collapse

*The failure I am talking about is immediate collapse as opposed to a slow fail with pieces being sold.

Re:Too big to fail.

[geekoid]

Actually Obama said that.
Specifically he said:
"But I think the most important thing that we can do is make sure that we put in a bunch of financial regulatory mechanisms to prevent companies like an AIG holding the rest of us hostage. Because that's -- that's the real problem."

That's from the tonight show transcript:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/20/obama-on-tonight-show-wit_n_177206.html

Re:Too big to fail.

[russotto]

Have we learned nothing from the recent "too big to fail" mess? I realize IBM is already too big to fail, but do we want to let them add to it? Sun failing would be fine for the market. Lots of small companies would jump in to take its place. Sun being bought by IBM would stifle the marketplace and would exert far too much control.

AIG was only "too big to fail" because their failure would have more or less automatically triggered a cascade of failures across the financial system (worse than already happened), when all their paper became worthless. That doesn't apply to IBM; were they to fail, their assets would end up being sold off piecemeal rather than simply cease to exist.

If Sun fails, IBM just picks up what it wants at auction anyway.

Re:Too big to fail.

[tthomas48]

Sure because it's not like much of the government and private sector are running on IBM software or hardware. Their contracts becoming worthless would not cascade at all. You've bought into AIG being too big to fail. Wait until IBM makes their case.

Re:Too big to fail.

[bored_engineer]

Isn't everybody griping that the loans have stopped despite the massive cash layout?

Re:Too big to fail.

[MightyMartian]

"Prevent" covers a lot of territory. I'm talking about a specific solution. No company should become so large that it's failure could threaten and severely cripple the economy, both national and international. Such a company represents a single point of failure, and us tech guys know just how evil that is.

I realize AIG is effectively being cut to pieces, but at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. We need to get past this "all the profits belong to the investors, all the shit that falls out of the sky when things tank belongs to the taxpayer." If the taxpayer is expected to basically borrow and print money to pay for these guys, then the taxpayer, through the government and regulators, should have the unequivocal power to cut companies into pieces.

AIG should never have been allowed to happen, everyone seems to agree on that, but no one wants to spout the real solution, probably because most of them have enjoyed the fruits of being whores to the financial sector.

Re:Too big to fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't want socialism. BO and the democrats make a token effort towards capitalism, but load it up with provisions and FUD so it fails. Then they can push socialism as the only alternative.

Re:Too big to fail.

[antirelic]

How cant you love it though? The possibilities in this merger are endless. Sun has been keeping afloat for the past 10 years. Their products are not bad, but way too expensive, for anything not requiring massive amounts of horse power. There are plenty of things that Sun does better than anyone else, such as massive Oracle databases... but not much else. For a while I was hoping that Solaris would just die already, but man did it make an improvement in 10 (I like the zones, what can I say). Perhaps they can open source some of it? (unlikely) Most likely they will use Solaris as a closed source "graduated" step. But... whateva. Perhaps IBM will just take the Sparc architecture, and take the best parts and put it into its offerings, and let the core of Sparc die. I wouldnt be too horribly sad to see it go.

Re:Too big to fail.

[falconwolf]

An institution that backs almost all the loans in the world is; becasue if it fails* the loans stop, and many large industries can't get the loans they needs and production stops..pretty much globally.

The problem with this was that even after the financial institutions were bought out they still weren't lending much money. Instead they used the money from the bailout to buy each other making themselves bigger. They should have been made to split into smaller businesses while continuing to loan money. Or they should have been made to declare bankruptcy leaving the businesses who did not take part in BS in business.

Falcon

Re:Too big to fail.

[larry bagina]

it's worse than business as usual.

US Bancorp CEO Richard Davis's comments on TARP:

"I will say this very bluntly: We were told to take it. Not asked, told. 'You will take it,' " Davis said. "It doesn't matter if you were there on the first night and you were told to sign on the dotted line before you walked out of the office, or whether in the days that followed, you were told to take it."

"We were told to take it so that we could help Darwin synthesize the weaker banks and acquire those and put them under different leadership," he said. "We are not even allowed to mention that. ... We were supposed to say the TARP money was used for lending."

Northern Trust (remember them from one of Barney Frank's tantrums?) got sick of complaints for sponsoring a charity golf tournament, so they're in the process of returning TARP money they didn't need and were told to take. (Some other banks are returning the money as well).

Bank of America agreed to buy Merril Lynch, but tried to back out after discovering they had been cooking their books. Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson made them complete the acquisistion (and put up additional money and loan guarantees).

JP Morgan acquired Bear Stearns and WaMu. Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia. BoA also acquired countrywide.

TARP was proposed and approved as a plan to purchase junk mortgages. In reality, it's turned big banks even bigger.

The money was given to banks so they could loan it? Not exactly.

Banks sold preferred shares to the government in exchange for preferred shares (which pay a dividend and are first in line in the event of a bankruptcy). Since the money isn't free, they need to loan it out, right?

Of course, AIG and Citibank couldn't make those payments, so that preferred stock was reorganized to regular non-preferred, non-dividend paying stock.

And AIG? You know where the bonus money went, but the rest is a mystery. They're basically laundering it to other banks (many of them in Europe).

Re:Too big to fail.

[mgblst]

It is not as simple as that in a multi-cultural world. If the US has the rule, but other countries do not, then their companies will end up dominating. You can rarely compete against a huge company fairly.

But I agree with you, not company should be too big to fall, it is very anti-capitalism.

Re:Too big to fail.

[Runaway1956]

The problem was deregulation. The United States learned some pretty hard lessons, along with the rest of the world, in 1929. Laws were crafted to regulate the financial sector as a result of the great crash of 1929. About, oh, 50 years later, Modern Math students who had worked their way up the various ladders started dismantling those regulations. Net result, by the year 2000, people were buying and selling securities, stocks, and bonds on the market, ON CREDIT. Not to mention, futures (gasoline, among others). IF WE WERE TO re-examine the regulations that were in place in - oh - let's take 1960 - and put them back into place, intact, almost all the abuse would be eliminated. This is not to suggest that the market would be fixed overnight - I only suggest that things would stop going downhill, and that things would begin improving. Slowly, maybe, but they would improve.

Re:Too big to fail.

[homer_s]

should be too big to fall, it is very anti-capitalism.

In a true capitalist society, no company would be "too _anything_ to fail". If a company fails, their investors, debtors, customers, counterparties, etc would take their losses - just like they'd take their profits.

In your current system, the companies aren't "too big to fail" - they're "too politically connected to fail".

Re:Too big to fail.

[DrSkwid]

govt. in control of business is fascism

Re:Too big to fail.

[russotto]

Sure because it's not like much of the government and private sector are running on IBM software or hardware. Their contracts becoming worthless would not cascade at all.

Neither the software nor the hardware would disappear if IBM went under. They're real assets, with value apart from the company they were made by. Any service contracts might disappear, if no one bought that section of the company, but that's not nearly as catastrophic. In any case, if IBM did fail, it would almost certainly be a Chapter 11 bankruptcy from which it would emerge.

I haven't bought into AIG being "too big to fail" (I'm actually not sure about that one); I've only pointed out that the rationale applied to AIG simply does not apply to IBM.

Re:Too big to fail.

[tthomas48]

I wasn't really attacking your premise. My point was just that they would portray it the same way. I can hear them saying, "Who could take over these IBM contracts? Why there is no one in the world with the breadth of experience IBM had. No one with the requisite experience to touch these critical systems." Those of us reading slashdot would call BS, but that doesn't mean that they would be able to convince the American public.

Re:Too big to fail.

[yorugua]

Maybe HP-EDS should think on a merge with Oracle if they want to compete in the future with a IBM-PWC-Notes-DB2-Informix-Sun kind of company.

Re:Too big to fail.

[rackserverdeals]

Their products are not bad, but way too expensive, for anything not requiring massive amounts of horse power.

Expensive compared to what? Large companies don't buy white box hardware. They are either buying Sun, IBM, HP or Dell for the most part.

Dell is usually the cheapest. A Sun X2250 and a Dell PowerEdge 1950 III are very similar.

Configured almost identically with the same dual quad core CPUs, 8gigs of RAM and 2 250GB Sata drives, the Dell comes out to $2,643, the Sun is $2,457.

Now if you're talking about the $30,000+ systems they usually don't have direct competition from people like Dell and while they've had their 8core /8thread chips out for a while and even running them with up to 8 CPUs per server, Intel is just now comming out with an 8 core 2 thread chip.

Re:Too big to fail.

[Sun.Jedi]

I realize IBM is already too big to fail, but do we want to let them add to it

Fuck IBM. They cannot be 'too big to fail' if they continue to ship jobs to india.

Sun being bought by IBM would stifle the marketplace and would exert far too much control.

IBM can't compete in the HPC, or high end computing markets. And yes, Linux SUCKS on a pSeries compared to Solaris 10 on a 9000. Dell, and their pitiful 4 socket max 4u (r905), AMD configuration isn't even in the conversation.

- as one who supports both, native SUN kicks the shit out of IBM all day long.

Sometimes to have a free-ish market we have to think about unpleasant topics like anti-trust.

If this is what it takes to keep Sun from being submergered by IBM, so be it. Sign me up.

Re:Too big to fail.

[fm6]

I share your dislike of mergers, but...

Sun failing would be fine for the market. Lots of small companies would jump in to take its place.

Like who? Most of Sun's customers are big corporate and research entities that have no interest in dealing with anybody who doesn't have a huge sales, distribution, and support operation. If they can't buy from Sun, they won't turn to a white box company. They'll turn to IBM, HP, or Dell.

Re:Too big to fail.

[tthomas48]

I think you bring up the fact that there are two facets to Sun. There's hardware and there's their services division. How important you think Sun is to the ecosystem seems to revolve more around whether you're a sysadmin or developer. Most of us developers don't even think about Sun as developing hardware. Most of the SysAdmins don't seem to think of Sun as the controlling force behind Java.

Re:Too big to fail.

[Richard_at_work]

So, punish companies that are too successful? Yup, thats a great plan.

Re:Too big to fail.

[fm6]

Most of us developers don't even think about Sun as developing hardware. Most of the SysAdmins don't seem to think of Sun as the controlling force behind Java.

You're on the right track when you talk about how people see Sun based on how it affects them. But your picture of the company is still too superficial.

First of all, hardware and software are not equal "facets" of Sun. The hardware business is much bigger. After all, the company only exists because a Stanford grad student couldn't persuade any existing hardware company's to license his killer workstation design.

Second, Java is important in the software side of things, but it's not dominant. There's development tools, application servers, web servers (Sun basically took over what used to be Netscape's http server business) databases (MySQL and Java DB) so-called thin client technology (remember Tarantella? Now part of Sun) and more.

Re:Too big to fail.

