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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."
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.
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... 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.
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
Any OS requiring >90% of configuration changes to be made in a GUI does not count as UNIX
100% of configuration changes in OS X can be made from the console. There is not a single setting that *requires* a GUI.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
You don't know IBM very well, then.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It has lost most of the characteristics people identify as Unix though.
The usable GUI? :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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
OS X is a unix. It is commercial in that it's being sold and to a large market. I don't see the problem.
The difference being the market. One is a server market, the other is a cult.
Alpha Centauri, followed by Betelgeuse.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
OS X 10.5 on intel is certified Unix 03 by the Open Group. Other certified Unix include Solaris, HPUX, and AIX.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Sure it does, 'Enterprise Solution' is an industrial grade solvent used for dissolving piles of money stuck to the floor of vaults. It's also available in 25ml bottles for removing embarrassingly large numbers on corporate bank account statements.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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