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

[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

[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

[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.

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)

[Neil Watson]

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

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.

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!

[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...

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.

[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.

[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.

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!

The real problem

[Amazing Quantum Man]

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

"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"

[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"

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't           that           Sun's         job?

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. :-/

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: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.

And the answer is...

[monkeyboythom]

LAYOFFS!

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.

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: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.

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???

[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.

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.