[badkarmadayaccount]

  Much more interesting - in their tries to secure the client side in their Server-Terminal wet dream,
  IBM will decide that M$ is to wobbly in the long term, and Appl€ are too much into user experience control,
  so they are gonna battle for FOSS on the desktop for a lack of a technically better solution,
  beginning with the open sourcing of all Lighthouse Design projects in the Sun morgue.
  Open Photoshop replacement, here we come! *drools*

Re:Too big to fail.

[AvitarX]

I don't think IBM is too big to fail. Their failure would be bad, but nothing like some other (e.g. AIG).

I agree that too big to fail was a mistake, and am not defending that strategy, but what the large banks (and small ones too) do is provide the capitol to idea rich, but cash poor companies and people. This is a very important function, and the losses if a bank failed would permanently remove some of this capitol from circulation.

This will prevent new things from happening, and it isn't something that can easily be replicated. Enterprise class service is still an area with some competition.

Additionally look at the 2 stocks in comparison, AIG took a ride on the insane late 90's rise, it is not crashing down.

IBM has been a reasonable slow but steady company. Really how "too big to fail" banks were expected to be.

Re:Obama Policies Will Bankrupt USA Tsarkon Report

[kmoorman]

What a maroon.

IBM = No service

[Anonymous Coward]

For those out there that think this is a good thing, try to navigate IBM's website. Or, worse yet, try to get support. You will be queued and wait for 24 hours for the simplest question. Then you would wait 24 hours after you respond to them after they copy and paste documentation back to you.

If you have IBM products, and you are giving them less the $1M/year, expect nothing in return for your money.

Re:IBM = No service

[rackserverdeals]

More importantly, what has IBM open sourced?

Sun has open sourced more of their own code than IBM has. Actually, Sun probably has open sourced more lines of code than anyone for that matter.

For large organizations, such as Sun and IBM, that have licensing agreements for parts of their technology, open sourcing a closed source project is not a trivial matter.

There's still a bit at Sun that was supposed to be open sourced that hasn't. Will IBM continue this? Will they put the same amount of effort into Sun's current open source projects? This is what worries me. Some of Sun's important open source projects compete with IBM's open and closed products.

The acquisition of Sun would have to transform the mindset of IBM. The open source gameplan that Jonathan Schwartz outlined in his video blogs seems like a good one, but if they get eaten up by IBM, I don't know if that plan will be able to be set in motion. It seems that when IBM acquires someone, the acquired company becomes more like IBM and not the other way around.

It's not just about open source though. Sun has been creating a lot of great hardware. The CMT chip based servers are awesome. The Ranger super computer is a great example of what you can do with their massive infiniband switch.

The billions of dollars they would spend to acquire sun would be worth it just to get Andy Bechtolsheim in my opinion.

The current economic crisis has made Sun a great bargain for those that can afford to acquire it.

Netbeans/Eclipse is going to be strange and I really hope that Netbeans doesn't die.

AIX/Solaris seems easy. IBM would be stupid to kill Solaris. AIX would likely be put on legacy support. Solaris may even become the default OS for IBM's new mainframes.

Power/Sparc would have to consolidate and with IBM/Sum/Fujitsu working together you might see some even more impressive risc servers coming out.

OpenOffice.org will continue because IBM uses it as a base for Lotus Symphony. StarOffice may die or get wrapped up in Symphony.

Glassfish might be tough. Competes with WebSphere and IBM has been more behind Apache's Geronimo app server I think.

I think Sun's blades might be very appealing to IBM.

As for Java, I'm more comfortable with it being under Sun than IBM. For all the press IBM has had over the SCO trial, I don't see them as good of an open source company as Sun. I can't remember the details right now, but there were some Apache projects, as well as OpenOffice.org where IBM wasn't really sending stuff upstream. The license in those cases didn't require it, but I still think it says alot, especially considering the financial benefits IBM has received from those projects.

Re:IBM = No service

[Rasputin]

"For those out there that think this is a good thing, try to navigate IBM's website."

Yeah, too bad Sun's pages suck equally badly. As much as possible, I've always used Google to search either one.

Re:IBM = No service

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse.
Derby.
Massive contributions to the Linux kernel.

Until recently IBM had made orders of magnitude greater contributions to the Open Source community than Sun.

Re:IBM = No service

[rackserverdeals]

Until recently IBM had made orders of magnitude greater contributions to the Open Source community than Sun.

Prove it. There was an EU study in 2006 that analyzed the corporate contributions to Debian. Sun was the largest with about 4 times the peron months attributed to it than IBM who came in second place.

That's only what came with Debian and doesn't count open sourcing Solaris or Java or any of the other projects they recently open sourced.

A different view is this old post from Ben Rockwood that they contribute equally but in different ways. Even if that were true, that's like your rich friend and really really rich friend donating the same amount of money to charity.

I think IBM gets way too much credit because they got sued by SCO. Remember. IBM didn't come in to save Linux because SCO sued Linux, SCO sued IBM.

I've switched over to Netbeans a long time ago. One of the reasons I like open source software is because it's free. Doing mainly web development and sometimes swing apps, Netbeans rocks and I don't have to buy any plugins to do what I need.

Re:IBM = No service

[Anonymous Coward]

Andy Bechtolsheim is working part-time, at present, for Sun. Methinks he would leave Sun altogether if IBM acquires.

And Apple should buy Sun and get into the enterprise. Better culture fit, better survival prospects for Sun's tech. Andy would stick around, imho.

Re:IBM = No service

[PHPfanboy]

If you love Sun so much, why aren't you selling their rack servers?

Re:IBM = No service

[pedestrian crossing]

s/IBM/Microsoft/g

Re:IBM = No service

[forgotten_my_nick]

"As for Java, I'm more comfortable with it being under Sun than IBM."

IBM already have their own JVM. The only Java bit that would be taken over is probably the spec. I don't see what SCO has to do about anything unless we are talking about pump-n-dump scams.

Re:IBM = No service

[neuromancer23]

I doubt that support for Netbeans would continue, which would really be sad, since it is a superior IDE to Eclipse in almost every way now days. I still don't use it because the build system / Project structure (requiring a separate ant build) blows. It's tragic that they have so many great features in the IDE and yet fail at performing even the most basic tasks.

As far as glassfish, they would be stupid to drop that since it is far and away the best open source app server on the market. Plus the freemium model is the only likely app server model to succeed. No one is going to pay $100,000k for a single cpu license for a container when the federal budget is going to be consuming 40% of the GDP. After a decade of Bush and Obama, Americans are going to be starving in the streets, barely able to afford electricity. Businesses will be lucky to be able to pay their employees and buy new servers. They certainly aren't going to be making commercial software purchases for things they can get for free. Maybe the government will bailout Oracle and IBM by outlawing open-source software.

Solaris is clearly better than AIX and I can't see AIX surviving. It's a miracle that it has lasted this long.

As for Java, with IBM in control of the JCP it is dead. IBM will destroy it just like they destroyed web services and corrupted the Java platform previously by introducing specs that subverted human progress for the purpose of locking people into application servers (e.g. EJB).

When dealing with IBM it is important to remember that we are talking about a company who deliberately engineered the deaths of 13 million people just because T.J. Watson hated Jews and wanted to sell computers. Everything they touch dies. Java will not be any different.

Re:IBM = No service

[rackserverdeals]

Why did you pick Debian as a metric?

Because that's one of the most comprehensive studies performed on corporate contributions to open source. I'm not in a position to take the time and resources to do my own study. Here's another look at how much Sun has contributed to open source.

Debian is also a popular distro that many other distros are based on. (Ubuntu, Xandros, KNOPPIX, DSL, Linspire)

The Linux Kernel is is not the only Open Source or Free Software project out there. I'd argue it's not even the most important one. If the linux kernel one day disappeared, the rest of the open source world could continue. But without the rest of the open source world, the linux kernel is worthless.

Have you ever had IBM salespeople come in to spec out a project? You might be surprised what they have to say on AIX vs Linux. This document is old, but still available on the IBM website. It talks about how AIX is better than Linux.

Re:IBM = No service

[rackserverdeals]

If you love Sun so much, why aren't you selling their rack servers?

I don't sell any servers. That's not what the site is about and that one page that's up now is just a teaser while the rest of the site is being developed.

Re:IBM = No service

[rackserverdeals]

The spec is probably the most important part of Java.

There was a time when using IBM's JVM gave some performance improvements but since 1.5 that hasn't been the case from what I've seen.

IBM's been slow to release new versions. The most recent version available for download is 1.5.

Re:IBM = No service

[rackserverdeals]

Even under the assumption that Debian is more important than the Linux kernel, Sun/IBM contributions to the kernel are far more important than Sun/IBM contributions to Debian.

That depends on your perspective. A tiny fraction of people use the kernel directly. A larger portion of people use the software above the kernel. Debian is an entire OS on top of the linux kernel. Sun and IBM don't just make hardware. They also create software, standards and provide consulting services. In IBM's case, services is a big deal and they've been moving away from hardware in some areas.

For some people, GNU is the most important project. I know that I was using GNU tools before I ever even heard of BSD or linux.

If you're just an office user, Firefox and OpenOffice.org might be all you care about.

Web developer? Chances are you visit apache.org a lot.

I'm not sure why the linux kernel gets so much attention. The linux kernel was the last bit that GNU needed to complete an operating system.

As someone that's using BSD, are you not familiar with the history of BSD, Sun's relationship with BSD and who Bill Joy is?

I would think a BSD user would care more about Sun's contributions to open source than IBM's contributions to Linux???

Search the lkml archives. The word Solaris shows up much more than aix or any other unix operating system, except BSD. And it's not always negative :) You'll also see some sun.com email addresses there.

Some people involved with the Linux kernel really hate sun and solaris. Some of it might be because Sun is their biggest competitor. For all the talk about Microsoft, it's really the Solaris market they're after. It's a shame.

There's been a good discussion of this...

[tcopeland]

...on the JavaPosse Google group here. Some talk about what this might mean for Netbeans, as one of the JavaPosse guys (Tor Norbye) is (was?) on the NB team.

Also, what would this do for the massive JavaCC book market? Expand it, I hope!

Re:There's been a good discussion of this...

[rackserverdeals]

Since 5.0 Netbeans has made tremendous improvements and now the combination of Glassfish and Netbeans is a powerhouse for J2EE development. That is real competition for Websphere Studio which costs a heck of a lot of money.

With EJB3, using EJB's even for smaller projects, using the full J2EE stack is reasonable. The complexity and performance overhead of EJBs is no longer a problem and it makes it very easy to deploy restful web services.

There's a great video on the matter from an independent developer at CommunityOne east recently. You can see the video here. When you get to that page click on the link for Video: Netbeans 6.7 and Glassfish v3. It's the third video.

My favorite quote was about which one is better, Netbeans or Eclipse. The answer was IdeaJ but it's not free :)

Re:There's been a good discussion of this...

