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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.
I remember rockin' coffee machines in the break rooms of their education centers. It's no mystery their most successful product is named "Java".
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
... I.B.M. into the dominant supplier of high-profit Unix servers ...
Oh, how pleasent, what a smart move for IBM.
Woh. Hold on. Wait. Please, I beg of you, save Sun's software from IBM's slow moving process and lack of usability.
I must confess that while I have used Solaris, the only thing I have ever cared about from Sun enough to bitch is Java and Java related thingies. Now, I'm not saying that this is going to fall apart if/when it transfers to IBM's hands and I certainly hope that the people involved in those projects stay there but if I look at the products of the two companies I must say that Sun is far better at Software.
This hasn't always been the case but let's look at web application servers. The free open source Glassfish container has been one of my favorites for development. Websphere, on the extreme other side of the spectrum, was the bane of my existence for a very short time in my life causing me to lose sleep night after night. I would take Weblogic, Tomcat, Resin, anything over Websphere. Please, baby Jesus, if you can hear me do not let this happens and if it does, let Glassfish be the source code they stick with moving forward.
Although I'm sure you'd love to hear me bitch for hours about Rational products, I'm just going to say that I think competition is healthy and also I prefer Sun Software to remain Sun Software. I hope this deal falls apart. I've loved IBM's tutorials but do not care for their software.
My work here is dung.
Really? I'm posting this comment from a workstation running a commercial UNIX. I'm using a Mac.
Try running a mac os x server and a solaris server, side by side, running the same application, and tell me that mac os x is truly unix. Any OS requiring >90% of configuration changes to be made in a GUI does not count as UNIX, in my book.
I'll grant you that OS X is UNIX-certified, but OS X is _not_ SVR4 UNIX.
PS- That burning you smell is my karma going up in flames.
Anybody want my mod points?
Sun somehow managed to butcher so many of its acquisitions, that it would be interesting to see what would be the outcome of IBM buying Sun. OpenOffice vs Symphony, DB2 vs MySQL, WebSphere vs Sun's offerings, Solaris vs AIX, and not to mention the hardware side.
If it goes ahead, of course....
ws
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
IBM today announced the outsourcing of 90% of Sun employees. "This will save us a good chunk of the $7B we paid for them," said an IBM representative.
Meanwhile, in Washington, IBM was approved to receive $3B in taxpayer money from the Keep America Working fund.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
I had a friend buy their stock in '01 expecting '00 prices to come back.
I heard about all this a few years ago and was like, get out of it, Sun will never be what it was then.
The make some great stuff, but decent has gotten good enough that the market for great is much smaller than it used to be.
They said "but it was worth so much", and I said "it may never have been worth that much"
It is funny looking at the two next to each-other since 1995, Sun took a ridiculous jump, IBM pretty much tracks with S&P and DOW, but slightly better.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
What market SUN has which is still substantial in certain arenas. Then there is Java, MySQL, and many other products which has been clearly covered. But I think getting their hands on ZFS and dtrace will be big. With ZFS IBM can build cheaper versions of NetApps Filers. Did I use cheap and IBM in the same sentence?
Hopefully IBM will still push out OpenSolaris along with Trusted Solaris. I wonder if this means the sparc processor is done and Solaris will be migrated to the IBM's RISC. What of AIX then? I don't see IBM maintaining two operating systems long term.
"RISC is going to change everything."
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
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.
I built a dial-up ISP in a major metro city with five Sparc 4s, and a Sparc Classic. Several Bay Terminal Servers and a crate full of USR Robotics Speedsters to attach to the octopus serial cables.
Upstream was a Cisco 2500 running two T1s, bonded with that new cool PPP protocol.
Over 650 shell accounts, usually 500 going at a time. A Special variant of SunOS 4.1.3 and access to tin, trn, pine and even... lynx!
Those Suns never took a break, never died and were solid, despite being located in a colo facility that alternated between being 100 degrees, and being 40 degrees. (Don't ask). Had a mind blowing $7,000/mo of revenue coming in the door to pay three people and keep the lights on the worlds crappiest office.
Good times.
TFS says "one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix" in the immediately preceding sentence. While OSX is indeed commercial and UNIX, it is quite arguably not "traditional Unix". Its distribution in the wild is almost the opposite of most others, quite common on laptops, not very common on desktops, fairly common in specific workstation markets, quite uncommon in smallish servers, and nonexistent in big iron applications. "Traditional Unix" tends to imply lots of big iron, a fair number of smallish servers, and some workstations, with minimal or no desktop/laptop presence.
