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IBM About To Buy Sun For $7 Billion
plasticsquirrel was one of several readers to send in the sharpening rumors that IBM is on the verge of acquiring Sun Microsystems, as we discussed last week. The pricetag is reportedly $7 billion. According to the NYTimes's sources, "People familiar with the negotiations say a final agreement could be announced Friday, although it is more likely to be made public next week. IBM's board has already approved the deal, they said." After the demise of SGI, one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix. If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix. And reader UnanimousCoward adds, "Sun only came into the consciousness of the unwashed masses with the company not being able to get E10K's out the door fast enough in the first bubble. We here will remember some pizza-box looking thing, establishing 32 MB of RAM as a standard, and when those masses were scratching their heads at slogans like 'The Network is the Computer.' Add your favorite Sun anecdote here."
If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix.
Really? I'm posting this comment from a workstation running a commercial UNIX. I'm using a Mac.
There's a number of decent forks of MySQL out there, time to look at them. People, list all of the forks you can think of here, I'll start with drizzle https://launchpad.net/drizzle
Drizzle's no good for me, I want those advanced features.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
virtualbox? OpenOffice? They do seem to have a few decent devs there...
I think you have just proved that Java is a fluke. Solaris is... well, it's Solaris. What more need be said?
What more need be said? Well, please elaborate. What exactly is wrong with Solaris, according to you? What exactly is it lacking that other unixes do offer? What is lacking about the many features that other unixes simply do not have? Even an open source version is made available.
Will IBM drop their support for Linux and switch to Solaris and OpenSolaris for their hardware? They won't if they want to continue to receive the support of the FOSS community, which they have been enjoying for some time now, otherwise they will be seen as exploiters, like so many who use the FOSS community during their beta period but take their product proprietary. Are you reading this Skype? Get that 4.0 Linux version out NOW!
Will IBM release ClassPath under the GPL2, making Java ENTIRELY GPL? They will if they want Java to remain competitive to .NET and expand.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
You're not kidding. MVS lasted for what, 30 years or so, alongside VM/CMS (and both OSs still have supported descendants). IBM even kept OS/2 on life support until 2007.
Last time I checked, Red Hat was selling a version of Linux, and so was Novell. They make quite a tidy profit from their Linux business.
Much of Linux's success is due to its community of contributors, but that community also includes corporations.
This space left intentionally blank.
Even an open source version is made available.
OpenSolaris is a last-ditch effort to remain relevant in the face of Linux.
Solaris is doomed to fail because Sun made it unnecessarily baroque. Speaking as someone who cut their Sun teeth on SunOS 4.1.1 on sun3 (now is your cue, crusty Unix overlords, to come and tell me you started with sun2) I can conclusively say that while SunOS has come a long way it has also become continually more of a PITA. If it's so fucking great, why is Linux eating its lunch? Maybe ZFS and dtrace just aren't enough?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OpenOffice? They do seem to have a few decent devs there...
Except that OpenOffice sucks at so many levels that I really can't understand why you're bringing it up as an example of what a few decent devs can do.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Scary.
plists are xml. If you don't count those as human readable, you may as well not count *any* text files as human readable.
"The make some great stuff, but decent has gotten good enough"
If decent is good enough, that explains why so many people still run Windows.
The base IDE maybe, but it simply can't compete with Eclipse's plugin ecosystem, which was after all the whole point of the Eclipse project.
IBM and SUN operate too much of the same space... the merger doesn't do anything other than mean the elimination of too man products that all compete. netbeans/eclipse Glassfish/WSAD Solaris/AIX Plus they both compete in the hardware market. In the long run this just means less competition in a market that I actually care about. If some other tech company (like google) that had orthogonal interests bought the company that would be a win.
What more need be said? How about "at least it isn't AIX". Or, better yet, "Thank GOD it isn't that abomination known as HP-UX aka H-PHUX aka Unix-on-Crack".
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
According to all technical definitions, OS X is Unix. The kernel is XNU which is based on Mach with BSD subsystems. Its roots can be traced to OPENSTEP based on NextSTEP's OS. All that qualifies it as Unix. The early versions of OS X were POSIX compliant. That qualifies it as Unix. As of 10.5 on Intel (Leopard), Apple went through the long procedure to have it blessed as Certified UNIX 03. In my mind OS X is what Linux on desktop has tried to be: The stability of Unix systems with a GUI that the average person can use.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix.
Do we really still count HP as 'being in the market' for commercial Unix? Last time I checked HPUX was as dead as a commercial Unix OS can be, and that was 5 years ago. Which wasn't surprising because it's probably the most archaic and outdated OS I've ever used, a real masochist OS.
Probably. It's certainly worth a lot more than $7b *now*, and although there's been a tremendous amount of inflation in the last few years, I think it's safe to say that $7b then was still too low. The problem with Sun is that, like most technology companies, it's run as a welfare program for its employees rather than a corporation for the benefit of its shareholders. A Sun with 12,000 employees would have around $7-9b in annual revenue and around $1.5b in annual profits with as much as $1.8-2b in free cash flow. Even at very conservative multiples, that's worth more than $7b, and it doesn't include the $1.4b in cash the company still has on hand. If this deal as speculated (and I do mean speculated - it has been "imminent" for weeks now) goes through, IBM will be getting the biggest steal in modern corporate history. All IBM has to do to turn a profit is fire the entire Java organisation and sell off a campus or two. After that anything they get right is free money.