[FishWithAHammer]

Since 5.0 Netbeans has made tremendous improvements

This cannot be understated. NetBeans 6.5 is a joy to use. I still personally prefer Visual Studio, but NetBeans is awesome for when I have to use Java or want to develop in PHP. I can see NetBeans supplanting VS for my C++ work in pretty short order.

Re:There's been a good discussion of this...

[rackserverdeals]

There's one important feature Netbeans has that no other IDE has.

The "Hi. My name is Roman Strobl" screencasts!

Re:There's been a good discussion of this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the fact that *ALL* NetBeans guys in Menlo Park were already laid off, I don't give much time to NetBeans. Now NetBeans is put into the basket of cloud computing (it's part of the recently created cloud computing division of SUN), while nobody understands what does it to have in common with the cloud.

--Sunny--

The real problem

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Is that new releases of Java and Solaris will be EBCDIC only!

Re:The real problem

[mcgrew]

No, Java will be supercesed by COBOL.

Re:The real problem

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Is that new releases of Java and Solaris will be EBCDIC only!

. . . and distributed in the new, innovative punch card format. An excellent secure media, free from all those meddling kids on the Internet. Or has anyone seen a punch card torrent?

I'd better start looking on eBay for an old punch card reader. Although, I'd prefer a new one, with a USB interface, of course.

Re:The real problem

[mhall119]

Or has anyone seen a punch card torrent

You will if you accidentally knock over a box of them. Or is that a stack dump?

Re:The real problem

[HappyEngineer]

In all seriousness, I have long wanted a punch card reader with a USB interface. I have a card puncher and would love to have fun punching out some cards and then reading them in just for the pure nostalgia of it. If you ever find one for a reasonable price, please let me know!

Re:The real problem

[mcvos]

No, Java will be supercesed by COBOL.

Java already is the new COBOL.

"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[javacowboy]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

IBM will take all of Sun's great software products, and either ruin or kill them through a combination of strategic imperative, incompetence, and bureaucracy.

Say goodbye to Netbeans. IBM doesn't want competition to Eclipse.

Watch OpenSolaris get pillaged for bits like ZFS and DTrace to GPL and put in Linux and then left in the ditch (though I don't think they'll kill closed-source Solaris).

Glassfish will survive only because it already has a large independent community, despite IBM cutting off funding for it.

Java will take twice as long to evolve, as IBM's bureaucracy will dwarf that of the JCP's. Swing will be slowly killed, to be replaced by SWT. As for Websphere, it's known to break the JEE spec, and indicates the direction IBM will take Java in.

OpenOffice, right now not the cleanest, most user friendly app, will worsen if Lotus Symphony is anything to go by.

IBM pays good lip service to open source, and contributes o some strategic projects (ex Apache Harmony), but their true commitment to open source is much less than that of Sun's. That's what the Linux crowd sometimes fails to understand.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[ByOhTek]

Say goodbye to Netbeans. IBM doesn't want competition to Eclipse.

Why? It doesn't compete with eclipse now. I've used modern and 2 year old installs of eclipse, and my last netbeans install was less than 6 months ago.

Swing will be slowly killed, to be replaced by SWT. As for Websphere, it's known to break the JEE spec, and indicates the direction IBM will take Java in.

Good riddance. Most swing based applications I have had the misfortune of using, have failed miserably at being cross platform, regardless of Sun or IBM JVM. Even if SWT is worse in that regard, it doesn't matter, because I've given up on swing as far as making any reliable cross platform app. Replacing one thing that is not sufficiently useful with another, well, I could care less.

OpenOffice, right now not the cleanest, most user friendly app, will worsen if Lotus Symphony is anything to go by.

I think this is the first thing I can truely agree on. I certainly would not want to see OO disappear or be so defiled.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Ukab the Great]

IBM will take all of Sun's great software products, and either ruin or kill them through a combination of strategic imperative, incompetence, and bureaucracy.

Isn't that Sun's job?

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[javacowboy]

Isn't that Sun's job?

Justify that statement.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is already dying.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[javacowboy]

Why? It doesn't compete with eclipse now. I've used modern and 2 year old installs of eclipse, and my last netbeans install was less than 6 months ago.

So what *specifically* did you find wrong with Netbeans? Please enlighten us.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[ianare]

Say goodbye to Netbeans. IBM doesn't want competition to Eclipse.

Honestly I think netbeans is just about perfect as-is. Besides, even if they kill corporate funding, I think the community would step in (unlike most open source apps, its users CAN modify it).

Watch OpenSolaris get pillaged for bits like ZFS and DTrace to GPL and put in Linux and then left in the ditch (though I don't think they'll kill closed-source Solaris).

I never saw a bright future for open solaris anyway, linux is too far ahead for it to catch up. Not that it isn't a great product, but it was open sourced way too late in the game. Might as well give linux its best parts ...

Java will take twice as long to evolve, as IBM's bureaucracy will dwarf that of the JCP's. ...
OpenOffice, right now not the cleanest, most user friendly app, will worsen if Lotus Symphony is anything to go by.

You're on to something here ... something very frightening.

IBM pays good lip service to open source, and contributes o some strategic projects (ex Apache Harmony), but their true commitment to open source is much less than that of Sun's. That's what the Linux crowd sometimes fails to understand.

I agree, but if Sun is going to disappear anyway IBM would at least keep some of their spirit alive.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[geekoid]

2 billion dollar commitment is a fucking lot. IBM, with all their issues, is a seriously committed player.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[CougMerrik]

If Sun were a good company, they wouldn't shopping around for buyers and their stock wouldn't have lost 99% of its value in the last decade.

There are good companies and companies that make good things. IBM is a good company -- one that makes money and provides good services. Sun is a company that makes some good products, but if all you have is that, a CEO with a pony tail, and no money in the bank, then are you really a "good" company? If anything, employees at Sun should be pissed that their company failed to do a better job of making money off their great products and services.

I went to Supercomputing '08 in Austin. Sun's booth had a custom motorcycle in coffee brown with the Netbeans logo on it, and a magician doing card tricks. IBM's booth was very boring -- it only had salesmen and spec sheets. That seems to represent a lot of the difference between these two companies.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Christian Henry]

One thing that IBM *won't* do is fail to find ways to monetize what they acquire from Sun.

The most significant reason Sun find themselves in their current situation is that they've never been able to figure out that (*gasp*) there's money to be made in things like *support*.

Around here (Toronto, Canada), Sun (in fact) would rather companies get Sun support (hardware, OS, or even application software) via third parties such as Kanatek (I know I'm spelling it wrong). IBM, on the other hand, *love* providing support, because they know enough to make a pretty penny from it.

As a result, from a *large business customer* standpoint, this potential buyout would be a *good* thing. I know of at least a few large companies which would *love* to pay IBM for, say, first-tier Java support on Linux. Or IBM support of Solaris. One prime example of an IBM-acquired company that IBM ended up providing superior support for was Adstar (makers of Adstar Distributed Storage Manager - ADSM, now known as Tivoli Storage Manager).

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't           that           Sun's         job?

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Hurricane78]

Have you actually tried something that is not centuries old?
Try the sancho frontend for mldonkey. Or the ThinkingRock life organization software?
They are a bit slow, but they look better than most apps I've seen and run nicely here on Windows and Linux.

So stop talking out of your old ass. ^^

The only problem I have with Swing, is that it tries to have all features imaginable. Thereby adding to the GUI slowness of Java. (Because in raw processing power, Java is actually the most performant VM, if you do not want to use something like OCaml, but still want to be compile-once-run-on-many-platforms.)

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[AKAImBatman]

Isn't that Sun's job?

Sun's job is to have one of the worst marketing departments known to man. They create some really great stuff, and many of their strategic acquisitions benefit amazingly well under their umbrella. (e.g. OpenOffice, NetBeans, StorageTek, etc.)

What Sun fails miserably at is selling their products. On one hand, they give everything long, complex, and confusing names. Like "Sun Java System Directory Service", formerly "SunONE Directory Server", formerly "iPlanet Directory Server", formerly "Netscape Directory Server". Then they take this confusing pile of BS directly to executives. Now executives aren't necessarily stupid people. But if you're expecting them to wade through your piles of BS to understand what it is their buying, you've already failed. Throw in a bit of inconsistent pricing across the board to where the IT guy actually buying the stuff has no idea what price he's going to pay, and you've got a recipe for dissatisfaction.

Sun needs to learn how to market and how to sell. More to the point, they need to pay more attention to the smaller markets and stop trying to out-IBMing IBM. IBM is better at it. Try out-Delling Dell. Sun was on the right track with their "Hotter than Hell" campaign, but they gave up before it ever came to fruition!

Which is another thing that tees me off. When Sun DOES get it right, they kill it off before they give it a chance to work. Then they go back to their old ways, and probably tell themselves what a fiasco THAT marketing campaign turned out to be. :-/

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[ianare]

it's only middle-aged, you insensitive clod !

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[mpcooke3]

Watch OpenSolaris get pillaged for bits like ZFS and DTrace to GPL and put in Linux and then left in the ditch (though I don't think they'll kill closed-source Solaris).

So what you are saying is that IBM might use this opportunity to make two really major improvements to Linux. Oh how horrible of them.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[harry666t]

But does netcraft confirm it?

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[samkass]

Dunno about the original poster, but my biggest problem is that it doesn't integrate with Perforce very well. That makes it completely a non-starter. Integration with version control is one of the top-5 tasks any IDE needs to do and in Netbeans it seems like an afterthought.

After that, Sun embracing OSGi and other de-facto industry standards instead of always re-inventing the wheel would be nice. We really didn't need yet another attempt at a Java application platform.

And JavaFX support? Who actually cares about JavaFX? It's a DOA technology.

The nice thing about IBM taking over is that IBM seems to have a MUCH better sense about what actual non-Sun developers like.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[SargentDU]

Kudos! That was hilarious! :)

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[fm6]

Java. Sun had a pretty good idea there, and thoroughly destroyed it. Oversold it and pushed it out the door before it was really ready to do all the things it was supposed to do.

To this day, Java has a reputation it doesn't deserve for running slow. This happened because early Java virtual machines were primitive beasts with minimal optimization, and because early Java compilers were hastily hacked out from C++ compilers.

This last bit of nonsense resulted in Java applications that were full of memory leaks. Bad in any platform, but positively evil in a platform that's supposed to eliminate the horrors of manual memory management!

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[AKAImBatman]

Nonsense. Sun couldn't push their way through a paper bag. Java caught on because developers liked it. Sun just struggled to keep up with all the new markets that wanted to use the technology.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Anonymous Coward]

And by non-Sun you actually mean 'you'.

Eclipse has some nice technology (JDT) but I can't stand the IDE and unfortunately most of their libraries are not modular enough to function outside of eclipse (JDT).

Netbeans may not have quite the feature set of eclipse but at least the plugins seem to work without any drama and random crashing, update automatically and intuitively.