Further, most "traditional Unix" setups, if they have graphics at all, use X. OSX supports doing so; but the mac users' howls of protest are deafening around any program that actually tries to do so. OSX is UNIX; but there are solid reasons for saying that it is hardly "traditional Unix".
...when I should start going back to calling things "IBM-compatible."
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
I was reading about this earlier in the week, and remembering when IBM and Sun were arch-rivals in the high-end Unix market. I'm guessing IBM's going to kill AIX and maybe even the p-series servers now.
My question is, does IBM want Solaris, the hardware business, Java, or do they just want to get rid of a competitor?
Every IBM product I've seen in the past few years has had its user interface written in Java. Every piece of middleware they write now is Java. So it seems like they just want to consolidate the market.
That said, they got a good deal in this market, but what a lousy time to do this. How many thousands of employees on both the IBM and Sun side are going to get kicked out over this? I guess it all depends on how many products this kills. Worse still, IBM hasn't been known to be keen on keeping jobs in the US and Europe lately...
wow that's one hot piece of real estate.... (sorry)
You can fool some of the people all of the time
Our Sun sales rep has already reported that 75% of the sales force has been let go - which may not be a bad thing... Sun couldn't sell/market themselves out of a wet paper bag.
I have the utmost respect for a large part of their technology portfolio... and they really do (or at least seem to) try hard, but in the last 5 years support, sales, and things in general with them have just degraded.
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!
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.
Back in college in the 1980's I administered a cluster of Sun2's with 160MB rack mounted hard drives. You could define those days as when a "hard drive" would kill you if dropped on your head from a height of 3 feet.
How much would they be willing to pay for some other celestial body. Say for example... Uranus?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That's a sexist comment, according to US politics. Your karma is gonna burn!
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
The article mentions "I.B.M. could also undercut Oracle by more actively promoting the free MySQL software" but bring up IBM's DB2. Isn't this the more interesting question? Won't there be fear of IBM cannibilizing DB2 with "free" MySQL? Will IBM try to bury (or join the ranks of those who disparage) MySQL so that it doesn't endanger DB2?
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Alpha Centauri, followed by Betelgeuse.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I started using Sun Workstations back when they had the Motorola based Sun-3's. Later,
when they came out with Sparc based Sun-4's, I learned just how portable software written
in C is. I used to take a buffer of data read in from the network or serial port, cast to a char*,
bump along the buffer, then cast to an int* to get some piece of a network header.
On Sparc architecture, you can't de-reference a pointer to an int if the address is not divisible
by 4. So you have to do a byte copy into memory properly aligned for 4 byte data.
In those days, if you wanted spreadsheet software that ran on Unix, it cost about $1000. Most
software for Unix workstations cost much more than the same sort of thing for Windows. The
rationalization for this was a Unix machine could support way more users so they had to charge more.I used to think that Unix software vendors were responsible for the success of Windows.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
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.
If
The Computer is the Network
and
The Network is Down
then
It's Time to Take the Rest of the Day Off
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
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?
"Eating its lunch"?
Really? Get thee to a real customer that demands five 9s or better uptimes. Yeah, there are probably some - running IBM mostly. We'll see how IBM likes handing support revenue over to RedHat now that it looks like they'll have their own open-sourced OS that's not burdened by GPL restrictions.
Until Linux guarantees backwards binary compatibility, Solaris is going to stay put. Nothing sucks more than applying a patch and having your customer's app fail to run. And as long as backwards compatiblity can be broken by some long-haired wackademic on his vision of free-software jihad deciding unilaterally "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!", Linux has a problem.
Ever try to back out an upgrade on Linux? Hint: enterprise customers do NOT upgrade their boxes by running yum or some other app against an internet repository.
Yes, I said burdened by the GPL earlier. Get this: there are a lot of companies that simply will NOT put their product into a mix that includes the GPL. Period.
The GPL allowed Linux to grow into what it is. It's also going to prevent it from "winning".
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Any company they buy ends up dieing horribly.
You mean like Tivoli?
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I'm willing to sell them the Moon for $1 Billion or Mars for $1.5 Billion
i wonder how much the moon will go for... i hope apple doesnt buy it, i like their stuff, but i'm sick of their logo and you know they'd laser it on there.
Forbes predicts 10,000 layoffs from the merger, most on the Sun side, in "IBM and Sun: There Will Be Blood".
Sun had a good run: 27 years. But they lost in workstations, they lost in servers, and Java isn't a big moneymaker.
