Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
You don't know IBM very well, then.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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!
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.
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
Scary.
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.
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
I'm going to break one of my own rules and explain to you why what you have said is stupid, on the assumption that you actually meant what you said. The ready availability of clustering solution has changed the game. People who need five nines can't use a single Solaris machine either; they need some kind of real mainframe from someone like IBM or Tandem who actually knows how to build hardware that can stand the test of time, hardware that can do shit like fall through a floor and keep running, or they need a cluster. OpenSolaris is a terribly immature platform which will never have the hardware support of Linux unless it goes GPL, at which point everything good about it will immediately be sucked into Linux and the last reasons for OpenSolaris to exist will vanish as well. Solaris itself has a per-node licensing cost which makes it less attractive in a clustering environment. You may have noticed that Linux runs on the lower-end Sun equipment worth building clusters out of, and that IBM sells more Linux clusters than AIX clusters. Solaris is going away just like AIX is going away and like we all wish HP-UX would go the fuck away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
you're spouting red herrings. I migrate enterprises from Unix(tm) to Linux, we use compatibility matrices, for everything from hardware to kernel and OS patch versions to application software versions. If we upgrade the software the process is planned the same way. Backwards compatibility is never an issue. And GNU/Linux on the proper hardware and correct systems architecture can do more than five 9's same as any Unix(tm). And sorry to break your bubble, but backwards compatibility has been broken by the major Unix vendors many with their patch sets, I've over two decades of experience with all the major commercial Unix(tm) if you want to argue. And I've seen the major Unix ass-plode and dump core because of bugs on mission critical apps, which if you ever took time to read the descriptions of patch sets you'd quickly realize some poor S.O.B. had their "rock-solid" big iron Unix box take a shit on their face....
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 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.