Most importantly their is a decent working vim-like editor plugin (jVi), and yes this is a killer feature.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Splab]

I had the joy today of trying to use OO to make a spreadsheet from CSV, christ what a load of crap.

First up I imported the set, realised I needed to compare it to an earlier set so I just dragged the file into my open window expecting it to make another spreadsheet. Well guess again, it just wrote over my current data - hitting ctrl+z didn't revert it. Great, so I closed my current spreadsheet wanting to start over and hit ctrl+n for a new sheet, so what popped up? Writer.. wtf?

Ok, closed the application, made a new instance, made sure to ask it for an extra instance before importing data from both the CSV and the earlier sheet. So far so good, did some calculations and wanted to save it; of course the target of this file is on MS so I chose excel 2003. "Unable to write file" wtf? no indication of what went wrong, just didn't want to write the file, I tried all sorts of permutations of file name, but to no avail. So I changed the format to 2000, saved it just fine.

These issues might be PEBKAC, but I sure as hell will stay clear of OO as much as possible; one of the most important tasks of a program is to do as a user expects, overwriting data with no apparent undo path and error messages that doesn't give any kind of hints to what is wrong is just downright unusable.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Zarluk]

Eclipse still looks too much like VisualAge :-(

The most significant improvement is that it doesn't hide your java files from you anymore ;-)

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[AvitarX]

I think the point is that they co-exist.

netbeans gets installed even as eclipse is installed.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Anonymous Coward]

bits like ZFS and DTrace to GPL and put in Linux

Not considering the fate of (Open)Solaris, why would getting ZFS and DTrace into Linux be bad thing?

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[rackserverdeals]

If your organization can justify the cost of Perforce, they should be able to justify the cost of using IdeaJ which supports Perforce.

I'm a big fan of Netbeans but I've used IdeaJ and I think IdeaJ is better than both Netbeans and Eclipse but Netbeans has been narrowing the gap more than Eclipse has.

I just don't understand the logic of using a proprietary, expensive source code management system with an open source IDE. If anything, I would have gone the other way around.

What is it about Perforce that makes it more appropriate than Subversion, Mercurial or CVS that you wound up selecting it?

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch OpenSolaris get pillaged for bits like ZFS and DTrace to GPL and put in Linux and then left in the ditch (though I don't think they'll kill closed-source Solaris).

Putting ZFS and DTrace into Linux is like putting breast implants on an ugly chick.

I'm sorry, I like linux, but more and more I'm choosing Solaris.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Gazzonyx]

*Starts the 'slow clap'*
Classic. Simply freakin' classic.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[gauauu]

Most importantly their is a decent working vim-like editor plugin (jVi), and yes this is a killer feature.

I agree entirely (the killer feature). I use eclipse, because our product is built up of eclipse plugins. But I completely hated it until I convinced the boss to buy me a copy of viPlugin for eclipse. Unfortunately, it's not free, is quite buggy, and doesn't implement all the vi features I'd want. But it was the difference between hating Eclipse and being generally happy with it.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[ion.simon.c]

Because in raw processing power, Java is actually the most performant VM,

Cite?

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[ion.simon.c]

I had the joy today of trying to use OO to ... These issues might be PEBKAC...

Please allow me to reply with a comment that is a content-free as your original post:

Works for me!

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Amitz Sekali]

I was hoping there is a voting system where the parent is automatically visible because some info/jokes won't be complete without parent's post.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[HAWAT.THUFIR]

One thing that IBM *won't* do is fail to find ways to monetize what they acquire from Sun.

The most significant reason Sun find themselves in their current situation is that they've never been able to figure out that (*gasp*) there's money to be made in things like *support*.

Around here (Toronto, Canada), Sun (in fact) would rather companies get Sun support (hardware, OS, or even application software) via third parties such as Kanatek (I know I'm spelling it wrong). IBM, on the other hand, *love* providing support, because they know enough to make a pretty penny from it.

I dunno, I would argue that it makes sense for a company to do one thing well then be a poor jack-of-trades. I expect that Sun sees Kanatek (or whatever) as another customer, and I bet that kantek *pays* sun. Even if kanatek doesn't pay sun, it at least frees up Sun to focus its organization on one thing. Not that it's written in stone. -Thufir

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Kevin Stevens]

I have used perforce, and while I have not used Mercurial, I must say I like it eons more than CVS or Subversion, which I currently use.

Things I like about Perforce as opposed to SVN:

-P4 doesn't clog your source code directories up with files- all information is hidden from you, and thus copying say, a directory of config files from one machine to another to reproduce a problem doesn't cause a massive headache.

-Changelists and jobs! These are awesome. A changelist controls when and where you can check stuff in. You can move file changes around on different changelists if you are working on different bugs. IE you can create a changelist for bug 101, and another for bug102, and keep the three files you are working on for bug 101 in that bug's pending changelist, and similar for bug102. When you are finished, you just commit on that changelist, and now everything is organized nicely in history. Jobs extend this a bit further by allowing you to group changelists under a job for larger projects.

-Integration and branching. So much easier under P4 than any other system I have used. You create a branchspec saying I want my code from over here, to integrate with these files over there, and boom you are done and can just use that spec to integrate at any given point. you can integrate changes by changelist, job, branch, and other more exotic and less useful ways. The only real downside is that branches are expensive and eventually slow the repository down (at least when I last used P4 about 2 years ago).

These made my life much easier when working on a large project, especially since we did a great deal of work to integrate the system into our bug tracking and release systems. I am currently at a startup that is trying to use OSS as much as possible, and P4 is expensive, so I couldn't make a case to use P4 over SVN, especially considering we only have 4 developers.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Toxe]

Java will take twice as long to evolve

Java evolves?

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[JAlexoi]

OO.o has the BEST CSV import dialog EVER!
You can actually customize it the way you want, not the way MS predefined it. Btw, Excells CSV files are actually SemicolonSeparatedValues.
And I can actually select my preffered encofding. But apparently, you rednecks, use only one encoging - ASCII7.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[ByOhTek]

crashed. A lot. With a sun JVM.

It was slower than eclipse.

The text complete didn't work as well.

Re:"IBM is where good companies go to die"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want your Swing code to be fast, try only importing the specific packages you're using. Who cares if Swing offers you the world? If you're only interested in New York, stick to New York. Don't import the whole kit and kaboodle. Make sure you null out your references so garbage collection can get rid of them. Dispose all windows when you're done with them. Keep an eye on your memory use.

It's the same old story. Optimize. You can't go around programming willy-nilly without thinking it through and expect your stuff to be fast!

sir.

[unity100]

if mysql dies a slow painful death, it would die alongside ibm's reputation and credibility amongst the i.t. community. especially web developers.

i dont need to remind you that how big a momentum does the new 'online communities' concept that are built on mysql has nowadays, and the domineering place they are gaining in our online social interaction.

internet is future, 'the people' online are its embodiment, and web developers are their servicemen.

Re:sir.

[rackserverdeals]

i dont need to remind you that how big a momentum does the new 'online communities' concept that are built on mysql has nowadays, and the domineering place they are gaining in our online social interaction.

You say that as if it means something. IBM doesn't make money from people sending tweets or whatever the next thing will be.

Re:sir.

[unity100]

You say that as if it means something. IBM doesn't make money from people sending tweets

yet.

even whitehouse is moving to facebook, youtube. go figure.

here

[unity100]

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-7oohabits/

What about the other java based projects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the real question what will happen to java based products which are competitors of IBM's products? What about JBoss? What about all those java based database?

Pipedream???

[syousef]

I see this story has been tagged "Pipedream". I don't know what kind of pipe people are smoking these days, but to me it doesn't sound like any kind of pleasant or desirable dream to have one company in control of so many things we depend on...even more so during an economic downturn.

Re:Pipedream???

[Anonymous Coward]

For the most part I don't really understand all the hatred being expressed against IBM. What realistic alternatives are there?

1. Sun continues its downward spiral into irrelevance and insolvency. Eventually it goes bankrupt and its assets are sold off to the highest bidders.
Bad for obvious reasons. No one would want to see that.
2. Sun gets bought out by another company, say HP or Oracle.
It would be hard to argue that HP or Oracle would be a better owner than IBM, assuming they could even afford it. If Sun is going to get bought out, IBM is probably the best choice. IBM has a much better track record of supporting Open Source than any other old-school company except Sun itself, and heck, IBM already sells Solaris servers, so they would not kill it off for AIX or Linux. Sure they might do something like GPL Solaris technologies in order to get them into Linux, but really who would think this is a bad thing except the zealots?
3. Sun voluntarily splits itself up into separate companies (Java, Solaris, OpenOffice, MySql, etc).
Probably the best option for the technologies involved, but it would never happen because the current management would essentially be admitting their own failure. It also might spell bad news for stuff like OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, since they may not end up with a "sugar daddy" to finance development work.

Re:Pipedream???

[rackserverdeals]

HP doesn't have a good track record with mergers and I don't see the deal going well. Oracle I don't see wanting to get involved.

Cisco on the other hand has been wanting to get greater data center market share. Solaris is a good OS for building general purpose appliances and the Crossbow project can be used to build a virtual router within your server. Not sure if this is something Cisco would kill.

If anyone is courting Sun right now, my money would be on Cisco.

Re:Pipedream???

[homer_s]

to have one company in control of so many things we depend on

I'm amazed at the mentality of people who think that, just because they depend on/like some product, they get to take away the rights and freedoms of the producers who produce the products.
It is a kind of perverse incentive: I produce a crap product, I'm free to do whatever I want; I produce a great product that millions depend upon, now all my freedoms reg. the product are taken away. And oh, now I'm "too big to fail" so I can put my snout in the public trough whenever I want.

Re:Pipedream???

[Anonymous Coward]

The "pipedream" is IBM buying Sun and GPL'ing ZFS and dTrace.

More likely, IBM would kick Linux to the curb once they can sell Solaris. And they'd keep ZFS and dTrace as non-GPL discriminators against Linux. Then, IBM would start hammering on all the "Linux really isn't ready for the enterprise" issues that Linux DOES have.

(Don't think Linux has enterprise-ready issues? Try backing out your updates after a patch breaks your system...)

Re:Pipedream???

[syousef]

It is a kind of perverse incentive: I produce a crap product, I'm free to do whatever I want; I produce a great product that millions depend upon, now all my freedoms reg. the product are taken away. And oh, now I'm "too big to fail" so I can put my snout in the public trough whenever I want.

No. You completely misunderstand. You can produce plenty of nice products. It's when you start to buy up all the competition who also makes similar or related nice products that we have a problem because:

a) There's no competition
b) If your ships sinks we no longer have alternatives

That's not a disincentive to produce good things. Only a disincentive from buying up lots of related good things. You can improve your product. You can also produce something new that's completely unrelated and really nice. Diversity is important.

Re:Pipedream???

[syousef]

Option 2 is quite desirable if you choose other companies. HP is a mess. Oracle only likes the top end of town.

Option 3 could happen. People have admitted their mistakes in the past. Hell CEOs seem to admit their mistakes and get a few million dollars as a parting gift. All the products could survive with other patronage.

How about an option 4 - Sun picks itself back up off the floor. Sun isn't so far gone that this is impossible.

Netbeans/Eclipse...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM's front against Visual Studio.

I hope Netbeans don't become the mess that Eclipse is threatening to become. The multiple distributions, the commercial only plugins, UI inconsistencies, and instability.

I know the Eclipse fanboys will object, but I've used both IDEs and Eclipse has its issues and feels like it was built by a committee consisting of competitors.

With Netbeans, I don't have to worry about CDT not meshing with the current patched version of the platform, or having to choose between Subclipse or Subversive and trying to get past that stupid Java HL issue with Ubuntu. Netbeans just works.

Nothing against Eclipse, I just don't want any of that crap to migrate over to Netbeans.

Then there's IBM history other editors like XyWrite...

Re:Netbeans/Eclipse...

[$1uck]

More likely any sort of corporate sponsorship or support for NetBeans would disappear, which would suck.

Re:Netbeans/Eclipse...

[rackserverdeals]

Eclipse has its issues and feels like it was built by a committee consisting of competitors.

That nails it. I've never seen it described as accurately and succinctly as you just did. That's exactly what it feels like.

Eclipse is just good enough but to do real work well in it, you have to buy some plug in or another. I and others have used eclipse without commercial plugins but it's not as good as Netbeans which gives you what you need for free.

If Netbeans wants to build something into the base, they don't have to worry about commercial vendors arguing that it will kill their business.

Re:Netbeans/Eclipse...

[Spikeles]

If NetBeans was actually able to compile our project i'd use it, but since it chokes on our use of java generics(when the standard JDK and Eclipse dont), takes forever to parse our project, and in the end crashes and falls over, i think i'll stick with Eclipse.

Re:Netbeans/Eclipse...

[HAWAT.THUFIR]

If NetBeans was actually able to compile our project i'd use it, but since it chokes on our use of java generics(when the standard JDK and Eclipse dont), takes forever to parse our project, and in the end crashes and falls over, i think i'll stick with Eclipse.

Why would Netbeans choke, since it uses Ant plus Javac? Clearly you need to modify your ant file. -Thufir

Re:Netbeans/Eclipse...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any Eclipse fanboys left? I thought we all moved to Netbeans.

Re:Netbeans/Eclipse...

[Spikeles]

Wasn't the build that was choking, it was the IDE.

And pretty sure it was because of this bug

Admittedly i havn't tried NetBeans with the latest builds of the JDK, nor tried the latest releases of NetBeans(last i tried was 5.0 and 6.0), but Eclipse works fine for us, so there is very little incentive to change at the moment.

Re:Netbeans/Eclipse...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Well that bug was resolved and it was a cosmetic issue involving a false-positive when the IDE parsed for errors. Not that this didn't make the error nerve racking.

When it comes to IDEs and everything else for that matter, we all pick our own poison.

Re:Netbeans/Eclipse...

[JAlexoi]

I know the Eclipse fanboys will object, but I've used both IDEs and Eclipse has its issues and feels like it was built by a committee consisting of competitors.

Ha! It should feel like, because it IS being built by committees(plural) consisting of competitors.

I wouldn't mind seeing Sun bought...

[$1uck]

But please not by IBM, they have too many competing products and this will effectively just strip out competition. As fro Glassfish being entry level product for websphere? Huh? its.. WSAD not WHAPPY. I'd like to see Sun paired with a company that has experience with consumers and consumer products like Apple (probably never going to happen). A company where the two could benefit each other not a company that will swallow Sun's product line and make it disappear or merge with its own.

A list of open source projects IBM contributes to:

[Anonymous Coward]

I post this every time someone makes the false claim that Sun contributes more than IBM. Source.

Abstract Machine Test Utility for Linux Common Criteria Certificate
Abstract Machine Test Utility (AMTU) is an administrative utility to check whether the underlying protection mechanism of the hardware are still being enforced.

AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications
AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications contains a collection of open source and GNU software built for AIX 5L for IBM pSeries systems and IBM RS/6000.

Ami - Korean Input Method
Korean IMS (Input Method System) Ami.

Anaconda
Anaconda is the installation program for Red Hat distributions.

Apache
Home of the Apache Web server and several dozen related projects.

Apache Ant
Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool.

Apache APR
Apache Portable Runtime

Apache Cocoon
A Web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based Web development.

Apache DB project
Open source database solutions

Apache Directory
The Apache Directory project aims to produce a high-performance and production-quality LDAP server written in Java.

Apache Excalibur
Excalibur's primary product is a lightweight, embeddable Inversion of control container named Fortress that is written in Java code.

Apache Forrest
Apache Forrest is an XML standards-oriented documentation framework based upon Apache Cocoon, providing XSLT stylesheets and schemas, images, and other resources.

Apache Geronimo
Apache Geronimo is the J2EE server project of the Apache Software Foundation. The aim of the project is to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open-source, certified J2EE server that: is licensed under the Apache License, passes Sun's TCK for J2EE 1.4, and reuses the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today, with new ASF code to complete the J2EE stack.

Apache Gump
Apache's continuous integration tool

Apache HTTP Server
The Apache project develops and maintains an open-source HTTP server for various modern desktop and server operating systems.

Apache Jakarta
A diverse set of open source Java solutions

Apache James
The Apache Java Enterprise Mail Server (Apache James) is a 100% pure Java SMTP and POP3 Mail server and NNTP News server. James was designed to be a complete and portable enterprise mail engine solution based on currently available open protocols.

Apache Lenya
Apache Lenya is an Open Source Java/XML Content Management System and comes with revision control, site management, scheduling, search, WYSIWYG editors, and workflow.

Apache Logging Services
Cross-language logging services for purposes of application debugging and auditing.

Apache Maven
Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.

Apache mod_Perl
mod_perl brings together the full power of the Perl programming language and the Apache HTTP server

Apache Portals
Apache Portals is a collaborative software development project dedicated to providing robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, and freely available portal-related software on a variety of platforms and programming languages.

Apache SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures.

Apache Struts
The goal of the Apache Struts project is to encourage application architectures based on the "Model 2" approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm. Under Model 2, a servlet (or equivalent) manages business logic execution, and presentation logic resides mainly in server pages.

Apache Tcl
An umbrella for Tcl-Apache integration efforts

Apache Tuscany
Tusca

You forget its OSS we're talking about!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically another item portraits older OS's and also (to a degree) reflects the way OS/2 came to a stop. One of the bigger players in getting it halted to a screeching stop was none other than IBM themselves. Being an OS/2 user in the "good days" where it was still mainstream (within context naturally) always made me to use my bookmarks to even get to the OS/2 homepage because well.. IBM didn't really show it clearly on their main website in the way Sun currently shows their stuff.

And this is also exactly what I, and I'm sure many Java programmers with me, fear when IBM would take over the stick. I doubt that IBM would even bother trying to maintain Java in its "pure" form as it is now and basically try to push all of its own silly standards forward, including its own (IMO) bastard version of the VM itself.

However, there is one very important matter to keep in mind here. The one which makes me seriously question if IBM would indeed gain the title of "developer company" (note: I'm only focussing on that what I use and like; Java). Simply because all the current big bad-ass Java tools (IMO that would be Netbeans, Glassfish and (slightly related) MySQL)) are all open source tools.

And you can bet that when someone would fork NetBeans and display a serious approach in keeping the project alive as it is now (naturally that would be under a different name) then I wouldn't have to think twice to ditch IBM and stick with the new NB-like project. Naturally the same would apply to Glassfish and MySQL. So I wouldn't get your hopes up yet. Its one thing to "own the tools", its a whole different game to actually entrance the developers who would be willing to use those tools.

My personal prediction would be that in the end not IBM but Open Source would prevail.

Re:Obama Policies Will Bankrupt USA Tsarkon Report

[mcgrew]

That's what you get for browsing at -1.

Finally!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Java support for 3270s!!

Visual Studio?

[ClosedSource]

"... and NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM's front against Visual Studio"

What do you mean? I didn't know NetBeans and Eclipse were planing on embracing .NET. Certainly .NET developers aren't likely to switch to Java even if they liked NetBeans and Exclipse more than Visual Studio (which they don't).

Seems that there always has to be an Anti-MS spin no matter how brain-dead.

Re:Visual Studio?

[FishWithAHammer]

I'd love to see a C# plugin for NetBeans, personally. NetBeans 6.5 is the first release I'd call almost as good as Visual Studio (I can't stand Eclipse, personally), and there's not much work left to make it a genuine competitor for what I use it for. I'm already looking at moving my C++ development over to it. Having an .NET plugin would seal the deal for me.

(It can't be any worse than MonoDevelop...)

Re:Visual Studio?

[Zarluk]

STFU (please) ;-)

There no need to support 'Java--' in Netbeans... really! Stop smoking that shit ;-)

Re:Visual Studio?

[FishWithAHammer]

Are you really that stupid? C#/Mono are a wonderful toolset that addresses most of the brain damages of Java (the fact that Java requires an ActionListener pattern at all, for example, indicates that somebody should have been fired for not having a clue) and generally avoids introducing new ones.

Re:Visual Studio?

[Zarluk]

Who is stupid here? You are the one who's glorifying that piece of crap.

If only you were talking about Python...

Re:Visual Studio?

[dbIII]

If only you were talking about Python...

He was - only the meaning was all in the whitespace so you didn't parse it.

Re:Visual Studio?

[FishWithAHammer]

I love how the ability to use more, varied tools is shot down by language zealots.

Were it that you all died in fires.

Re:Visual Studio?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know it's funny you wont win a popularity contest around here stating the Visual Studio is a superior IDE, such as being intuitive and tight integration with the server platform. I was just having this conversation with a fellow developer the other day. Being a recent convert to Netbeans, I was talking to him about how it is one of the first Java IDE's that rivals Visual Studio and that seems to just work and not get in the way. Such as its integration with Glassfish, Tomacat and the rest of the jee servers, as well as the fact that by default, it sets up all of your ant build scripts, so when you move out of development your build manager does not have to build a bunch of build scripts that the developers failed to write. Some of the tools such as the persistence wizards for JPA, allow a developer to create a database persistable object, with a few button clicks not to mention the JAX-RS integration you can go from the database to entity class out to a RESTfull service on the internet without having to write any boilerplate code. I just have not seen this kind of clarity in Eclipse, it seems that they only did jee server integration once it was required or they would loose the market. Yet RAD had integration with the app servers since it was WSAD. I am sorry but IBM does a lot of crippleware open source, they build the lite version and open source it and then charge for the one you really need to get your job done, while gleefully taking user contributions to the lite version and incorporation it into their full product. I am sorry but I am not a fan of a shareware sales strategy for open source. The worst part is they will dump Glassfish for that turd Websphere people keep hypothesizing that they will use Glassfish as their entry level offering but that would be hard when you entry level is superior to your enterprise offering.

Solaris vs. Linux

[turgid]

The only reason IBM has been funding and supporting Linux development so strongly is to compete with Solaris, since AIX is so dreadful.

You can bet your bottom dollar, that when IBM gets its filthy mitts on Solaris, it will drop its Linux development like a hot potato.

Sun has frittered away all its advantages over the last decade, and despite its genuine commitment to Open Source in general, the PHBs really don't get "community." This is a shame. And why can't they make processors? Fujitsu have always made better SPARCs than Sun. Sun should have bought AMD when the Opteron came out in 2003.

An IBM buy-out of Sun would be bad for Sun technology, and bad for the market in general. Sun could really do with some strong leadership and proper organisation in touch with reality.

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

[TheLastUser]

I generally agree that this is a big negative for the OS community and IT community in general. However, I think IBM will be more likely to kill off Solaris than stop supporting Linux. They understand that there are more Linux people than Solaris people, even if Solaris is a better os for enterprise computing (IMHO and yes I use both)

The reason Sun is in trouble is 100% a marketing issue. They need to sell their hardware products in a consistent way. People have the idea that their hardware is over-priced and this makes it difficult for people like me (IT professional) to recommend their gear to the boss. What really irritates me is that if I look on their site I see a 5120 for ~$15,000 if I look on Ebay, I see the same server for $5500, and if I bother to contact a reseller they will immediately drop the price to $4500. Now, at $4500 this machine is interesting but at $14,000 its insane. How many people look at the Sun store and say "Holy shit this stuff is over priced".

They should just shut down their online store and point people to resellers. As it is, their store is a big advert that says, "Our stuff is cool but absurdly over-priced".

And their stuff is good. I have a couple 5120s and they run Oracle like you wouldn't believe. They far exceeded my expectations in regards to their ability to handle our application load.

Also, I have never had a problem with installation of Sun gear or any quality concerns. Racking and install always goes tickity with a Sun server. This is unlike any other vendor that I have dealt with.

What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean

[spacefight]

It means IBM is back in our datacenter in the midrange area after we spent years getting rid of those expensive AIX pSeries...

I'm repeating myself too

[ClosedSource]

A few years ago IBM acquired Rational. Immediately afterword they discontinued the popular Visual Test product because it competed with more expensive products IBM owned. They won't sell you a license for it and they won't convert it into an open source project.

Re:I'm repeating myself too

[ebh]

If Rational is any indication, IBM is going to figure out what Sun's cash cows are and hold those customers hostage.

I've been an enthusiastic ClearCase user and administrator (please let's not start that flamewar again) all the way back to the Atria days. After dealing with IBM as a vendor since they bought Rational, I've seriously considered recommending against ClearCase to my customers.

It's not just the incompetent and ever-changing bureaucracy, which is indeed infuriating, it's the attitude of their reps. They go way beyond "We've got it, you want it, you get it on our terms." They act more like bill collectors than anything else. At one point, because of a paperwork delay in my purchasing organization, our ClearCase support lapsed. IBM called me EVERY DAY until they got their check, even after I told them to stop and let all their calls go to voice mail.

I don't know what Sun is like to deal with these days, but no matter how bad they are, it can't be worse than IBM.

JS

[Anonymous Coward]

"what if ... google buys Sun"

Re:Obama Policies Will Bankrupt USA Tsarkon Report

[Anonymous Coward]

This is trolling done right!

Horrible article

[Jonboy X]

Wow. Just...wow. All IBM gets out of the deal is the Java name. All the other assets are basically bogus, which the market has already figured out.

1. Glassfish is still pretty much a toy, as far as J2EE app servers go. If users want free, they go with JBoss. If they wanna pay money for scalability and features and support, they already go with IBM's WebSphere.
2. IDE's don't bring in money for consulting companies. Besides, Eclipse has been the standard for Java development for so long and by such a wide margin that it's barely even a debate except among industry wags. Also...Java IDE's don't compete with Visual Studio. Sheesh!
3. MySQL is great and all, but if someone's using it, they're probably doing so to *avoid* high consulting and licensing fees.

InfoWorld hits another high score in tech buzzword bingo, but misses the point completely...

Re:Horrible article

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree the article was horrible, I have to correct some of your reasons.

1. Glassfish is now more popular than JBoss. JBoss took forever and a day to push Version 5 out the door. In doing so, they allowed Glassfish to become the de facto open source Java EE 5 compatible server.

2. IDEs can bring money to a company indirectly. IBM does more than just consult. They also offer a suite of Java technologies. Eclipse is just Websphere developer studio free edition. Eventually, IBM hopes that you;'ll move up the chain and buy their tools.

3. I agree with what you said about MySQL, but IBM could still stand to make some money. After all, MySQL has always had paid support. Something that IBM likes to do.

Re:Horrible article

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Just...wow. All IBM gets out of the deal is the Java name. All the other assets are basically bogus, which the market has already figured out.

And they would get a little tiny thing called Solaris.

Re:Horrible article

[Jonboy X]

Not to be contentious, but I'm curious...

1) Glassfish is now more popular than JBoss.

Cite? It's tough to get a good feel for these things. The hype around Glassfish has been huge, but I haven't seen developers flocking to actually use it. It's kinda moot anyway because most of the places I've worked at use Spring/Hibernate instead of EJB, and can get by with just a Servlet container.

2) IDEs can bring money to a company indirectly. IBM does more than just consult. They also offer a suite of Java technologies. Eclipse is just Websphere developer studio free edition. Eventually, IBM hopes that you;'ll move up the chain and buy their tools.

I think you've got it backwards there. WebSphere Dev Studio is just a repackaged version of Eclipse with add-ons to integrate with WebSphere AS and related stuff that you can buy from IBM. Granted, IBM started Eclipse, but Eclipse.org was spun off and has been largely separate for years. If nothing else, the fact that Eclipse has been somewhat splintered lately should be proof of a lack of central guidance.

3. I agree with what you said about MySQL, but IBM could still stand to make some money. After all, MySQL has always had paid support. Something that IBM likes to do.

Hehe, and I thought *that* was the shaky point. ;)

Re:Horrible article

[tieTYT]

Java IDE's don't compete with Visual Studio

Um, excuse me sir but I call shenanigans on that. And unlike you, I actually have a source. Here is a list of the VS ReSharper plugin compared to plain VS: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/ComparisonMatrix_R4.html

Be aware that these are the features VS is missing that Intellij IDEA (a java IDE) comes with out of the box. And when you're done with that, you can head over to the Intellij IDEA feature list to see what it has over ReSharper: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/index.html

Please, show me your list of what VS has over Intellij IDEA. I'll settle for what it has over Eclipse. I really, really, really want to see this list. I ask in every slashdot thread where someone gets modded up for comments like this.

PS: Yes, I'm aware these two tools are made by the same company.

Managers at the receiving co. don't give up power.

[Futurepower(R)]

"The company culture between Sun and IBM are too different for a successful merger."

That seems correct to me. The managers at the receiving company don't want to lose power, or learn something new, so they kill or neglect the products they've bought.

Why does there need to be an even larger computer company? That idea sounds like Sanford Weill and Citibank. Will IBM-Sun also become too large to fail, and require money from U.S. taxpayers?

Often when these merger deals are made, huge amounts of money are put in the pockets of top executives, and that's the underlying reason for the merger.

News Flash: VS sucks for Java development

[ClosedSource]

"And I for one can just consider that Visual Studio sucks compared to Eclipse when it comes to how user-friendly the tool is."

I feel sorry for the hoards of Java developers that have been using Visual Studio all these years when they could have been using Eclipse.

And the answer is...

[monkeyboythom]

LAYOFFS!

Re:And the answer is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oi! It's called Synergy!

The company that made cobol a big deal ...

[Anonymous Coward]

deserves the company that made java a big deal.

Re:A list of open source projects IBM contributes

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what the fuck do you else want? a hug?

I didn't knew that Linux community was so ungrateful.

Yes, I'm disappointed.

It's just natural selection at work,

[falconwolf]

companies grows bigger and bigger and devour all competition and suddenly they are big enough to collapse and the cycle starts over again.

Unless you're a financial services business, a bank or something. Then you're allowed to get so big failure is not an option.

And I for one can just consider that Visual Studio sucks compared to Eclipse when it comes to how user-friendly the tool is.

I haven't seen Visual Studio but Eclipse Rocks.

Falcon

Bad for java...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM loves java, but that doesn't mean IBM is good for java. IBM is a slow lumbering beast, java's inability to innovate has hurt it enough already. The acquisition process alone will delay java a few years.

Re:Bad for java...

[HAWAT.THUFIR]

IBM loves java, but that doesn't mean IBM is good for java. IBM is a slow lumbering beast, java's inability to innovate has hurt it enough already. The acquisition process alone will delay java a few years.

IMHO it's time to think past Java and look at Ruby. Much of what makes Ruby so appealing *can* be applied to a compiled, strongly typed language, like: gems getter/setter notation cleaner syntax -Thufir

Re:Bad for java...

[Anonymous Coward]

No it won't. OpenJDK will fork, probably taken over by Red Hat. Open source programmers will ignore IBM and move to OpenJDK, proprietary programmers will bend over and grab their ankles for IBM, and the world will keep on turning.

SPARC

[Rob Riggs]

I'm more interested in what IBM will do with the SPARC processor and Solaris, and how that affects Fujitsu.

Re:SPARC

[mihalis]

kill, death

Re:SPARC

[ggeens]

If IBM drops SPARC, Fujitsu will probably become the only supplier of Solaris systems. Both the SPARC architecture and Solaris are available as open source, so IBM cannot easily prevent that.

Being open source, it is possible that other companies emerge using those technologies. Don't count on it: if anyone believed in that, this would already have happened.

I'm also unsure about how much traction Solaris will have without SUN.

They don't "fail" to understand...

[Osvaldo Doederlein]

IBM pays good lip service to open source, and contributes o some strategic projects (ex Apache Harmony), but their true commitment to open source is much less than that of Sun's. That's what the Linux crowd sometimes fails to understand.

The reason why the Linux crowd swallows IBM's posing of a great FOSS champion is that IBM's contributions are focused on the Linux kernel and Apache projects. Linux zealots are not standing behind IBM's policies with licenses, community or anything; they are just rewarding IBM for "being in their side", i.e. helping to promote Linux and developing stuff that's useful to Linux distros. The same zealots know very well that Sun's FOSS contributions and positioning dwarf IBM's, but Sun is seen as a competitor (Solaris) and doesn't use a license that allows Linux to get cool stuff like a decent filesystem for free.

That's all, the rest is hypocrisy.