This has serious implications for Java. To Sun, Java was their one remaining strong product. For IBM, it's just another software product line. IBM will do a decent job of maintaining it, as they do with all their corporate products. But they may not push it forward.
IBM also gets MySQL, which might be a problem, since IBM has other competing database offerings.
Sun's Silicon Valley operations have been shrinking for years. They overbuilt hugely during the dot-com boom, and have far too much office space. There's even an abandoned Sun industrial park in Fremont, where they built the parking lots and the building foundations before stopping construction around 2001.
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?
IBM wants to sell you different hardware that works better for your different software needs rather than shoehorning everything into Power, x86, or System z and trying to force those into your racks. They've made lots of press with this lately. Just search for "IBM hybrid server", as there are too many articles to link from here.
There are some workloads that the Niagara, Rock, and such are just phenomenal at running. These tend to be ones that Power, which is fewer faster cores, aren't so great at running.
IBM and Sun both have different strengths in their closed Unixes, too. They both have their own connections to Linux. They both have their own strengths developing software for Linux.
MySQL could complement DB2 as the entry-level DB. IBM has lots of middleware software written in Java. They have Lotus stuff and Sun has OpenOffice.
They both have blade products, and Sun's x86 ones are IMHO better than IBM's. They oth have torage products, and they are each one stronger in different parts of that market. Sun steps all over most other server companies in the telephone and telecoms market with their Fire and related servers.
I think there's a good match to be made here if IBM doesn't kill the engineering culture of Sun. The two are rumored to have very different product development styles, and it'd suck to see IBM chase off all the good employees who are more comfortable with how Sun does things.
Sun likes to put an inordinate amount according to IBM's figures into R&D. Maybe they can become an IBM Research subsidiary or something, sort of like AT&T had Bell Labs. That could be awesome for the IT industry.
uhhhh, no. Sun entered the consciousness of the unwashed masses in 1995-1996 when, in an entirely unprecedented maneuver, it spent millions of dollars advertising a programming language. My mom actually called me to ask me about this "Java" thing and what she should do about it. No, my mom does not know how to program.
I was programming at a company in the beginning of the 80's that bought Sun workstation serial number 2 for us to develop on. It was an S100 bus machine with a M68000 CPU. Berkeley UNIX with C compilers. The documentation stacked 4 feet tall. We connected to it with WYSE-50 RS-232 terminals.
I worked on the E10K team - we were called "Cray Research" then.
Most people only pay attention to the big vector boxes but Cray also had a SPARC shop in San Diego. There was a Cray blessed version of Solaris and a 64 processor beast called the "SuperDragon".
When SGI bought Cray, they couldn't figure out what to do w/us. After a few weeks Sun got the SPARC shop for basically the cost of inventory.
The SuperDragon was renamed the E-10K, got new colorful cabinets and people started to eat them up. I still don't understand why Cray couldn't have done just as well w/those boxes.
Anyway... I still own a nice SS-20 which I boot up a few times/year (and turn off when I can't take the noise). I am sad to see Sun go (just as I was sad to see Cray and Tandem and other employers go). Hard to believe that IBM will do a better job of managing Sun but we will see.
IBM Unix Servers: 6.387b
IBM Unix Desktops: Essentially 0
HP Unix Servers: 4.561b
HP Unix Destkops: Essentially 0
Apple Unix Servers: 0.099b
Apple Unix Desktops: 14.27b (FY 2008)
In other words, Apple makes TWICE as much money selling Unix-based systems as IBM.
A lot of people attending MS presentations have Symbian phones and run embedded non-ms in their cars. Nobody in their right mind would run a laptop as you would a server.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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
Depends on what you mean by "users." Web developers love it: you can be running a near-perfect approximation of your production server right on your laptop and have commercial desktop apps...
There's nothing especially unique about MacOS that lets that happen. You can say the same thing about Windows or Linux. Unless you're running MacOS on your production server (you aren't). On today's machines, you can have a miniature version of just about any configuration, I can't think of anything in that respect that MacOS can do that others can't.
It certainly depends on the web development you're doing, but my company's developers use everything from Windows to BSD to MacOS, and by far the hardest ones to support are the ones using MacOS. They have the most problems getting our tools configured properly, and I had one guy who spent an entire day trying to figure out how to get Tomcat to run. We don't use anything esoteric, straight Java, no frills. On every other system used by our teams, it's been trivial to get things to run, but every Mac user has had to jump through flaming hoops to get where those that use Windows or Linux get to in under an hour.
I think that the Web developers who use it use it because that's the system they're comfortable with, not because it offers anything that cannot be done with another system.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg