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."

Comments

"commercial UNIX"

[Swampash]

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.

Re:"commercial UNIX"

[Bonker]

Calling MacOSX a 'commercial unix' just doesn't taste right coming out of the mouth. It's like calling Microsoft Windows a 'Server Operating System' or an 'Enterprise Solution'.

Yeah, there are people who use them that way, but that way madness lies.

'Enterprise Solution' tastes pretty damn foul all by itself.

Re:"commercial UNIX"

[LWATCDR]

True. Apple made a Unix so user friendly that people forget it is Unix.
And so small and light that it runs on a phone.
Maybe they really are a great company.

Re:"commercial UNIX"

[Jurily]

'Enterprise Solution' tastes pretty damn foul all by itself.

Because it doesn't really mean anything if you're not playing buzzword bingo.

Re:"commercial UNIX"

[drinkypoo]

True. Apple made a Unix so user friendly that people forget it is Unix.
And so small and light that it runs on a phone.
Maybe they really are a great company.

Apple made a Unix so Baroque that you can't manage it from the command line.
They took an operating system usable on a NeXTStep with a 25MHz 68040 and made its file browser unresponsive on a machine with dual 2 GHz processors.
They opened and then closed the kernel, they bury knowledge base articles that make them look bad (e.g. B&W G3 Rev.1 UDMA data corruption errors which were in the TIL but didn't make it into the KB even though higher and lower-numbered TIL articles were transferred) and they locked the iPhone so that you can't run third-party software without hacking your phone and voiding your warranty.

If you think Apple cares about anything but your money, you must have drank all the Kool-Aid.

Re:"commercial UNIX"

[avalys]

What else should Apple care about besides my money?

I'm glad they care about getting my money, because it means they will continue to try to build products that I want to pay for.

Re:"commercial UNIX"

[drsmithy]

Any decent Unix admin will be at home on MacOSX. It's just another Unix.

No, they won't. OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.

Your typical UNIX admin will be lost at sea, trying to run a Mac like his Solaris or HP UX machines. OS X isn't really a UNIX from a usability perspective, nor does Apple market it as such. Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list. It could just as easily be running atop the Windows NT kernel (and for a while there, nearly was).

Re:"commercial UNIX"

[bobdinkel]

At first I thought this was just a troll. But then it dawned on me that you might actually hold these opinions. Wow.

So I wanted to add my two cents.

I'm a Mac user and I find the implication that I've chosen a Mac in order to be cool or because of peer pressure plainly insulting. I don't think the OS is great, but for my needs I think it's the least bad of the major desktop OSes.

• I can do the things I want to do.
• I don't have to mess with the OS if I don't want to.
• I want my peripherals work with minimal effort.

Using those statements as a guide, OS X was the clear winner. By a long shot. Of course that evaluation is subjective--what you want to do and what I want to do are likely rather different.

Frankly, I don't give a shit whether someone know what OS I use. It isn't a part of my identity and it isn't part of an image I wish to project. It's just a preference. Lighten the fuck up.

Re:"commercial UNIX"

[nessus42]

People who want UNIX don't use OS X.

You couldn't be more wrong.

Maybe it's true in your little world, but it's not true in mine.

Which makes no sense. Why would you pay the Apple tax for a pretty face on X11, xterm and emacs when you can get the same thing from a Linux machine (or even an OpenSolaris PC, if you're a traditionalist) for probably half the price ?

Many reasons, including:

(1) To get a Unix machine that works out of the box without a lot of fiddling. That works with your network card, and your display card. That works with a 30-inch monitor without endless hacking on the XF86Config file.

We had an employee who insisted on a Linux notebook computer. It never worked for him. He couldn't get the display driver to work with whatever weird video card Lenovo was shipping that week.

(2) To be able to run more polished or popular commercial apps when you want to, even if that's not the main thing that you do.

(3) Mac Books have excellent industrial design.

(4) Mac minis are small and quiet and not much more expensive than inferior imitators.

(5) Etc., etc., etc.

There are many excellent reasons to use OS X. That your primary interest is a familiar and typical UNIX-like environment, but with a pretty face, is _not_ one of them, because the UNIX aspect of OS X is neither familiar, nor typical, once you move past trivial usage (stuff even Cygwin does just as well).

You haven't a clue. I'm a Unix wizard. OS X's Unix is completely familiar and typical to me. Sure I have to use fink or Ports to make it so. So what? They're no better or worse than the package managers on any other Unix/Linux.

Regarding Cygwin -- you're nuts. It can't handle signals properly and does forks incredibly slowly. Also the NT filesystem really bites when you're looking to just be happy with Unix.

Regarding the Apple tax, my precious time is worth oh so much more than a few bucks. You can be penny wise and pound foolish if you want. Many people chose otherwise. Or, if you have fun endlessly fiddling, feel free. I used to have fun with that sort of crap too. Now I prefer to get other stuff done.

You can have whatever opinion you want, but your facts are wrong.

|>ouglas

Re:Do Not Want

[rve]

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.

Wish it were Google or someone else...

[$1uck]

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.

Re:mac != unix

[UnknowingFool]

90% of configuration changes to be made in a GUI does not count as UNIX, in my book.

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.

Fun ways to save cash:

[FiveTenMatt]

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?

Re:mac != unix

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:mac != unix

[pohl]

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.