Define a successful merger.

[Rasputin]

"The company culture between Sun and IBM are too different for a successful merger."

Success: [n] Chomp, chomp, gulp.

Just ask the former employees of Sequent, Informix, or Rational.

Re:Define a successful merger.

[CapeBretonBarbarian]

"The company culture between Sun and IBM are too different for a successful merger."

Success: [n] Chomp, chomp, gulp.

Just ask the former employees of Sequent, Informix, or Rational.

Speaking of Rational, I've been really underwhelmed with what IBM has done with the Purify products they acquired with their annexation of Rational. The product looks like it has hardly been updated at all since I first used it way back in '95 or so. Plus it is a huge struggle to get it to work, no thanks to IBM. And if you want to change your licensing or contact information, good luck with dealing with the huge IBM bureaucracy. I for one dread seeing IBM take over Sun. It'll make HP start to look good. :p

"Credibility" != mysql

[sirwired]

IBM is around a $100B company with fingers in nearly every corner of IT. The portion of that market that gives one iota about IBM's success in merging mysql is a rounding error in that $100B.

There are a lot more things for IBM to worry about with the merger than the continued success of mysql.

SirWired

Re:"Credibility" != mysql

[unity100]

every corner of i.t. is getting integrated with internet. there will be little left unrelated and unintegrated to internet in future. whomever one is doing business with, they will have to consider internet in everything related to it.

dont need to tell you that a huge part of internet is getting integrated with communities. youtube has grown to a point where white house, u.s. govt. is using it officially as a communication device today. dont get surprised if facebook gets hooked up with various foia plugins, or stuff interacting with govt. websites.

you are seeing this from a narrow window in my opinion.

Re:A list of open source projects IBM contributes

[rackserverdeals]

You do realize that that is just a list of projects they contribute too. It gives no indication of the level of contributions. A lot of those contributions are patches to make sure the projects can work with IBM hardware and software.

Not saying there contributions are meaningless, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that IBM has contributed more to open source than Sun.

IBM might open source a less powerful version or maybe a pet project, while Sun will go out, buy a company and open source the technology.

That's a big deal, especially considering the relative size and financial power differences between the two.

Sun: Get a marketing department.

[Futurepower(R)]

"Sun's job is to have one of the worst marketing departments known to man."

True or close to true, in my opinion. Except that Intel may be worse, but Intel doesn't need marketing, so the incredible foolishness of Intel's marketing isn't so obvious.

Mod parent up.

Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[thanasakis]

Bare with me for a moment.

Sun is full of PhDs, patents and interesting technologies and I think their corporate culture is much more close to Apple than to IBM. They have a fairly decent server product line with competitive prices, a host of enterprise contracts all over the world and an excellent OSS "server" OS which is still being developed heavily. They have a solid 64-bit RISC architecture coupled with energy efficient multicore processors that give even the best x86 chips a run for their money. Not to mention their storage strategy which is, IMHO, brilliant. ZFS, StorageTek, Lustre, fishworks, mysql all fall into a strategy of acquisitions and development that was commenced several years ago. Has it started yielding financial results yet? Arguably not quite. Was it spot-on? Hell yes. Storage has come and it will be big. The bad economic conditions make their financial problems worse, but it's not like they didn't give their best.

Apple could really use them to buy its way into the Enterprise. They have already ported dtrace and zfs to MacOSX, demonstrating that a lot of technologies can be used outside of Sun products with success. Considering the stockpile of cash they're sitting on, it would not really be a problem for Apple to buy them. With their combined strength (heard that one before, right?) they could really be a dangerous adversary for IBM, HP and Microsoft.

Well, if that isn't a pipe dream, then what is?

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[kevinbr]

There was a Sun / Apple merger rumor years ago.....early 90s?

If Sun are to go, better to Apple than to IBM.

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[ishobo]

There is bad blood between Jobs and McNealy (who is still chairman). I agree though, a merger between Apple and Sun would be better because nothing they have overlaps. Apple picks up enterprise software and hardware, which they clearly lack. They also would get a global services group. Although Sun is not profitable, they have little debt and $2.5 billion on hand.

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[turkeyfish]

Apple can't afford it. They are rapidly becoming an ipod/iphone company anyway.

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[Anonymous Coward]

Bare with me for a moment.

Yeah, let's get nekkid!

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[jonaskoelker]

Well, if that isn't a pipe dream, then what is?

echo what | sleep 1s

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[HAWAT.THUFIR]

There was a Sun / Apple merger rumor years ago.....early 90s?

If Sun are to go, better to Apple than to IBM.

And BSD vs Solaris Vs Linux? Three operating systems by one company? -Thufir

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[Anonymous Coward]

The other big benefit would be Sun's marketing sucks while apple has very good marketing. The only thing that scares me a bit is that the apple people will get their hands into the sun servers a bit too much. A friend of mine showed me the manual for an xserve where it literally said plug in your ipod instead of saying plug in a portable hard drive or thumb drive etc. Of course he liked it because it let him convince management he needed an ipod.

It scares me to think what would happen to all the open source stuff sun has. Apple uses open source software, but they've not shared a lot of what they have written.

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[JAlexoi]

Do you know why Apple is horrible in the enterprise? Because of all of their secrecy. I mean, most of the times noone knows what they are working on. That does not fly with the corporate execs. Even Microsoft, when fails to deliver, we all know what we are going to get in the next release(exception Vista). With Apple, noone would know when the next Java version would come out and what number will it be? And how would Apple treat Java trademark.

Re:Why can't Apple buy them instead???

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry. I have no interest at all in being bare with you.

Virtual Box

[falconwolf]

How much have you used Virtual Box? I'm typing this on a Mac I've been thinking about installing Ubuntu on to make it dualboot. If I do I want to be able to boot into one OS and use the other OS in a VM. It's not clear to me Virtual Box can do this. In the forums I read it might be possible or it might be added but I couldn't find anything on how to actually setup a system to do it.

Falcon

Re:Virtual Box

[Runaway1956]

Hmmm. I'd have to research a little to answer that accurately. But, I DO KNOW that VMWare Fusion will enable you to run Ubuntu as a guest on the Mac host. (Being a law abiding citizen, I wouldn't DREAM of pointing out that VMWare Fusion can be found on bit-torrent) http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads That page has a download for INTEL MAC - it appears that PPC MAC might be out of luck. I can't offer advice on how to use a Mac, as I've never owned one, but at first sight, it seems that keeping your Mac as the host OS might be wiser. Good luck!

Re:Virtual Box

[falconwolf]

Hmmm. I'd have to research a little to answer that accurately.

Thanks.

I DO KNOW that VMWare Fusion will enable you to run Ubuntu as a guest on the Mac host.

Yea, so does Parallels. I was thinking of using VMWare Fusion myself though. However I don't know how to do the opposite, run Leopard in a VM while booted into Ubuntu. I ran across something about it but didn't find it in my bookmarks.

it seems that keeping your Mac as the host OS might be wiser.

I could probably get away with just running Ubuntu in VM while booted into Leopard and not need to run Leopard while booted into Ubuntu. Two reason I've been thinking of doing it is to run CinePaint in Ubuntu and to test programs and scripts in both.

Good luck!

Thanks!

Falcon

Don't assume SUN will have that big an impact

[CFD339]

IBM can absorb a company like Sun more easily than you may think.

1. Don't assume mysql will be taken seriously by the db2 guys. They'll continue it, probably as Open Source -- but it won't be their primary hook.

2. IBM is VERY invested in their own JVM. Look for a merger to move the things IBM needs into the SUN JVM, not the other way around.

3. I seriously doubt IBM gives a damn about Solaris or Sun's hardware business. Sorry.

4. IBM is -- VERY -- serious about Open Office and Eclipse, and already heavily funds development in both (with money, and with staff).

5. Sun has been dead for a decade, it just continues moving through inertia.

Re:Don't assume SUN will have that big an impact

[ishobo]

3. I seriously doubt IBM gives a damn about Solaris or Sun's hardware business. Sorry.

Then you do not know much about either company.

Re:Don't assume SUN will have that big an impact

[CFD339]

I must have missed something in the last 17 years of working with them.

Re:Don't assume SUN will have that big an impact

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. (11 years and counting.)

... would gain control of ...

[janwedekind]

Cool idea. If copyright won't let you integrate your systems, simply acquire the necessary companies.

1. IBM acquires Sun
2. Microsoft acquires Yahoo
3. Google acquires Motorola
4. IBM acquires Google
5. Microsoft and IBM announce merger

There's only one logical outcome of this: At the end the US government has to acquire the whole thing using taxpayers money. Oh wait ...

Sun and Apple

[falconwolf]

I'd like to see Sun paired with a company that has experience with consumers and consumer products like Apple

I read an article some years ago in a business magazine on how the writer envisioned the marriage of Apple, Redhat, and Sun. He thought it was a good idea. Here's one by IEEE on the same theme.

Falcon

Sun Ray technology

[amirulbahr]

Would be interesting to find out what IBMs plans for Sun Ray are. Desktop virtualisation is an area that Sun excels in at the moment.

Re:Sun Ray technology

[rackserverdeals]

For the past few years I haven't heard much about IBM's thin client strategy. They just formed some sort of alliance with Wyse on this front so not sure how Sun Ray's will fit in.

Right now it looks like to get a thin client solution from IBM you'd be using Wyse thin clients, and VMWare/Citrix on the back end. With Sun's technology, they would have their own end to end solution.

Years ago, IBM had a bigger push into thin client market but it didn't go anywhere. I attended a seminar at one of IBM's facilities around that time and those little black network computers were everywhere. It was a multi day session so I stayed on site and there was one in my room.

The cool thing you can do with the Sun setup, if you're using the right server software, is not only have a remote desktop but run applications remotely. So you can launch a windows application from your Solaris desktop.

Re:Sun Ray technology

[dbIII]

An odd thought just hit me about virtualisation and thin clients. With malware rampant it seems to be about the only sane way to run MS Windows applications in large organisations. Perhaps the extreme bloat of Vista was a defence against Citrix etc to try to keep people on the desktop and away from thin clients - ok silly idea but a real unintended consequence.

mysql != internet

[sirwired]

I'm just trying to picture some CIO saying "Hmmm... I was going to hand $1B to IBM over the next five years so they take over my IT, but since they let mysql be replaced in the market by some other open source database, I'll just have to give my money to somebody else."

Nobody's saying the internet isn't important, just that if mysql goes away, there will be something else to replace it.

If IBM had pulled a MS and started waving patent swords, certainly there would be reason to hold a grudge. But they don't, and never have, despite undoubtedly having the ability to do so.