Of course, a Sun without StorageTek and MySQL would also have an extra $5b in cash on its books, and a Sun that didn't give away enormous sums of cash - estimated in press releases at $500-600m for the 6000-8000 in the current rounds, or perhaps $80k each! - to its least-useful employees as it fires them would have a couple billion more than that. In other words, just a few decent managerial decisions in the last 5 years would have this company valued at perhaps $30-40b and with almost $10b in cash put it completely out of reach of its competitors as a buyout target.
Let this be a lesson to those of you in the engineering world who think executives don't matter. Sun with merely ordinary management: $30b and a vibrant, profitable, independent company. Sun with McNealy and Schwartz: $7b if the government agrees, maybe, and eaten by a soulless monster. Same company, same businesses, same revenue streams. 4x difference in market price, and I'm being conservative.
Any company they buy ends up dieing horribly.
You mean like Tivoli?
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Honestly, I don't see how you can hold MySQL in the same arena as DB2 and Oracle. MySQL is no threat to DB2.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
On top of outsourcing Sun employees, I think one of the big money savers for IBM was laying off approximately 5000 of their own employees just a few months ago. I guess they needed the cash to buy Sun, so they could outsource Sun's employees to save more cash... This hardly seems like good corporate policies in our current economic climate. I just don't see how average Americans tolerate companies who fire 5000 of their own (American) employees to raise enough cash to buy another company to increase their stock margins. Isn't this the sort of business policy that got us into this recession?
IF you think installing a distro makes you elite, then perhaps you shouldn't be trying to judge such things.
If you want to come out as a smart-ass maybe you should make sure you're not retarded in the first place?
What more need be said? Well, please elaborate. What exactly is wrong with Solaris, according to you? What exactly is it lacking that other unixes do offer? What is lacking about the many features that other unixes simply do not have? Even an open source version is made available.
I'll bite
I always thought it was odd that every Solaris machine I've ever been given (including the Blade 1500 at my last job which came with Solaris 10) I had to spend hours, weeks, months and even years applying patches and setting up keyboard maps so that when I hit backspace it actually deleted characters, and for the most part I always used the factore keyboards with these workstations. I always thought it was retarded that the stock keyboard didn't actually work with Solaris 8/9/10 out of the box.
Solaris 10 out of the box when I logged in via the UI had no less than 5 separate dialogues warning me about various configuration errors or something (some were bugs I had to patch, others were things I had to fix by hand). None of these machines were ever fully fixed and had tons of subtle issues that no-one including me seemed to be able to fix, but since I had work-arounds it worked well enough. And talking to friends I found most Solaris machines seemed to be this way - working, but lots of small annoying issues that never went fixed. Every one of these machines was brand new purchased straight from Sun and pre-configured at the factory and nothing ever worked.
Being a Sun customer for years - I felt that their hardware was just fine (I only recall one problem with a cpu which they replaced fast), but Sun software seemed to be QA'd by monkey's - you shouldn't ship something with loads of error messages. Not a single app they ever sent me worked out of the box. Not a single damn app without hours of fiddeling. Same with 3rd part apps certified for Solaris. The fact that to view their KB and download these fixes costs money just pours salt into your wound.
Moving to Linux as most people are doing was like a dream - seriously. You install packages and they usually worked with minimal configuration. The keyboard worked without lots of fiddling - actually looking at most common Linux distos like Debian and Unbuntu the keyboard worked perfectly out of the box.
Solaris is fine enough as an OS, but it lacks polish in every single way imaginable and needs serious design help. I find it hilarious that they used to try to market it as a replacement to Windows a long time ago (search computer chronicles archives if you don't believe me).
I believe more "average people" (primarily Windows refugees since 90% of desktop users are currently using Windows) can quickly get comfortable with Ubuntu or even Fedora, than with OS X. Certainly Open Office and Evolution are more like the familiar Microsoft Office and Outlook than are the equivalent OS X apps.
As you saying that OpenOffice is more like Microsoft Office than Microsoft Office is? As a sentence it makes no sense. I use Office on OS X and OpenOffice on Ubuntu daily. I can tell you with a high degree of certitude that Microsoft Office is more like Microsoft Office than Openoffice is.
I also use (but much less often) Microsoft Office on Vista. Microsoft Office on OS x is more like Microsoft Office on Vista, and the opposite is also true, than OpenOffice on Ubuntu.
OpenOffice is a good product for the price (really it isn't because with a price of zero you wind up with an infinity in the answer... but while I do well at finance I am really no math guy). However, There are times I consider putting OX x on my netbook just so I will have Microsoft Office available, it is that different.
You do understand the GNU stands for "GNU is Not Unix" either right? Linux is Linux kernel + GNU. This argument could go on and on about which is "more" Unix but if you consider AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX as Unix you have to consider OS X as well.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Ok smart guy, so how do you reassign F11 and have it actually function in Xcode?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
There's more to Unix than just being minimally complaint to some written spec.
And yet nobody in this thread can seem to put their finger on it without demanding something that you can do with MacOS X. (Example: configuration from the command line...see the man page for 'defaults').
This whole thread smells bad to me. If a Solaris admin tried to claim that AIX wasn't UNIX because he couldn't run dtrace, he'd be laughed out of the room.
I shouldn't be surprised, though. NeXTstep was similarly ostracized back in the day, too. I think UNIX weenies must be a bunch of religious fanatics who view useable software as the work of the devil. Unix minus the arcana makes certs valueless, after all.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
There is no specification. Its a feeling thing. Fuzzy (GP) did a pretty job describing the differences.