SirWired

Re:mysql != internet

[marnues]

You're looking at this all wrong. If MySQL died, so would the support my company would have for anyone that had a hand in it. We don't work with IBM now, but we do work with Sun. If a merger happened we would automatically switch support to IBM. It would be a very big black mark on them if they aided the destruction of a major component of our business. We are 1 of hundreds if not thousands of such businesses. This would severely injure IBM. Not to the point of ruin, but enough to know that it doesn't take a lousy start-up to screw over Big Blue. They can do it themselves just fine.

Big Blue and Sun merging means...

[gorb]

Blue Sun

Microsoft

[cowdung]

Shouldn't Microsoft buy it?

Look MS doesn't have an Enterprise API anymore.

(see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html)

Why not buy Sun and get into the high end server business?

In the process they buy and control Java (what they wanted all along).

That's easy

[geminidomino]

What it means for developers?

It means "Bend over, grab your ankles, and smile, 'cause Big Daddy Blue's a-comin'"

The real Pipe-dream

[anokun7]

You know what the real pipe dream would be? The one where Google just saves Sun by buying it - I cannot think of a better, more powerful and more technology friendly company than Google for buying Sun. I know, google is mainly into advertising and Sun is in to hardware & java. But Google is trying to make inroads into telecom / android which is based on J2ME, they use a lot of java, many java experts have moved to google, I think they will find a very good use of Sun and mysql.

Re:The real Pipe-dream

[turkeyfish]

This probably is a pipedream. However, for very large corporations the IBM/Sun merger would be definitely a monopoly game-changer in the server space and for businesses that rely on servers to conduct their business, which today is nearly everyone. You would think that the closing comments in the article, which I believe are right on the money, regarding the need for Java users and developers to bring their wallets to the next JavaOne conference would at least merit some discussion in various board rooms.

It might well be that some corporations such as Google/Cisco/MS or a conglomerations of other competitors may need to consider bidding for Sun, if for no other reason than to slow down the time it would take for IBM to consolidate the purchase and monetize their emerging monopoly of the Unix/Linux/Server market.

Since the merger will likely dramatically warp the Linux development space for some time to come, if not fundamental alter the landscape of FOSS well into the future, some corporations might wish to slow things down a bit or make them more complicated for IBM, lest they find themselves truly stoned and at the short end of the stick as the ink dries and the dust settles.

Re:The real Pipe-dream

[badkarmadayaccount]

Hallelujah! And I though I was the only one who was wondering where everybody's mind was at when they suggested an Apple-Sun merger. Corporate culture at Google is much closer.

You can't be serious

[ZxCv]

... Visual Studio sucks compared to Eclipse when it comes to how user-friendly the tool is.

Do you actually use both on a regular basis?

I've honestly never met someone that does that prefers Eclipse.

I use Visual Studio, XCode, and Eclipse, on a daily basis, and as far as I'm concerned, Visual Studio is just about the only thing Microsoft has ever done right, and beats the hell out of any other IDE I've ever used.

Re:You can't be serious

[whizzter]

For C/C++ eclipse isn't even in the same league as VS 6 (Edit-continue factors in HEAVILY in that :).

But i recently did a C# hack in VS(2005) and writing stuff in there felt very very crude compared to working with Java in eclipse, no refactoring and sync issues with the UI editor. Maybe 2008 fixed this.

Now consider all the other plugins available for Eclipse thanks to the plugin arch then i actually favour Eclipse for much work.

Re:You can't be serious

[Anonymous Coward]

I concur. People that say they prefer Eclipse say so because they think it makes them sound more hardcore (like the people who claim to develop only in Notepad, vi, or emacs).

Everyone keeps putting down Visual Studio, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument. They'll probably fall back on the de rigueur cry of it being "bloated" (which anything with "too many" features will be called.)

There is no IDE, commercial or open source that rivals Visual Studio.

big trouble for big-endian shops

[mihalis]

IBM buying Sun means the big-endian server landscape is in big trouble. One mega-vendor plus a bunch of small-fry. I have just written a report that recommends an urgent port over to little-endian platforms (well actually a port to be endian neutral) as a strategic precaution. No matter whether IBM was good or bad, owning AIX/POWER and SPARC/SOLARIS it would have too much power/dominance in big iron unix).

Ironically this could push people into using Windows server. If we really will end up with monopoly proprietary single-vendor lock-in, Windows on PC servers is just cheaper.

Re:You Got that Right

[turkeyfish]

Amen. American politics has degenerated into a pay for play system, not that it hasn't always been to varying degrees throughout our history. Its just more noticeably extreme now.

If you can't buy yourself a politician, you're simply not in the ballgame, but you are permitted to rant and rave to your heart's content so that all can pretend that you have your right to be heard.

The people will surrender their 1st amendment rights, their second amendment rights, etc. However, they will never surrender their right to complain. That would definitely be un-american.

Would you pay money to keep Sun free?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

"What's Sun's software worth to you? That's the question being put to developers at a poll at Mr. Poll. The poll asks Java developers what they would be willing to pay to guarantee continued access to and development on Sun's Open Source software including Java, Glassfish, ZFS, MySQL, etc. The results, while limited, seem encouraging: the vast majority (92%) of independent or small company developers say they would open their wallets to the tune of U.S. $100.00 (the mode) to U.S. $$1,000.00 (9%) to keep Sun producing software while an encouraging 77% of developers in large companies say they believe that their companies should be willing to pony up U.S. $1,000.00 per developer per year to keep the Sun software machine going. Sun seems about to set into a Big Blue sky, leaving the future of major pieces of the Java stack in question. Are developers just finding religion now that they're faced with the possible abandonment of their language of choice? Or has Sun missed out by not asking for support, reasoning that people wouldn't pay for something they could get for free? If it would save Sun's software from oblivion (or worse) would you pay real money to keep Sun's software developers developing?"

Re:Would you pay money to keep Sun free?

[turkeyfish]

I doubt it. The answer is . as in .com.

Sun is like so many other American corporations. The thing they really invested in heavily was stock options for corporate execs and their egos.

Don't get me wrong. I ponied up $45,000 worth of SUNW/JAVA stock many years ago and still have far too much of it. What do I have to show for my retirement fund? 1% of the original purchase price. I held in there for years foolishly thinking that Sun and Java really were full of promise, despite their misfortunes, if only they and the broader community would recognize it.

However, they only proved that they never really learned how to use their advantages or sharpen their focus sufficiently to outcompete their competitors and the current management is now so bankrupt of ideas and sapped of energy to preserve their own perks that they view a sale as essential. Ironically, the FOSS community will never learn to appreciate its contributions until it disappears.

I would expect at this point to roughly double my money relative to the premerger price, when IBM buys out Sun or that simply Sun continues to whither until it is a dying ember, should they think a merger is not really worth the effort. With existing management, investment in Sun will always prove equivalent to flushing money down the toilet, not that many in Sun, particularly their engineers, are not an earnest bunch, do good work, and have contributed to making Open Source successful. However, as has been said above they never really learned the IBM lesson of providing and monetizing value added service. Sun lost it as a viable company when they lost Zander as CFO.

Anyway, as many have posted here, what remains, once the corporate shriveled egos and the whiz programmers drift off into the sunset, will disappear into a faceless IBM that charges too much for me and most FOSS users to ever be able to afford any of their products, save the free stuff they might from time to time throw to the Linux community to keep MS or RedHat temporarily off balance. Too bad about Netbeans.

Ironically, your idea/question might actually force IBM to pay more for Sun than they would wish. But I really doubt the opensource community really has that kind of cohesion or sense of self-focus to pull it off. It would mean spending real money in a difficult time. The FOSS community is by and large one that looks, with some justification, but at some cost, for sofware for "free", as in free beer. In these times, we all need more free beer.

Oddly, I always thought that a Sun/AMD deal would have been a good entry for Cisco to expand its presence in the datacenter, networked OS/virtual platform space. However, they seem to be like Sun and most other corporations, more focused on devising executive stock option schemes of their own to be interested in the tecnological/economic potential. Should IBM eat Sun, I suspect Cisco will wish that they had.

But, I'm really not sure its going to matter much soon anyway, as the US government will be forced soon to step in to buy up all failing US corporations as the bailout business and government stimulus contracting business are the only boom industry left, at least until the Chinese come in and buy out the US government, using increasingly worthless US dollars, of course.

That being said, I wonder if Sun ever shopped the company in China. At least the Chinese seem to have a knack for management, even if one, might find their political culture a little too rigid, not to mention the national security implications. My own personal view is that judging from the way Congress is managing things these past years, the later fears are greatly overblown as the Chinese are becoming better capitalists than we are, would be destined to overtake us anyway.

As for investment, its nearly all at the point of amusement now. I can still remember their heyday when all those Sun exec's were sitting around the conference table in their commercial gazing in amazement while staring at the giant shiny

Re:Would you pay money to keep Sun free?

[HAWAT.THUFIR]

If it would save Sun's software from oblivion (or worse) would you pay real money to keep Sun's software developers developing?"

You're not describing a for-profit business but a non-profit organization such as the mozilla foundation, which is fine. Maybe it would even be better were Java run by something like that, it would at least be vendor neutral. (Personally, I prefer netbeans, but, I bet that most of what I like about Netbeans would be ported to Eclipse, which is fine.) -Thufir

IBM's Role as "The Developer Company"

[wagadog]

'All in all, this move would solidify IBM's role as "the developer company,"
...right. After laying off all the developers.

But

[Anonymous Coward]

Business in control of government, thats the American way. We must bailout the AIG's of the world or our government will collapse.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Perfect

[Don_dumb]

I can't believe you posted that as AC. That deserves a Knighthood.

Re:Perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Who else should I have posted as? This is my "account", been using it for a decade or so :)

Deregulation is a strawman

[Belisarivs]

I keep hearing about the evils of deregulation. The thing was that there were a *lot* of financial regulations passed after 1929, and not all of them were good - not by a long shot. A lot of those regulations (NRA, for instance) were dismantled *during* FDR's time. Others were dismantled following WWII.

Fast forward ahead to the 1990s. Regulations regarding the merger of banks were relaxed, allowing for the very large banks such as Bank of America to form. But new, tougher enforcement and interpretation of existing regulation (namely the Community Reinvestment Act) encouraged bad lending practices. In this case the problem was overregulation.

Additionally, the most devestating argument that deregulation wasn't the problem is SOX - Sarbanes-Oxley. After the fall of Enron, extremely tough reporting laws were passed (compliance was frequently cited as costing several percentage points of the gross income of corporations). They'd been in force for about five years before the market meltdown. If they weren't strong enough regulation, then the problem isn't simply "deregulation".

Re:Deregulation is a strawman

[MightyMartian]

You see, the real problem is regulation. If we'd just let investors do what they liked, we wouldn't have market meltdowns.

I still stand by my point, whatever other regulation there is, if a company gets so large that it's demise would lead to massive economic impacts at home and abroad, then that company needs to be dismantled.

Oh yes, and all bonus and remuneration packages should legally be required to be voted on by the shareholders, and all executives and board members should be required to hold only non-voting stock.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion