IBM Withdraws $7B Offer For Sun Microsystems, Says NYT

suraj.sun points to a story in the New York Times indicating that the much-rumored merger (or purchase) that would have united Sun with IBM may have dissolved before it began. Excerpting: "I.B.M., after months of negotiations, withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun's board balked at a slightly reduced offer, according to a person close to the talks. The deal's collapse raises questions about Sun's next step, since the I.B.M. offer was far above the value of the Silicon Valley company's shares when news of the I.B.M. offer first surfaced last month. .. Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers. ... Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers."

Comments

Purhase?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that internet slang for "much-rumured merger?"

Who edits the editors?

Re:Purhase?

[davester666]

The meta-editor, of course.

Re:Purhase?

[Courageous]

Hmmm? I believe there is not really such a thing as a "merger". There is always a buyer. A "merger" is declared to be nice.

C//

Re:Purhase?

[tyrione]

Hmmm? I believe there is not really such a thing as a "merger". There is always a buyer. A "merger" is declared to be nice.

C//

No. A buyout is Computer Associates famous for buying corporations for their IP/Products and canning the staff. This would have been a merger with overlapping departments [accounting and human resources] being purged to keep IBM's staff. Every staff member would be interviewed to explain their justification for existing in the corporate structure moving forward. There are staff purges in mergers, just nowhere near the same level as a buyout.

Crap

[Anthony_Cargile]

I was looking forward to the merger, actually.

Re:Crap

[linhares]

My fears is that MS may buy SUN. At these prices, it's pocket change for them. And they probably do not love the fact that OpenOffice, VirtaulBox, Java, OpenSolaris, Netbeans, and a host of other things are open source and widely adopted. Despite all people that simply _detest_ java or openoffice, they probably hurt deeply microsoft.

Wouldn't it be much much easier to Embrace Enhance Exchange if OpenOffice were in the hands of microsoft? That's what worries me.

Re:Crap

[carlzum]

I didn't like the idea of IBM purchasing Sun, there is too much overlap between the two companies. Like the summary says, IBM wanted to acquire their software and research and "consolidate" the market. That's business-speak for picking off the talent and products they need and discarding everything else. It's not a criticism of IBM, I wouldn't want any of Sun's direct competitor's buying them. Someone like HP or Cisco will be adding Sun's products and research, keeping the industry more competitive than it would be with a bigger IBM.

Re:Crap

[Loadmaster]

The best part about open source: even if MS hates OO they can't kill it. Buying Sun would make no difference. It's like pee from a pool, man, and there ain't no way for MS to empty the pool and refill.

Re:Crap

[diegocgteleline.es]

So what is MS going to do, close the source code? All those products are opensource, they can't. Any other company (IBM, RHAT, NOVELL) would resume the investment in Java & OO.org, and could offer jobs to the original programms.

Re:Crap

[SEE]

What does Sun have that wouldn't fork if Microsoft bought them?

Re:Crap

[linhares]

They can't kill it, but they can lead it in a cumbersome fashion, with enormously slow progress and giant trolls fighting within the community. People might have to fork the code in this crazy scenario in order to really secure OO.org. But from a MS perspective, to play the hand of the nice boy while creating havoc with the code just might make enough sense to put out those billions. Then SUN would have to pull a Yahoo: "we won't go because it's Microsoft", and the stockmarket will not take that lightly.

Re:Crap

[644bd346996]

There's no way Microsoft could buy a big competitor in this political climate. In case you hadn't noticed, there's a Democrat in the White House. Sun is the corporation behind the only viable competitors to .NET and MS Office, in addition to being a competitor in the server OS space and a provider of a consumer-oriented virtualization product. The only way Microsoft could benefit from buying Sun is the reduced competition, and that fact is too obvious to slip past the regulators.

Re:Crap

[Planesdragon]

even if MS hates OO they can't kill it.

Shame, really. Because if ever there was an open-source project that deserved to die, OOo is it.

Re:Crap

[CajunArson]

Uhh... IBM & Sun are also competitors, don't let the fact that one of them isn't Microsoft fool you into thinking they aren't. In some ways, this merger would be MORE restrictive than if Sun merged with Microsoft (which would never happen BTW, MS has no interest). Think about it: MS isn't really a hardware company in any of the same places that Sun is (no the XBox doesn't count), while IBM with Power is directly competing with SPARC. An IBM merger would likely lead to SUN's software assets being distributed around IBM, while SPARC would be left to die.

Re:Crap

[IntlHarvester]

OOo being Lotus-ized would be a fate worse than death, I think.

Re:Crap

[644bd346996]

IBM and Sun don't compete in any markets where either one or the combination would be close to a monopoly. Yes, they are both big into Java, but Java itself has competition, so consolidation of Java solution providers wouldn't necessarily be bad for consumers, particularly given that so much of the platform is open. As for the servers, both IBM's sub-mainframe POWER based machines and Sun's SPARC are constantly under heavy competition from x86 based systems, and if SPARC disappeared from the market, it wouldn't be missed by very many people.

Re:Crap

[setagllib]

Sun didn't have to close the source to kill MySQL. Just forcing upon it a poor structure and community for continued development was enough to send away the lead developers. Nobody can say yet if any of the few forks will succeed.

If Sun can ruin MySQL, I'm sure Microsoft can ruin everything Sun has done as well. Imagine when Java is just an optional compatibility layer on top of .NET, never again to run on Linux or Solaris except via the (then deprecated) OpenJDK.

Re:Crap

[644bd346996]

Hardware.

SPARC would just die. In fact, I'm not sure what kind of acquisition SPARC could survive. Perhaps Cisco would keep it. IBM, Apple, and Microsoft and RedHat would certainly kill it.

Re:Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

>The best part about open source: even if MS hates OO they can't kill it.
MS can't kill it but OO would still die; nearly the only people working on OO are the ones employed by Sun.

Open source is not magic pixie dust, kids.

Re:Crap

[Draek]

The thing with OOo in particular is that most of the devs are Sun employees because the codebase is an extremely huge and confusing mess, so buying Sun out and firing all OOo devs would *seriously* hurt it as a project, perhaps not long-term but certainly short- and mid-term.

Java and Solaris not so much, Java is far too important to IBM to be affected, and I guess there'll always be geeky hackers willing to adopt and maintain any abandoned version of UNIX, moreso with Solaris' reputation. But a MS purchase of Sun would be very bad for OOo, that's for certain.

Re:Crap

[Joebert]

It's like pee from a pool, man, and there ain't no way for MS to empty the pool and refill.

Why empty the pool when you can just add chemicals that bind to the non-water elements of pee to make them float to the surface where your filter can get rid of them ?

Re:Crap

[GiMP]

Ask and you shall receive. Thats right, IBM has already made an OpenOffice-based Lotus suite.

Re:Crap

[westlake]

even if MS hates OO they can't kill it. Buying Sun would make no difference. It's like pee from a pool, man, and there ain't no way for MS to empty the pool and refill.

OpenOffice is down to about 24 full-time developers.

Sun has invested enormous sums in trying to make OpenOffice a competitive office suite.

But the suite is all it has.

Microsoft can deliver an off the shelf solution for everything your business needs.

Microsoft can employ thousands of specialists whose only job is to study and understand office work.

It can employ hundreds more in testing innovations like the ribbon.

It can spend a billion dollars on web based resources exclusively for Office users and call it money well spent.

When mega-projects die they tend to stay dead.

You've lost time. Talent. Organization. Funding. You'd be very, very lucky not to slip two or three generations behind your competition.

When an open source project dies often all that remains is the code - and the code won't be nearly enough to jump-start the corpse.

Re:Crap

[jopsen]

Really can you assemble a community to maintain and develop OpenOffice?

Last time I heard OpenOffice was a project with a very small volunteer community...
And who is going to pay developers to work on it... Novell, might contribute a little, Google also AFAIK. IBM maybe, but I doubt that they care...
As for VirtualBox is there a community around VirtualBox?

You can't just opensource a codebase and expect 100 coders to appear out of nothing to maintain your codebase... Building a large stable community is not easy and doesn't happen by itself. If it did Sun would already have large community around Solaris and OpenOffice, but how many volunteer developers are working on OpenOffice?

Re:Crap

[ClosedSource]

I think you overestimate the significance of a Democratic President.

It just happened that a Democrat was in the White House when MS wasn't pouring money into Washington and their competitors were.

If just happened that a Republican was in the White House when MS corrected their problem by starting to pour money into Washington too.

Re:Crap

[Anthony_Cargile]

buying Sun out and firing all OOo devs would *seriously* hurt it as a project

In that case, since Sun is taking the role of old yeller, we should start learning more about the source code so as to keep the project alive after Sun.

Re:Crap

[SEE]

How many volunteer developers and rival companies are put off by Sun's project management enough not to contribute, but not enough to put the effort in to start a fork? How many volunteer developers and rival companies currently don't bother with the projects because Sun's progress is good enough for them, but would see a reason to help if the Sun contribution went down?

Okay, yes, I don't know the answer, either. I could speculate, but it amounts to "insofar as the projects really are important to people, Microsoft couldn't kill them; insofar as they aren't, Microsoft could."

Re:Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine when Java is just an optional compatibility layer on top of .NET, never again to run on Linux or Solaris except via the (then deprecated) OpenJDK.

Wow, would that be awesome! It would finally put an end to Java.

Next: putting an end to .NET.

Re:Crap

[MmmmAqua]

Niagara-generation SPARC CPUs are open source. Anyone with an idle fab laying around can go ahead and start churning out UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors. Fujitsu has an interest in the architecture not dying, since the SPARC Enterprise server line is actually Sun/Fujitsu and the SPARC64-V PRIMEPOWER is all Fujitsu.

That doesn't get you very far without compatible hardware to plug the CPU into, but Sun being bought and shut down by the likes of MS doesn't necessarily mean SPARC will go bye-bye.

http://www.opensparc.net/

Re:Crap

[ivan256]

Replace 'OpenOffice' with 'Netscape', and your comment could have been written in 1997.

(Posted from Mozilla Firefox)

Re:Crap

[shutdown -p now]

Forking is easy, keeping the fork alive and,.more importantly, relevant is not.

Re:Crap

[setagllib]

I like Java and .NET. They have some very good technology even if a lot of their design decisions are stupid. That same technology is now giving us very good runtimes for superior languages like Python and Ruby. So I'd rather we evolve Java than kill it.

Re:Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

That link contains the most source code in one place I've ever seen before in my life. Is that really >30GB of just text? damn

Re:Crap

[Trogre]

I think you may have just given strength to the other guys point :P

Cisco Sun

[olddotter]

I hate to think about it, but a Cisco Sun merger might make sense. At least at first glance.

Re:Cisco Sun

[LostCluster]

Cisco is already using Linux in some Linkaya models, and has it's on NetOS running on it's high-end stuff. Why does it need Solaris or Java?

Re:Cisco Sun

[putaro]

Cisco's trying to become a server company. Sun has a lot of credibility in that market, some interesting hardware and, yes Virginia, Solaris is more stable than Linux.

Re:Cisco Sun

[ltmon]

Same reason they've started building it's own servers - they want to expand into new markets.

Sun would sure give them a leg-up, as the two product portfolios have very little crossover, but it remains to be seen if Cisco would be any better at selling Sun technology than Sun has been of late.

As a Sun partner/reseller I'd probably prefer Cisco however, because it's less likely that the cool stuff that Sun makes, which I know and sell, would be just be swallowed up never to be seen again as would likely happen in an IBM deal.

Re:Cisco Sun

[segfaultcoredump]

Cisco + Sun would make more sense. Mostly because there is very little overlap in their actual products but their two lines constantly need to work together. (Our sun servers are connected to Cisco ethernet switches, our SunRays vpn into Cisco vpn concentrators, our Sun Storage is connected to Cisco MDS switches, etc). It would also give Cisco the biggest, baddest InfiniBand switch on the market (and at 110Tbps, its switching capacity totally trashes anything cisco has ever produced).

The biggest problem with the Sun+IBM deal was that there was so much overlap, customers would be left to wonder which product lines would get discontinued. (glassfish vs websphere, solaris vs aix, sparc vs power, sun's servers vs ibm's, storage, tape, etc, etc, etc. )

Re:Cisco Sun

[maxume]

Solaris is available under a rather liberal license. If Cisco thinks they can get away with buying a few hundred million dollars of expertise, no way are they going to spend billions.

Re:Cisco Sun

[QuantumG]

Solaris is more stable than Linux.

stable. n. resistant to change of position or condition.

Indeed.

Re:Cisco Sun

[segedunum]

yes Virginia, Solaris is more stable than Linux.

The same old sad refrain, right to the last breath. I have had countless Sun consultants for the best part of ten years telling me that Linux is unstable versus the 'rock solid' Solaris and that no one could ever run anything serious on a x86 system versus SPARC. When I challenge them for specifics they clam up tightly as if saying it should somehow be enough or they retreat by pointing to some exceptionally vague Sun 'studies', again, as if pointing to them is somehow sufficient. Your comment is the same amongst thousands and it's not helping.

Alas, saying it doesn't make it true, and given Sun's current sad state it can't be all that important to people if it's actually true.

Re:Cisco Sun

[dkf]

Solaris is more stable than Linux.

stable. n. resistant to change of position or condition.

Indeed.

Sometimes, stable is good. I prefer having my house built on stable ground, and I prefer standard libraries to have stable ABIs so I don't have to recompile everything every time a system upgrade blows through. OTOH, "stable" is sometimes a codeword for "sclerotic". I suppose ones view on stability depends on whether one has a direct interest in the stable thing or not.

Re:Cisco Sun

[ltmon]

I use (and like) both Solaris and Linux.

I think the "stable" moniker mainly comes from Solaris + Sun hardware, not Solaris as a standalone entity. Tight coupling to SPARC hardware (and Sun-made x86 to a lesser extent) means that Solaris has the ability to take portions of RAM offline if errors are detected, deactivate individual CPU cores or sockets if errors are detected and similar fault monitoring and recovery across the hardware. It's pretty cool stuff really, have a look at it if you get the chance.

Solaris SMF also kicks the ageing init.d method for 6 as far as software fault monitoring and recovery goes IMO.

Of course plenty of consultants have oversold this, deriding other good OSs at the same time, often without any knowledge to back it up.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris is more stable than Linux.

stable. n. resistant to change of position or condition.

Indeed.

Used and admin both. I've never seen a live-locked Solaris system; seen many times on Linux.

Re:Cisco Sun

[russlar]

I have had countless Sun consultants for the best part of ten years telling me that Linux is unstable versus the 'rock solid' Solaris and that no one could ever run anything serious on a x86 system versus SPARC.

Solaris on SPARC has device drivers in user-space. This lets you add SCSI devices to the server without rebooting.

Need to add a new SCSI tape library to a Linux server? Sorry, need to reboot the server!

Need to add a SCSI tape library on Solaris? No problem!
1. Plug it in
2. # add_drv st
3. # add_drv ds
4. # devfsadm -Cv
5. 99.999% uptime!
6. Profit!

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

When I challenge them for specifics they clam up

Live locking.

I've never seen a Solaris system become inaccessible because it has a too-high load. I've seen resource starvation (fork bombs using all fds, PIDs, etc.), but not load.

Seen many, many live-locked Linux systems. (Most recent one a few months ago.)

Re:Cisco Sun

[rubycodez]

big (data center/enterprise grade) Linux installations use fibre SAN, and adding a tape drive and rescanning can be done on-line, even with copper scsi if presented to fibre SAN via storage router.

Re:Cisco Sun

[whoever57]

Need to add a new SCSI tape library to a Linux server? Sorry, need to reboot the server!

A simple google search such as this one would show you that a reboot is not necessary to get Linux to recognize a tape drive that is added to a SCSI bus. Please take your FUD elsewhere.

Re:Cisco Sun

[rubycodez]

if someone has the money to spend, similar features are supported by the Linux kernel on expensive hardware for several architectures.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Solaris has a lot of really sexy features that Linux lacks

Re:Cisco Sun

[rubycodez]

that doesn't work with all scsi device drivers though, with some you'll even see new (hot-plug) disk but not tape drives, while for example in HP land some cciss drivers do it and some don't for tape drive. But yes, if someone wants the feature and plans their hardware purchases and device drivers, can do many hot-plug tricks with all manner of devices.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

stable. n. resistant to change of position or condition.

Hardly - with some of the most innovative and performance raising changes in the last 10 years being developed and released (in opensource format) by Sun, I'll call your bluff and raise you...

So not only are they more stable, but also more innovative...

Thanks for the note, too bad it wasn't accurate.

Dtrace
ZFS
Container/Zone technology
CMT - UltraSparc T1, T2, T2+ and the new Rock CPU to name just a few...

Re:Cisco Sun

[QuantumG]

That's 4 you've named.. for the last 25 years..

OpenBSD has a longer changelog (and that's saying something).

Re:Cisco Sun

[putaro]

Kernel internals don't get mucked with all the damn time. I don't do as much kernel work as I used to (and I've done it on 4.3 BSD, Unicos, IRIX, SunOS, Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X) but I hit it often enough with Linux. I was trying to get some slightly older Linux drivers to work but some genius had decided to rename all of the logging macros so that drivers that weren't being actively maintained had been broken.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Cyberax]

Just try to use ZFS then. Or NVidia drivers.

I've seen a lot of lockups on Solaris. Also, performance of Solaris sucks in many areas compared to Linux.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had countless Sun consultants for the best part of ten years telling me that Linux is unstable versus the 'rock solid' Solaris and that no one could ever run anything serious on a x86 system versus SPARC.

Solaris on SPARC has device drivers in user-space. This lets you add SCSI devices to the server without rebooting.

Need to add a new SCSI tape library to a Linux server? Sorry, need to reboot the server!

Whilst it is probably best to reboot, it is ABSOLUTELY NOT REQUIRED under Linux for the example given.

1. Plug it in
2. # echo "scsi add-single-device 0 0 6 0"> /proc/scsi/scsi
3. 99.99999% uptime!
4. Profit!

Seems to be a couple of steps shorter on Linux. Go figure ...

Sorry about AC, but I've already moderated above.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

big (data center/enterprise grade) Linux installations use fibre SAN, and adding a tape drive and rescanning can be done on-line, even with copper scsi if presented to fibre SAN via storage router.

Funny, I just did a SAN cut-over this weekend, and I had to reboot the Linux systems involved so that they could see the new NetApp LUNs via the QLogic HBAs.

Not sure about tape drives, but new LUNs seem to need a reboot from my experience. (And yes, I tried sending strange incantations to various /proc entries to re-scan the bus--no joy.)

I like Linux on my work desktop, but like Solaris on my servers.

Re:Cisco Sun

[GuyverDH]

Hmmmm - and have you noticed that the changelog incorporates almost all of these technologies?

I think the poster merely stated the most recent innovations to show ones that the majority of the slashdot posters would be familiar with.

Check out this link, for a list of Sun contributions...
http://mediacast.sun.com/users/pgdh/media/sum_of_parts_v2.8a.pdf

I'll highlight just a few, probably found in your beloved *BSD* as well..

NFS, NIS, XDR, Posix, SVR4, mmap, Streams, ld.so, diskless boot, autofs, rpc, news, abi, xdr, vfs.... /proc, truss, nsswitch, ptools, dynamic kernel, smp, domains, libthread, nis+, vold, jumpstart

hls, mpss, pools, fss, zones, brandz, s8ma, mdb, dtrace, fma, pgrep, smf, mpo, least privelege, zfs

and for additional software contributions...

JAVA, OpenOffice for starters...

Now.. this list is not all inclusive... but I think it shows a more than fair share of technologies, a lot of which are considered to be *common* tools, that would either not be here, or would not be what they are today, without Sun's contributions...

Re:Cisco Sun

[GuyverDH]

let's not forget the newer cfgadm command, and all it's possibilities...

with the new ssd driver removing lun per target limits (at least raising them substantially), and allowing for usb, fibre, scsi, etc to be scanned, configured, updated, refreshed on the fly...

Also, don't forget drvconfig and the ability to reload/refresh drivers in memory, while up and running...

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all in the boundary conditions and error checking. While Linux is getting better, it has some distance to go. I had a Linux box with a bad motherboard that was 'losing' a few bits on the IDE bus every now and again due to a bad capacitor.

This resulted in a mirror md/ext3 configuration that ate itself over time. After 6 months, the system became unstable and had to be rebuilt (ala windows).

I did the same thing with Solaris, and ZFS showed me disk corruption within 24 hours. I tossed the motherboard and didn't look back.

Additionally, I get a lot of warnings from Solaris telling me about poorly configured interrupts, downlevel BIOS (CPU workarounds), and other details that simply aren't reported in Linux.

YMMV. However, I think Solaris is still more verbose than Linux for error checking.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen and locked a Solaris box. Just run zfs for a little while. You'll see.

Performance of zfs positively blows chunks for nfs service.

Stability of drivers for 10GbE, Infiniband, non-Sun disk arrays and NICs in general, blows chunks.

You can always tell a Sun fanboi when they haul out the Sun marketing material, and Sun market bullet points, verbatim.

Re:Cisco Sun

[GuyverDH]

I've used probably more x86 based UNIX / UNIX like operating systems than many people out here.
Let's face it, there's not a lot of folks who remember turning key switches to load CTIX over CTOS on a Burroughs XE-550. Yes, I know there are some who will remember this, and things even older...

What I'm getting at, is that of all the operating systems I've used, based off of a plethora of chips, motorola, x86, powerpc, pa-risc, alpha, sparc, of them all, Solaris has been the most stable and reliable.

I've seen Linux systems, using kickstart, loaded onto identically configured hardware, end up with different packages loaded, due to some driver quirk that made it not load during one bootup, and work fine on another. I've seen boxes that ran fine, while their identically configured system crapped out repeatedly.

I've taken those same systems, and using a jumpstart server, loaded them with Solaris x86, and ended with identically configured, installed (down to the last package, configuration, etc) systems. All ran stable, fast and reliably.

Try taking your own run at comparing an application written for the A.M.P. stack, and first run it as a LAMP stack, then run it as a SAMP stack. You'll find that the SAMP stack outperforms the LAMP stack, sometimes by almost 100% on the same hardware.

Take a look at the security certifications, the revamped TCP/IP stack able to process millions (possibly billions) of messages per second (depending on the hardware it's configured to run on).

Take a look at the proprietary hardware, including CMT technologies, or the new ROCK processor due out this fall.

For a company that has been so solid in the operating system arena, to also be leading the pack in some of the hardware innovations is simply amazing.

Anyway, as I said, I've used most of the available UNIX/UNIX like operating systems, and find Solaris to be the best of breed for most, if not all, applications. That's my personal 24 years of experience talking, not just empty marketing words...

Re:Cisco Sun

[Bigbutt]

Doesn't seem to work for me. Every time I have to add a SAN drive to a Linux box (Red Hat), I have to reboot the system. There are a few suggestions on recognizing the drives while the system is live but none have worked so far. We're pretty much resigned to rebooting when adding a SAN drive.

[John]

Re:Cisco Sun

[QuantumG]

, probably found in your beloved *BSD* as well..

bwahaha.. dude, I just dissed BSD.

"Your car goes slower than a snail.."
"Well, my car is green too, much like your beloved snails.."

WTF?

Re:Cisco Sun

[Bigbutt]

Interesting. A couple of reads of the search finds the first one was a script that didn't need to be run as the guy had already rebooted. Since my issue is with SAN rescans, I adjusted your search a tad. I found the same IBM document I found before that said I needed to stop all I/O, unmount the file system... hell, may as well reboot at that point.

Unfortunately many of our Linux servers are still running 2.4 kernel. Since development drives deployment (to an extent; we're trying to get a catalog where development has to choose one from column A and one from column B but we're not there yet), we're stuck with what's on the systems for now.

Which means reboot if we need more SAN space.

[John]

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Just try to use ZFS then. Or NVidia drivers.

Firstly, I'm trying to grok why NVIDIA drivers matter.. oh yes, the matter because you're worried about workstations.. like in your mother's basement. We're talking about men's computers here.

Secondly, ZFS? I've had no problems.. and it sounds like my iron is a hell of a lot heavier than yours, needle dick.

Re:Cisco Sun

[rubycodez]

haven't had that problem with HP Proliant and HP's perversion of qlogic drivers and boards. only issues is with hot-plug scsi and sas, some cciss drivers good and some stinky at rescan

Re:Cisco Sun

[rubycodez]

in another post you've mentioned your on 2.4 kernels, much has changed in later 2.6 kernels, with right hardware you can hotplug CPUs now and with right drivers plus hardware hotplug disk and tape even on copper scsi.

Re:Cisco Sun

[chuckymonkey]

Yeah, given the choice I'll take Solaris on the server over linux. We have Sun boxes in our shop that I'm almost scared to look at the uptime. I don't know anyone in my shop that even remembers the last time they were rebooted, hell I'm not even sure any of us really know what they do anymore.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Bigbutt]

Agreed. Unfortunately it seems that the ones that need to recognize the SAN are the 2.4 systems. They're the older ones. Newer systems are coming out on 4 u7 or 5.x and are just getting going so adding new space isn't necessary, yet.

[John]

Re:Cisco Sun

[db32]

Buy an abacus and don't worry about it.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what you mean by "live-locked" but I've seen locked up Solaris servers before, but more often than not, they just panic and reboot.

Here's a nice one: Good old solid UFS on a fiber-attached 4TB SAN. Fill the fs under load and watch the log corrupt and then refuse I/O. Unmount and fsck the file system, bring it back online and start writing to it. Bang, instant panic in ufs driver and reboot. Fsck again, then all is fine, till you fill 'er up again.

Seen this with different server hardware, different SAN hardware, and on Solaris 8, 9, AND 10.

Re:Cisco Sun

[rwyoder]

I hate to think about it, but a Cisco Sun merger might make sense. At least at first glance.

Absolutely! Cisco is now starting to produce server blades, but how seriously will they be taken by corporate people looking to make server purchases? I even had a Cisco sales rep tell me they had been told *not* to market them as "servers"! (Apparently Cisco is worried about alienating the big competitors who also buy a lot of network gear).

Now think what would happen if Cisco bought Sun: Instant market share and customer base, and Cisco would be the *only* vendor who could fully populate a data center with *one* sales order and fully support it with *one* service contract!

Re:Cisco Sun

[speedtux]

Used and admin both. I've never seen a live-locked Solaris system; seen many times on Linux.

SunOS and Solaris used to be full of horrendous bugs: data corruption, memory leaks, pointer errors, security holes, performance bottlenecks, etc.

The fact that Solaris is now tolerable is not due to good engineering, it's because it's so old and because people have figured out over the years what not to do with it.

Re:Cisco Sun

[speedtux]

Solaris SMF also kicks the ageing init.d method for 6 as far as software fault monitoring and recovery goes IMO.

There are plenty of init alternatives for Linux, as well as SMF-like add-ons; people tend not to use them on most systems because they don't survive a cost/benefit analysis.

Re:Cisco Sun

[cryptoluddite]

I have had countless Sun consultants for the best part of ten years telling me that Linux is unstable versus the 'rock solid' Solaris ... When I challenge them for specifics they clam up tightly

I work a lot in VMs and linux is shit for stability when normal hardware expectations aren't met. Like the CPU frequency changing without Linux knowing about it, or having the clock instantly change by a couple months, or having disk IO be instant or take forever. Some specifics:

* A fedora core 7 snapshot that you can type a couple words into a terminal after reverting and then it slowly starts to lock up.

* Loaded a vmware image over an SMB network drive; linux guest crashed. Tried again and it worked ok.

* Frequently when I revert a fedora core image and click a close box, the box next to it is clicked. Or mouse clicks get doubled.

Lots of other instances of Linux bugging out like this. I don't know if Solaris has these problems, but I seriously doubt it. I think if you have actual hardware go bad you'll see a different side of Linux.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what's funny? People used to have the same attitudes towards Sun as you have towards Linux now. Remember, Sun started out as a seller of low-quality, low-cost workstations for computer science nerds.

I still can't get used to the fact that some people seriously proclaim that Sun hardware or software is high quality. I've had Sun machines literally go up in flames, and their kernels were nearly as unstable as Berkeley's development kernels.

Re:Cisco Sun

[aralin]

You should call the new company: "Sun and Cisco" :)

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the Linux mentality is very much "You bought PC hardware, it's supposed to suck and throw errors, just be glad we didn't panic the system and you can still brag about your uptime".

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris SMF also kicks the ageing init.d method for 6

That'd be an LBW.

Re:Cisco Sun

[drinkypoo]

The problem with your analysis is that there are many forks and branches of the Linux kernel which have been separated specifically for longevity. Off the top of my head, the entire 2.4 branch comes immediately to mind.

Re:Cisco Sun

[cerberusss]

and Sun-made x86 to a lesser extent

You mean "Sun-licensed" -- they don't build their own x86 boxes, they just slap a sticker on them.

Re:Cisco Sun

[drinkypoo]

NFS, NIS, XDR, Posix, SVR4, mmap, Streams, ld.so, diskless boot, autofs, rpc, news, abi, xdr, vfs.... /proc, truss, nsswitch, ptools, dynamic kernel, smp, domains, libthread, nis+, vold, jumpstart

NFS = not at all transparent to applications until V4. NIS = insecure from the get-green. POSIX was a collaboration. SVR4 is an AT&T product, stupid. I think they do get diskless boot. Even on SunOS4 I had to run BSD AMD and not Sun's automount because Sun's automount is shit. Virtual filesystems predate VFS, if that's the one you mean. Most of the rest of these things are just implementations of an obvious concept and many of them were very poorly done (e.g. RPC which is horribly insecure.)

This list is partially accurate, partially disingenuous, and mostly annoying.

JAVA, OpenOffice for starters...

Java forgot most of the lessons of Smalltalk, which is kind of pathetic considering how much older Smalltalk is. OpenOffice existed before Sun's involvement; they did make it powerful, but it is also so fucking slow it makes me angry sometimes. No kidding. Sometimes it takes OO.o longer to respond to a request of some sort than it takes to start office and do the same thing. The problem is likely the integration of Java; not due to any inherent properties of Java or anything, but people seem to go badly wrong there often :P

Now.. this list is not all inclusive... but I think it shows a more than fair share of technologies, a lot of which are considered to be *common* tools, that would either not be here, or would not be what they are today, without Sun's contributions...

For the most part, that's an indictment against them. LET THEM BURN, I SAY!

Re:Cisco Sun

[drinkypoo]

The problem with this idea is that it can never be as reliable as a cluster of commodity x86 servers no matter what you do because you always introduce a single point of failure even if it's the backplane. Monolithic computers should be purpose-built only when required for specific scientific problems because they are a bad solution to all other types of problem simply because of the aspect of availability.

Re:Cisco Sun

[GuyverDH]

awww - did my troll crowd follow me in here???

that post was certainly NOT trolling... merely stating results of years of experience, and not once did I bash anything, just said it wasn't as good as... /sigh - the people they let moderate these days...

Re:Cisco Sun

[rcw-home]

Need to add a new SCSI tape library to a Linux server? Sorry, need to reboot the server!

No, no apologies or downtime required.

BTW, 99.999% is a fiction. In the real world, everything needs a maintenance window. For example, next weekend late at night my ILEC is scheduling 45 minutes of downtime for all their voice customers so they can physically move their 5 9's capable phone switches to a different suite. It's not likely that phone system will still be in production in 9 years so they can make up the difference. Do I, as their customer, care? No.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had Sun machines literally go up in flames,

Did you really see Sun servers on fire?
Do you know what "literally" means?

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Just try to use ZFS then. Or NVidia drivers.

I've seen a lot of lockups on Solaris. Also, performance of Solaris sucks in many areas compared to Linux.

Yeah, try and find a faster file system than QFS on Solaris.

I dare you.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right most of the Mac and Linux fanbois on here forget who really "invents" the technology and then gives it away. Go in any Telco rack space and see what the back end of all this really runs on. If your on the public network you've hit a Sun box somewhere on the route.

Yes lets don't forget things like Cloud Computing, HA Clustering, and Data Centers in a box to mention a few more.

Yes IBM touts to be open source and yes they have given pieces of technology to the FOSS world but look at any of their open source products. Their pieces hacked together. Now if you want the "Full/Stable" version well that $10,000.00 plus support.

Sun gives away and open sources their full products. Not just pieces. Look at Glassfish which blows away Websphere. Better yet look at Java Messaging verses Lotus Notes. Notes is a piece O' shit to admin especially compared to Java Messaging.

Support contracts are way more affordable with Sun versus IBM and the support is far better.

One reason we use Sun is we don't want to deal with IBM. Sun has real engineers. IBM has suits.

About which is more stable Linux or Solaris. They both are in my book. ALL! systems get sick from time to time. If they didn't we wouldn't have a job. With SMF Solaris does do a better job of recovering from its sickness. Its not a knock on Linux just a fact.

You young folks weren't around when IBM "owned" everything. Life in IT was not good and VERY expensive. We don't want the beast to rise from its grave. We need to keep Sun around and on their own. We need to support them. After all they do give to us. All of us. Yes even to you Windows folks out their.

Re:Cisco Sun

[mlwmohawk]

yes Virginia, Solaris is more stable than Linux.

It's curious that this get repeated so often. I'd like to know the metrics by which they measure this. Which "linux" they measure against, and what constitutes "stability."

I've seen Solaris crash. I've seen Linux crash. having watch many systems over the years, I don't sense any practical difference in reliability over Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris. They all stay running without issue until a power failure, hardware failure, kernel upgrade, or system upgrade.

So, what is "more stable" in this context? I have Linux machines with uptimes over a year.

So, please, do tell, how is Solaris "more stable" than Linux and why? Do tell!

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: OpenOffice - Sun bought that, did not develop it. and I find it bloated, slow, and does not supply *true* (advertised) MS compatibility. I don;t like MS products either, but hey, if you can't present your concept in text, a friggin slide show is not going to make you r lack of expertise any better.

Re: JAVA - hmm ... also bloated, slow, and too often the app written in it produces unexpected behaviour or crashes. Every time my set-top-satellite box does an automatic "upgrade" (which is out of my hands) MORE bugs are introduced.

maybe developers love it but I am not impressed by a thing that encourages poor programing and design practices, encourages you to rewrite standard libraries (without identifying them as such) and on and on and on. Yes, I am a "C" and assembly fascist. deal with it. they are fast adn small and force good practices and reusable code.

Speak of fat and slow, I prototyped a complex product in friggin SHELL SCRIPT that was easier to read, easier to maintain, smaller and FASTER than the Java app that the so-called Java Guru App Team devolved the product into.....

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Ignore a thousand comments.
2. Post comment on slashdot to the contrary.
3. +5 insightful!

Wtf? I'm curious what might actually convince you.

Re:Cisco Sun

[mzs]

I have seen Linux kill arbitrary processes under swap exhaustion. At first I just thought malloc()s were failing but then I reproduced the conditions and was shocked that seemingly random long idle processes were the ones that were basically getting kill -9'ed. The OSs that can take a load of hurt and just keep going are:

1st place: Solaris 9 (sparcv9)
2nd place: FreeBSD 5.3 (i386)
3rd place: SunOS 4.1.3 (sparc)

There was just something particularly magic about those versions, things just somehow aligned right in the heavens for those.

Re:Cisco Sun

[mzs]

You missed an oldie but a goodie, the slab memory allocator, that was genius.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I am pretty sure it's not all their voice customers.

Toll switches will not be unavailable. End of question.

Re:Cisco Sun

[fm6]

I've often thought that the two companies products dovetail pretty well. Two reasons to think it won't happen:

First, it would make Cisco a major competitor of IBM, HP, and Dell. They sort of compete now, with that new server appliance, but this is many orders of magnitude beyond that. As AT&T discovered, it's really hard to sell stuff to your competitors (which is why they spun off they hardware businesses).

Second, Cisco is obviously just not interested. Sun Management has been shopping all or part of Sun around for some months now. Cisco must have been one of their targets. If they'd had any nibbles, we would have heard by now.

Re:Cisco Sun

[jafac]

Overlap is exactly why 90% of these mega mergers happen: Removal of Competition From the Marketplace.

Why the compliant lapdogs at the FTC allow such mergers to happen (over and over and over again) - remains a mystery. . . .

. . . . oh wait, no it doesn't. They're on the take!

Re:Cisco Sun

[rcw-home]

Yes, it is all their voice customers.

No matter what it is, stuff does need maintenance, often not even because of any bug or design deficiency in the equipment itself. End of answer.

Re:Cisco Sun

[El_Oscuro]

Just be glad you have Linux. I get stuck having to configure raw devices in Windoze:

1. Click on the disk administration icon.
2. Click "no" on the "do you want to create dynamic volumes?" for the 17th time
3. Allocate the partitions
4. Reboot. Windows automagically assigns drive letters to all of your raw devices, even though there is no filesystem on them. While it is doing this, it takes a while to figure this out and your reboot will take awhile.
5. Now, go back into Disk administration to remove all of the drive letters that Windozes automagically assigned to your raw devices.
6. Reboot again.
7. Repeat the entire process every time a new raw device is added to your system.

What I wouldn't do to have Solaris (or even Linux)

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not "userspace". That's modloadable drivers. There is support for userspace drivers, via ugen and the generic scsi driver (forgot its name), but what you're talking about with the add_drv trick is just the fact that we can change the kernel drivers loaded in via dynamic linking.

Linux has this too, though its been a while since I've played with it.

From the kernel perspective, Linux's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. It is developed by many many more people, many of whom don't even speak the same language. While this means that you get a lot broader hardware support, it also means, IMO, more "anarchy" in certain areas that ultimately leads to bugs that cause hangs or crashes.

Solaris, OTOH, is subject to much more rigorous scrutiny, particularly when new code or ideas are developed. As someone who's integrated a lot of code in the Solaris kernel, and some code into NetBSD (but admittedly not into Linux), I can tell you that the bar for getting code into Solaris is quite high indeed, and the beneficiaries of this are the folks who need to rely on it to be reliable and robust.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Stable is an adjective...

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Your dictionary needs to learn the difference between a noun and an adjective, because mine says:

stable. n. A house for horsies.

Just how much is enough?

[LostCluster]

Sun seems to want to hold on for a better bid than IBM's $7 billion, but there's seems to be a hard time justifying much higher of a markup beyond the $6.3 billion it has in market cap. Who wants to bid more?

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Darkness404]

Well, someone who views Java or Solaris is the future. Sun also has a rather large stake in Blu-Ray, something that some companies might want to try to get as it won the format war.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[LostCluster]

Java and Blu-Ray may have a future value, but Solaris is a has-been that's been open-sourced.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Veetox]

Sun may have some current research that will produce valuable results down the road. Especially since they consider their stock grossly undervalued. I wouldn't be surprised to see IBM come back with another offer - they've tasted the bitter fruit of a lost opportunity before...

Re:Just how much is enough?

[LostCluster]

If they do... they might as well publish it and start using it in sales presentations. A 10% premium above current value was IBM's offer. How much more do they want?

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Bandman]

What is Sun's stake in bluray?

Re:Just how much is enough?

[TinBromide]

It won the format battle. How's the war against the DVD Empire going?

Anyway, I have a hard time seeing a company value the language or the operating system (who isn't Microsoft or Apple) to the tune of 7 (or 6.3) billion. I think that IBM would have been the best bet because Sun is very diversified, in addition to the language and the OS, it also builds and sells servers using processors that it owns a major stake in. Sun is a soup to nuts type company. It designs and builds the chips, the hardware, the OS, the drivers, the servers, the software stacks, and supports them. IBM would have been a very good fit because IBM has its own architecture, builds its own servers, and does its own software.

There aren't very many companies that would make a good fit with a SUN acquisition. Sony isn't interested in mainframes, OS's, or just about everything except blu-ray. Dell, Apple, Toshiba, and company are currently banking on Intel and AMD chips(who don't appear to ever dream of doing anything but chips).

There was a post above about how Red Hat should purchase SUN, but that isn't a bad idea at all. In most companies that I've seen (and I've seen a few), Linux means some variety of RHEL. If they could swap out the Solaris for Red Hat, they would actually be able to SELL something beyond tech contracts. They would be able to leverage their existing mindshare as a server provider and they could cut out the other OEM middlemen. Reliability and driver support would also (appear to) increase if Red Hat focused on the limited subset of hardware that Sun makes (look at what it did for Apple, its not hard to build a bug free OS when you only have to make it work on 6 different pieces of hardware).

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

All blu-ray devices include a licensed java virtual machine for running the interactive crap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Java_software_support

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

the reason bluray players are so expensive is because they license embedded Java and (obviously) need beefier specs to support it.

Meanwhile, current DVD players and HDDVD players didn't need to use Java.

Way to stick it to the customers.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[SEE]

Red Hat buying Sun would be the exact same mistake as Caldera buying SCO.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[linhares]

"Sun may have some current research that will produce valuable results down the road."

My feelings exactly. I feel that SUN, like PALM had with the PRE, may have something on their hands. I have no info besides the history of a company that has been so innovative and also embracing of FOSS (which shows they understand the new landscape). All that brainpower inside the company is not dead, so I think they just might have something up their sleeves.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[TinBromide]

Sort of, but completely not in that SCO offered operating systems but not hardware, servers or just about anything that Sun offers. Caldera and SCO were OS vendors, Sun is more of a hardware company that also happens to sell an OS that it puts on its boxes.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

The AP story says that Sun instigated the collapse by terminating IBM's exclusive negotiating rights. Then IBM retaliated by withdrawing its offer.

It could be that someone from Cisco whispered something in someone's ear... suitably intermediated to provide deniability, of course.

I'm guessing that a couple things happened over the past week that made this seem more like a shotgun marriage than the two parties originally hoped for:

1) IBM probably signalled that while it intended to keep the Sun brand, it wasn't about to give the Sun guys special status in the merged company. ... which means that Sun's innovative R&D would be reporting to IBM's quarterly results-oriented senior management. We know what that means in terms of staffing, funding of next gen projects, site consolidation, etc.

2) As time wore on, some of the same dynamics that triggered Microsoft giving up on Yahoo came into play. Instead of saying, gee, we could get all this great stuff for only $7 billion, IBM's people probably started asking, remind me again why we want to take on so many redundant products and staff, burdening our senior management with a tremendous integration problem, and giving us the PR hit of laying off tens of thousands of Sun employees at a time we're bidding for stimulus projects. Most of Sun's best engineers would probably get up and leave anyway, and many have already left.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're responsible for making it slow and ensuring that the menus are unusable.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

why "obviously"?

I'd say it takes way "beefier" specs to decode the actual BluRay compression than to run the embedded Java for the menus.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[koutbo6]

I believe sun market cap was in the $3-$4 billion range, it shot up to $6 when IBM plans were announced.
They have a good chance to justify a higher price given their IP and how crazy stock market valuation is. Don't you think it's odd for a company such as IBM to offer this price for SUN given the huge overlap between them? not to mention that many of the software technologies are open sourced and IBM could take advantage of them
I believe this is a move from IBM to make SUN more expensive for likely suitors. Which is why Cisco will have to pay at least $8 billion now if they are to acquire SUN, which I think will hapen.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[koutbo6]

forgot to mention, lets not forget ORCL
Total Current Assets $15,611.00M

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

They also embed java on $99 cell phones, so that's not it.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[speedtux]

Why does the Java virtual machine have to be "licensed"? There are plenty of third party J2ME implementations around.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[SEE]

My point really wasn't about Solaris. Red Hat would wind up with Sun's businesses, and have to run those businesses with Sun's people since they don't have anybody of their own in those businesses. The resulting company would be Sun, with a little Red Hat bolted on the side that didn't have enough weight to wrench Sun from its decline.

(Yeah, maybe Red Hat management could pull a Steve Jobs. I wouldn't bet much on it myself.)

IBM can buy Sun, and the resulting company would be IBM. IBM is used to running multiple business units, and it's already got people who manage units that do Java, storage, databases, Unix, RISC boxes, and all the rest. But even if IBM screwed up with Sun, IBM's big enough an organization that the collapse of the Sun division wouldn't kill IBM.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[drinkypoo]

It wouldn't be exactly the same. They'd have a failing hardware company to deal with, not just software. Surely we'd get some interesting bits of kit out of it, and it would kill RedHat at the same time... a win-win scenario! (Just Kidding. I only wish we could get rid of Red Hat Linux without getting rid of Red Hat's contributions to Linux) :/

Re:Just how much is enough?

[jadavis]

They have a good chance to justify a higher price given their IP and how crazy stock market valuation is.

This sounds like the same logic that Yahoo! used to reject Microsoft's bid.

The fact is, Sun should be looking out for the shareholders, and the correct move for the shareholders is to sell when someone is offering a 75% premium on the stock (or whatever insane premium it was).

Re:Just how much is enough?

[Wireless Joe]

Sun: What a bunch of Yahoo!s.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[koutbo6]

Yahoo failed because there was no other likely suitors besides MS, SUN on the other hand, can afford to play hard to get because they have at least 2 other likely suitors (Oracle and Cisco).

Re:Just how much is enough?

[fm6]

Sun's market cap is kind of irrelevant. On the one hand, it's only that high because of the IBM deal. Now that the deal seems to be off, the market cap is going down real fast.

Second, the market cap doesn't really say anything about Sun's value to IBM. It basically expresses the market's lack of faith in current management. If you look at Sun's assets objectively, they're worth a lot more than $7 billion. The cash reserves alone are worth almost half that.

This whole thing is not actually something Sun's management wants. They'd be happy to soldier on and hope things get better. The people who want to sell Sun are "activist" investors who spent a lot of money buying up Sun stock so they could force the company to sell itself off. (The biggest stockholder, Southeast Asset Management, did the same thing to Knight Ridder a couple of years ago.) If these investors don't get a good price from IBM, the deal just doesn't make sense for them.

Re:Just how much is enough?

[swillden]

If they do... they might as well publish it and start using it in sales presentations. A 10% premium above current value was IBM's offer. How much more do they want?

AND the current value has increased significantly as a result of IBM's offer. Before the IBM rumors started, Sun's market cap was around $3.5 B, so IBM's offer was double Sun's market value.

Time to modify this hilarious graphic?

[LaughingCoder]

I saw this a few years ago and it made me true to my moniker: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19080808-Ars-technica-on-Sun-strategy-over-the-years. Looks like we have an edit to make to this spot-on, funny-but-sad pie chart.

Netbeans

[derrida]

Does this mean that Netbeans is still alive?

Re:My complaint against IBM

[mikael]

Did somebody write that all by themselves or did they use an automatic speech generator?

Apple Should Buy Sun

[Helmholtz]

If Apple bought Sun, then they would be a very interesting Server-Desktop combo.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Darkness404]

But I don't think Apple really wants Sun. Sun seems to be everything Apple isn't. Sun has a lot of corporate customers, not something that Apple really caters to. Java would be a nice acquisition by Apple, but I just can't see them wanting Java for iPhone applications, something that would seem natural if they acquired Sun.

I just think that Sun seems to be everything that Apple has opposed, and acquiring it doesn't seem to make sense. On the other hand, (assuming various regulatory bodies would approve it), MS merging with Sun, or Cisco buying Sun seems to work better.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[bobstreo]

I see what you did there: Sun's Next Step.
Steve Jobs?

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Nerdfest]

Apple's not really much better than IBM, for a lot of the same reasons (expensive, restrictive, closed). They're also similar in that a big part of their business is selling based on their name, not their products, although Apple is _much_ better in that regard than IBM. Apple however, doesn't buy competing, superior products and drive them in into the ground.

I'm still hoping for a Cisco buyout.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Years ago Sun was trying to buy Apple. :-)

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[JAlexoi]

Damn, replied to the wrong comment....Once more


And I would immediately switch to MS .NET after 10 years with Java!
I mean, if there is a company as secretive about their plans as Apple, it's probably some kind of governmental intelligence agency.
At least, with MS we know that we are not going to get what they say, but we know that... Apple is a total enigma.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[ducomputergeek]

Someone posted this the other day and at first it made a little sense. Afterall, Apple doesn't really have an enterprise market presences and Sun doesn't have much in the desktop arena. Not much of the two companies would overlap in terms of canabalizing products. IBM already has a RISC server line as well as a java app server as well as a damn good database system, even if it has a price tag.

But Apple is getting away from being a computer company and getting more into being a consumer electronics and media company. They've developed the first online content delivery system that works for consumers and producers.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[LostCluster]

Apple's already pinned itself to their own fork of FreeBSD. Why would they need Solaris?

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Raffaello]

Java is poison to Apple. Apple's whole business model is one of OS differentiation. Java promises OS homogenization. Apple has done everything it can to damn Java with faint praise, ensuring its second class status on Mac OS, and complete absence from the iPhone OS.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Courageous]

If Apple bought Sun, then they would be a very interesting Server-Desktop combo.

That's curious. I've often heard Steve Jobs called an ass, but never a dummy.

C//

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Savage-Rabbit]

On the other hand, (assuming various regulatory bodies would approve it), MS merging with Sun, or Cisco buying Sun seems to work better.

Other than it being an excellent opportunity to kill off a Unix vendor, why would MS merge with Sun? Never mind the consequences an MS take-over of Sun would presumably have for Java. Sun being swallowed up by Hewlett-Packard doesn't sound all that good either. Cisco buying Sun has a better ring to it, at least at first glance. I'll take continued diversity on the OS market over consolidation any day.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[644bd346996]

Solaris isn't the important part of Sun. Java and the server business are. But if it bothers you, you can take solace in the fact that Apple's desktop environment used to run on Solaris, before Java was developed (incidentally, Java was heavily based off Objective-C and OpenStep). OS X and Solaris could be merged pretty easily, as far as OS mergers go.

Apple isn't a serious competitor in the enterprise server market, and that limits how well they can do in the corporate desktop and workstation markets. Those three markets are the only high-margin parts of the computer market at large that Apple isn't doing well in. While Sun isn't exactly doing well (or else they wouldn't be ripe for acquisition) they do have a lot more credibility than Apple in the business space. Java has a lot to do with that, too. Imagine what it would do for Apple if they were the de facto provider for systems designed to run Java server apps. Apple would be able to compete much more effectively against .Net, which is currently the biggest factor other than inertia that is ensuring Microsoft's continued dominance.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[IntlHarvester]

Sometime back in the 1980s, Apple made an insultingly low take-over bid for Sun. When Apple was in bad financial straights in the 1990s, Sun returned the favor and put an insulting low offer out for Apple.

I don't think either Sun or Apple was serious about it, however Apple really wanted IBM to buy them out.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[BlackSabbath]

Pesonally, I always thought that OS X on top of the Solaris kernel would kick some serious ass. Far cleaner and more multi-core performant than the Frankenstein kernel they've got now.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Gary W. Longsine]

No, Java is not poison to Apple. Apple went so far as to elevate Java to a primary development environment and strongly hint to its development community that Java would ultimately replace Objective C. Unfortunately for Java advocates, Java didn't mature fast enough, and eventually Java was dropped from the list of first tier GUI languages. It had been unsuitable for the task for so long that eventually it became irrelevant. At the same time, you see the rise of Python, which looks poised to become a first tier GUI programming language in XCode at some point. Is Python any less about homogenization than Java?

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple did everything they could to destroy Java on the desktop?

Apple did their best to make Java apps look native, but have finally given up I think. Such a shame really, because Java on the desktop really took off on every other platform.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[falconwolf]

A few years ago I read an article in a business magazine saying something like this. The writer proposed Apple, Redhat, and Sun merge.

then they would be a very interesting Server-Desktop combo.

Apple already does both the desktop and servers. It would add expenses to port OS X to SPARC for servers and keep Intel for Desktop/portable computers. That plus software companies wouldn't want to create another software port. Adobe took years to release a universal/Intel compatible Photoshop CS, and when they did it was only 32 bit, whereas CS for Windows comes in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

Falcon

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[koutbo6]

based on your argument, flash would be distend to a similar fate, yet it will soon be on iphone.

could it be more related to performance due to bloat?

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Sometime back in the 1980s, Apple made an insultingly low take-over bid for Sun.

I know they almost made a bid for Apollo; I never heard about Sun

When Apple was in bad financial straights in the 1990s, Sun returned the favor and put an insulting low offer out for Apple.

Actually, it was a pretty high bid given Apple's huge losses at the time, but Apple's incompetent management at the time took it as an insult anyway.

I don't think either Sun or Apple was serious about it, however Apple really wanted IBM to buy them out.

And exactly the same thing happened. IBM made an offer, and Apple turned them down.

At least after Steve Jobs returned, Apple's financial performance gives some justification for its inflated view of itself.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the potential trademark infringement of the only logical name for the new entity...

Take out the "u" and Sun plus Apple becomes Snapple!

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[speedtux]

Java promises OS homogenization.

I think Apple can breathe easy: it's promised that for more than a decade and always failed to deliver.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[IntlHarvester]

> Unfortunately for Java advocates, Java didn't mature fast enough

Or, unfortunately for Java advocates, Apple was making too much money selling $2500 laptops with slow-ass $25 PowerPC chips inside. ;)

It had little to do with "maturity", Apple's heart obviously was with Objective-C and as soon as it looked like Mac developers would accept that, they dropped Java like a hot potato.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Cisco employee and a fan of Sun kit from way back, I must say I'm rather hoping for that, too. No insider knowledge or anything like that, just a hope.

To Sun, I would say - as someone who came to Cisco by way of acquisition himself - that one can do much, much worse than this. Cisco is a nice place, and it was by far best acquisition process I've ever been through. So Sun, if John Chambers comes knocking, please, please, please talk to him :-)

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[smcdow]

Is Python any less about homogenization than Java?

At least with Python, you get built-in hooks to OS facilities. That's the thing I've never understood about Java's popularity. What's the point of writing software if you can't make direct OS system calls? It's certainly a lot less fun.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[ultrabot]

Is Python any less about homogenization than Java?

Yes, Python does not have its own GUI toolkit or "look", but rather provides wrappers for whatever native toolkit is used (cocoa, ...).

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[shutdown -p now]

What's the point of writing software if you can't make direct OS system calls?

The point is in writing non-OS-specific software.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[Elwood P Dowd]

The only valuable promise from Java so far has been programmer interchangeability. Since Apple sells devices and software to people before companies, that is not as desirable for them as it is for enterprise vendors like Sun & IBM.

Re:Apple Should Buy Sun

[zuperduperman]

I agree with you in a sense, but I would put it rather differently: the problem with java is that it DID succeed in delivering homogenization and it turned out that nobody wanted it. The lowest common denominator of any group of things is just an all round sucky experience in general. Had java failed to deliver that, strangely enough, it just might have succeeded better on the desktop (because alternative libraries like SWT might have had a chance at becoming dominant and saved it).

Stupidity.

[XPeter]

Sun has now made my list of the stupidest companies on the planet. This is the same stupidity that happened when Yahoo rejected Googles buyout offer. Message to CEO's: When you have someone offering you much more then your companies worth...you take it run and never look back. Especially with the bad economy.

Re:Stupidity.

[QuantumG]

Uh huh. If you're an executive in a company and the suitor making the offer won't agree to a golden parachute then it doesn't matter to you how much they are offering per share.

Re:Stupidity.

[mysidia]

They think their company is worth a lot more than what the stock market says their shares are worth and a lot more than IBM is willing to pay, and they may very well be right.

Sun owns and is developing a lot of things that have a whole lot of worth and a whole lot of future potential.

If they don't think it's enough, and they won't succeed on their own and generate all that value for their investors, then yes, it makes sense to sell.

If the proceeds from the sale really offset the anticipated worth and provide investors a hefty profit in the here and now, similar to to successful business, then, yes, it's worth it to sell.

Otherwise, if there's any doubt, they have a decision to make, and only time will tell -- but they may have made a good one.

Re:Stupidity.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you approve of the HP acquisitions of Digital and Compaq, correct?

Re:Stupidity.

[Luke has no name]

... When you have someone offering you much more then your companies worth...

There's the catch: Sun thinks one of two things, or both:

1) They are worth more than they are valued at
2) The company is better off without being sold

Just because money-grubbing financiers think the company is worth $8.50 a share doesn't mean Sun thinks it is.

Re:Stupidity.

[this great guy]

So just because the stock market crashed, every CEO should accept to sell their company for a fraction of their market cap before the crash ? Riiight.

Re:Stupidity.

[Raffaello]

Every CEO whose company is circling the drain should. Such companies are rather unlikely to regain their pre-crash market cap.

Re:Stupidity.

[Anonymous Coward]

/shrug.

i'm of the opinion that sun is undervalued and should hold out for more then 7.5 billion.

Re:Stupidity.

[BrainInAJar]

Then it's a good thing Sun keeps coming up with new ideas, so that they aren't circling the drain.

The old McNealy strategy of 1980's UNIX vendors failed and that's why Sun's in the state that it is, but taking on NetApp and EMC with the storage strategy ( storage 7000 boxes ) is brilliant

Re:Stupidity.

[bcrowell]

If you're an executive in a company and the suitor making the offer won't agree to a golden parachute then it doesn't matter to you how much they are offering per share.

According to the article, IBM wasn't refusing to offer them a golden parachute. What it says is that various people at Sun already had contracts with Sun guaranteeing them golden parachutes in the event of a buyout. When IBM worked up all the figures, they realized that the golden parachutes were going to cost more than they'd thought, so they reduced their offer.

Re:Stupidity.

[Anonymous Coward]

The heads of Jonathan Schwartz and Scott McNealy need to roll for this. Scott is the Chairman of the Board and I can well imagine that he would not have been in favour of a deal like this, especially one that undersold his "baby".

Expect Sun's share price to plummet... $3 or maybe $2 after this.

Re:Stupidity.

[jcr]

The heads of Jonathan Schwartz and Scott McNealy need to roll for this.

Well, Schwartz should have been shown the door about four years ago, and McNealy should have take the fall for choosing him, but I'm not sure that this particular botched deal is why they should finally get the axe. They have a duty to get the best price they can, and it sounds like IBM really didn't want them after all.

-jcr

Re:Stupidity.

[falconwolf]

When you have someone offering you much more then your companies worth...you take it run and never look back. Especially with the bad economy.

Before the economy went south Sun's stock was selling above $20. Today it was trading below $9. Virtually every corporation has seen the same thing. Smart investors buy low and sell high, not the opposite.

Falcon

Re:Stupidity.

[ILongForDarkness]

True, but that is why the board/shareholders can fire the CEO.

Re:Stupidity.

[hanwen]

you are confusing google and microsoft.

Re:Stupidity.

[jadavis]

it sounds like IBM really didn't want them after all.

They were offering an insane premium on the price. It sounds like they wanted Sun to me.

Re:Stupidity.

[jadavis]

They think their company is worth a lot more than what the stock market says their shares are worth and a lot more than IBM is willing to pay, and they may very well be right.

Then they should buy the shares back themselves.

What they are doing is playing with other people's money. The vast majority of investors obviously don't think that Sun is worth much more than around $3-4B, which was their market cap before the IBM/Sun announcement.

It's appalling that they would bet their investors' money on their own inflated sense of self-worth, contrary to their investors' wishes (which is evident by the 25% drop today).

Re:Stupidity.

[jcr]

They were offering an insane premium on the price.

Maybe they figured that out, and that's why they're not bidding for Sun anymore.

-jcr

Re:Stupidity.

[jafac]

This is what's known as a "poison pill" :)

Re:Stupidity.

[zuperduperman]

> When you have someone offering you much more then your companies worth...you take it run and never look back. Especially with the bad economy.

Wow, so using that logic you must think that now is an excellent time to sell your house, right? Right after a massive collapse in prices and when nobody has any money or can get a loan - wait until there are at least 5 "for sale" signs in your street - the perfect time to sell!

I think you're 100% wrong - now is the worst time for any company to sell itself because there is literally no money out there except vultures looking for dead meat. Wait a few years and sell when the market is up. Sun has a lot of problems but they are not dead meat yet, and they shouldn't behave that way.

Re:Stupidity.

[mysidia]

The 25% drop doesn't mean anything -- other than the rumors of a deal had created some hype, surrounding a deal. The failure of the deal means the immediate hype was unwarranted, so the market will go back to pricing them as they were before (for now).

It makes no sense for them to buy shares back, unless they have no proper need for the cash. Esp. If they are borrowing money -- then 'buying back' just means they are trading shareholder funds for debt they have to pay interest on (destroys value in the long run).

Public companies are expected to invest in their ongoing business, not buy their own stock.

*A company buying their own stock generally just means a sweet deal for management, it really doesn't help investors one bit.

If they have surplus cash they can't efficiently invest in their product development and business efforts, Sun should return that in the form of dividends.

Now RedHat can buy them ...

[tomhudson]

... after all, why not? They know how to make a profit.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[maxume]

Do you think it would be like when Flickr bought Yahoo!?

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anthony_Cargile]

And it would aid the economy in the sense of the two pooling their money, and centralizing their spending. It would also aid us in the IT field, as the post-merger IBM would sell Sparc AND POWER hardware, with the option of Solaris or Linux on either one (theoretically), all bundled with IBM's famous support. IBM owning the rights to Java would work wonders for the Java community, especially in the Linux aspect, and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice using some Lotus material. I was really looking forward to the two becoming one, needless to say, especially for more formidable Microsoft competition (from both a business stance and IT stance).

But ah well, IBM withdrew, so It'll just go back to Sun barely remaining a company, and IBM being competition on a fairly peer-to-peer level with them and Microsoft when it comes time to design new network infrastructures. If Red Hat bought Sun, I don't know if it would be as much of a benefit as if IBM and Sun merged, but for Sun anything is better than their current status - I just wish they would have seen that more clearly when IBM offered them a healthy current-economy-sum for their company.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[tomhudson]

Cisco takes the hardware (servers, solaris, etc)

RedHat takes Java

Everybody's happu

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It would also aid us in the IT field, as the post-merger IBM would sell Sparc AND POWER hardware, with the option of Solaris or Linux on either one (theoretically), all bundled with IBM's famous support.

The support they just outsourced to India? I'm sure that won't hurt the quality.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anthony_Cargile]

To the contrary, I know a local company that deployed an IBM iSeries (previously AS/400) mainframe in their main office, serving two other locations connected via a metropolitan-area T1 line. The machine itself was pretty expensive, yet covered by a 5 or 10 year (can't remember) warranty. The machine would actually call a support technician out to the site whenever it detected an issue with itself, and this has kept their uptime at an astonishing rate, aided by a decent UPS and the hot-swappable hardware.

They've been doing this for many years, and even though their first IT technician whom set this up passed away long since, they've kept the same infrastructure for all these years and it hasn't failed them. They also do this to remain backward-compatible with the older mainframe tapes, which has proven successful. Even at the busiest times, the mainframe is only at 10% utilization, even though it is a pretty low-end model.

This has amazed me about IBM support, and since then I've always weighed IBM as a candidate in new networks, although many of them are too small size or budget-wise to deploy a mainframe. But this is the support I've come to associate IBM with, can't speak for their phone support although everyone seems to outsource to India for phone support these days (a problem I have frequently with Cisco). But this support with Sun's hardware running Linux for cheap was one thing I was longing for with this merger.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[blind biker]

And it would aid the economy in the sense of the two pooling their money, and centralizing their spending. It would also aid us in the IT field, as the post-merger IBM would sell Sparc AND POWER hardware, with the option of Solaris or Linux on either one (theoretically), all bundled with IBM's famous support. IBM owning the rights to Java would work wonders for the Java community, especially in the Linux aspect, and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice using some Lotus material. I was really looking forward to the two becoming one, needless to say, especially for more formidable Microsoft competition (from both a business stance and IT stance).

I read this paragraph fairly carefully, and I still couldn't make up my mind if you meant it or you were just being sarcastic to the max.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, IBM would do like it always does and kill off all of Sun's products that overlap (SPARC processor, all the STK stuff, etc) and keep its inferior products around instead. They'd probably try to kill Solaris, too, but I'm not sure even IBM could justify keeping AIX over Solaris. :-/

I'm happy to see IBM drop out. Come on, Cisco!

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[falconwolf]

... after all, why not? They know how to make a profit.

Redhat couldn't manage it. As of the close of the stockmarket today Redhat's market capitalization was $3.54B whereas Sun's was $6.32B

Falcon

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

They could just take out a loan to do it. Then default, cry for a bailout, and have taxpayers pick up the bill. Seems to be working for everyone else.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[ThrowAwaySociety]

And it would aid the economy in the sense of the two pooling their money, and centralizing their spending.

Seeing as the whole justification of mergers is to "cut costs," I'm pretty sure the combined IBM/Sun would spend less money in fewer places. Centralized, yes. Good for IBM, yes. Good for the broader economy...probably not.

It would also aid us in the IT field, as the post-merger IBM would sell Sparc AND POWER hardware, with the option of Solaris or Linux on either one (theoretically), all bundled with IBM's famous support.

I'm not sure that I'd want that at all. IBM's support is famously expensive. Yes, the big blue army does know how to come through in an emergency, but they charge handsomely for the privilege. And constantly call you to make sure that you have everything from IBM that you could ever want.

IBM owning the rights to Java would work wonders for the Java community, especially in the Linux aspect

Hopefully, they'll accelerate the process that Sun has started and open-source everything. Neither IBM, nor Sun, nor any other company should "own the rights" to anything except the Java name.

and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice

Good, good...

using some Lotus material.

...whoa, DO NOT WANT!!!! (Yes, I'm a former Notes developer, can you tell?

I was really looking forward to the two becoming one, needless to say, especially for more formidable Microsoft competition (from both a business stance and IT stance).

Before there was Microsoft, there was IBM. Trust me, IBM was no better.

But ah well, IBM withdrew, so It'll just go back to Sun barely remaining a company, and IBM being competition on a fairly peer-to-peer level with them and Microsoft when it comes time to design new network infrastructures. If Red Hat bought Sun, I don't know if it would be as much of a benefit as if IBM and Sun merged, but for Sun anything is better than their current status - I just wish they would have seen that more clearly when IBM offered them a healthy current-economy-sum for their company.

All I hope is that Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, and all of Sun's other initiatives (it's hard to call them products, since Sun can't seem to make money off of them) can find stable homes, either as self-sustaining open-source projects or under companies that won't smother them. IBM does not fit the bill, in my experience (although their work with Eclipse comes closest.)

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[blurryrunner]

Would they call it SunHat or RedSun?

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Max Littlemore]

...and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice using some Lotus material.

Good god no. Keep IBM well away from that, thanks.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[gandhi_2]

life> enable
enter password:
life# conf t
life(config)# no cisco take the hardware
life(config # ^z
Writing changes.....done!
life# write mem
building config........done!

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[mabhatter654]

we run 3 plants (in two states) from one iSeries. It's phone-home ability is super slick. I've come in to the CE on the phone at 8 am monday on the way to replace a failed RAID disk. The upgrade process is super-slick usually involving just one backup tape to move entire systems.

The support contract is great, the iSeries people really know their stuff. But it don't come cheap... it's very expensive compared to the cost of the hardware and software.

That said, I think IBM - SUN would have been really cool. We've upgraded to the POWER 6 Blades and they're pretty slick for running iSeries OS. It would have been neat to have a Sparc blade added to the Power, Intel, and AMD options to mix in our blade center.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[nicolas.kassis]

In this realm it's all about how much you want to spend. It's really cool when one of the EMC SAN calls a tech in the middle the night and they are at my door the next day with an brand new hard drive but HAVE YOU SEEN HOW MUCH THAT COSTS?

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[nicolas.kassis]

Cisco? Even Microsoft and Oracle are more open then them.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[westlake]

... after all, why not? They know how to make a profit.

In the present market, who does Red Hat hit up for a $7 billion dollar loan?

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[AliasMarlowe]

Would they call it SunHat or RedSun?

BrownPants, I expect.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

AS/400 has nothing at all to do with mainframe.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

yes it does, it was the previous name for the series before they labeled it iSeries. more specifically they should be called minicomputers, but still they can still technically be called mainframes, at least the ones I've seen

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[saleenS281]

I'm sorry, I just don't believe you've EVER dealt with IBM support, including your rosy picture painted in your response below. IBM in general, has grown so large they don't know their head from their ass. I have SEVERAL companies who made the mistake of replacing their IT department with IGS "IBM Global Services". The customer has hardware NOT from IBM with phone-home support. It phones my company, we call the customer site, and it gets routed to IBM. IBM doesn't know where the hardware is, doesn't know who owns it, doesn't know who services it. The actual hardware replacement is done by IBM themselves, but the guy bringing the hardware doesn't know who the guy "operating" the machine is, so oftentimes they'll have catastrophic failures for no reason other than lack of co-ordination.

IBM would sell SPARC and POWER for maybe a year max, at which point SPARC would be EOL'd and EOS's as quickly as possible. Solaris would hit the junk bin nearly as quickly (they have AIX).

I'm not sure what you do for a living, but I'm guessing it's NOTHING in the enterprise. I've yet to meet anyone that does business with these two directly that are remotely excited at the idea of them merging.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[wolverine1999]

Cisco takes the server hardware

Redhat takes Java

Novell takes Solaris

Even better...

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[WillerZ]

System i, formerly iSeries, AS/400 are minicomputers.

System z, formerly zSeries, System/390, System/370, System/360 are mainframes; some of which have longer uptimes than AS/400 (or indeed Sun) have existed for.

Not the same at all.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Christian Henry]

To the contrary, I know a local company that deployed an IBM iSeries (previously AS/400) mainframe in their main office, serving two other locations connected via a metropolitan-area T1 line.

Just a small nit to pick. The iSeries product line is mini computers, not mainframe; that would fall under the zSeries brand.

The machine itself was pretty expensive, yet covered by a 5 or 10 year (can't remember) warranty. The machine would actually call a support technician out to the site whenever it detected an issue with itself, and this has kept their uptime at an astonishing rate, aided by a decent UPS and the hot-swappable hardware.

Parts of this also exist in their pSeries (Unix-class) product line. If I experience a serious adapter error in a management-console-connected server, a call will be dispatched to IBM. It won't be as fast as for their iSeries or zSeries products (or their enterprise-class storage systems, such as the DS8300), but it'll typically result in an under-24-hours resolution time (manually dispatched, however).

Oh, and our local Solaris admins freak out when they discover that, even on our older hardware (some of which is older than five years), I can do things such as replace a failed fiber channel adapter online, without our end users even noticing that I've done anything.

But this is the support I've come to associate IBM with, can't speak for their phone support although everyone seems to outsource to India for phone support these days (a problem I have frequently with Cisco).

Not sure about IBM US, but whenever you call for Canadian support, it most definitely routes through one of a few Canadian call centres (typically Markham, Ontario, if you're in the Greater Toronto Area; calls also get routed to support personnel in BC and Montreal).

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

the post-merger IBM would sell Sparc AND POWER hardware, with the option of Solaris or Linux on either one

just like HP kept alpha and tru64 ? like another reply said, both will be junked in a heartbeat. even intel have trouble keeping 2 CPU architectures (x86 and itanium), what makes you think IBM will do the same ? solaris and sparc may survive, but outside IBM. mostly because both are opensourced now.

bundled with IBM's famous support.

BWHAHAHAHAHA!!! I was trying to have an AIX server fixed last week. first time the IBM guy was a no-show, second time he went there just to validate the disk, but he said if the disk was realy broken, we'd have to reschedule because the new part was sent to the wrong city. while validating, he tried to boot from a DVD to run a diag tool, but the DVD was for the wrong kind of hardware, so it wouldn't boot on our machine.

we ended up using the diag tool installed on the native AIX, and the disk is working. if it ever fails for real... ***SHUDDERS***

now, sun ? if if the disk (or memory, or CPU, or whatever) is still working perfectly, they'll replace under warranty or contract just to keep a platinum client happy. no questions asked. you call, the call center is in US, after they get your information and give a ticket number, you're transfered straight to an engineer in US/canada. they get an explorer file right away, identify the problem, order the part and send a field tech to the site. quick, easy, painless.

IBM owning the rights to Java would work wonders for the Java community, especially in the Linux aspect, and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice using some Lotus material. I was really looking forward to the two becoming one, needless to say, especially for more formidable Microsoft competition (from both a business stance and IT stance).

IBM support for small developers, AFAIK, is _lousy_. several old time programers i know said that what killed OS/2 was the lack of software, caushttp://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/05/2314207#ed by how badly IBM treated third party developers. why do you think there was no netscape 3.x or 4.x for OS/2 2.0 or warp ? because IBM denied them a license for the development kit/libraries. on IBM's hands, java and staroffice are doomed.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...whoa, DO NOT WANT!!!! (Yes, I'm a former Notes developer, can you tell?

Yes, because you left off a parenthesis.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[ps2os2]

IBM for last lets say about 15 has been porting unix software to run on their big mainframes. I am not privy to the numbers but lets just say its quite a few. The Porting sort of works but in their rush to do so IBM has bent so many of their own rules that it was obvious (to me) that they hired green CS kids to do this. I cannot tell you how many violations of IBM internal standards but it is *SUBSTANTIAL* one of the "precursor" products has been through so many code changes its almost impossible to guess where the issue lays. I would suspect that IBM does not want to have this heard as every time I have brought it up they say "hey its the Pimply faced kids doing the coding not the old timers. The error rate is approaching (or may have surpassed the DFP VSAM people out west about 20 years ago.
IIBM is bad now but I could just see what the SUN people might do in the future.
IMO SUN was a so-so option to buy. Not enough bang to the buck (for me). I hope it does not happen, as the clash between the young the current IBM "mindset". IBM would be like being on the front of a train going 100 miles an hour and hitting a 100 foot thick brink wall.
IOW the ex sun types would be running to another vendor quickly. I guess in this economy that would really be a good idea.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[ps2os2]

Well, I have dealt with IBM support for somewhere around 50 years.
At times my call backlog was 10 calls deep talking to IBM support people. Now the question comes up is this pre '92 or post '92?

Somewhere around that time frame IBM support went to pot. Before then most of the time I could call IBM support and get a fix for the issue I was having and IBM would test it out on their own equipment before sending it to the customer (there was a lot of complex issues that happened causing fixes to be delayed. If it hit a critical part of the OS it could take 6 weeks before they let go of the fix as IBM does test the code before they send it out. In my 40 years I have not had one bad fix given to me (complicated so I won't expound).

Somewhere in 1992 support went into the hole. I was not talking to the old people anymore I was talking with fresh "new" people that really did not have the experience that the old people had.

There are several levels of IBM support and the new green "kids" were semi taught things but really did not have much of a clue. The second level is usually good unless you got a "kid"then you have to tell the person what to search on.
IBM's Problem database got larger and larger and much more user friendly over the years. 30 years ago the update tape came once a month. Now you can search online the IBM database and its reasonably good (although IBMLINK (their tool to communicate with IBM over the internet is OK just the reliability is just not there (as it should be) they can be down on the weekend and you are desperately needing access and its down.
Sometimes they do announce outages in advance and usually if they do it takes 2-3 days of teeth mashing to get it back up. Reliability of IBMLINK just plain sucks.
They keep saying they are working on it but IBM has lost almost all credibility it had with the customers because of that.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Cheeko]

Exactly I said this when the first hints of the merger came out. Sun would be playing the role of DEC/Compaq in this merger.

IBM would buy them for their installed enterprise base and technology. Sparc goes the way of Alpha, and those existing customers convert to Linux or AIX. Sure some defect to HP or Dell, but thats what HP and IBM were doing already (cannibalizing Sun's existing market share). This would just be a way for IBM to get a much bigger foot in the door with those existing customers.

Meanwhile, Java, and any Solaris features/tech IBM deemed worthy would either get rolled into AIX, or turned into an open source Linux project under IBM's control.

Re:Is Solaris relevant?

[JAlexoi]

And I would immediately switch to MS .NET after 10 years with Java!
I mean, if there is a company as secretive about their plans as Apple, it's probably some kind of governmental intelligence agency.
At least, with MS we know that we are not going to get what they say, but we know that... Apple is a total enigma.

Microsoft

[haystor]

A Microsoft acquisition would be interesting.

Re:Microsoft

[maxume]

What would Microsoft get out of it? They are pretty happy letting other companies do all the low margin work involved in making and selling hardware and then collecting a bounty on each of those dollars. And Java doesn't really buy them anything; on Windows platforms, .NET is at least as good a platform, and they aren't really at the point where they need to abandon the 'use our stuff on our stuff' strategy.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

A few billion dollars is not too much to spend to kill off a company and a set of technologies (Java, Open Office, MySQL, etc) that have been a thorn in their side for a while. Linux on net books wouldn't be much of a threat without Open Office. The "LAMP" stack would be setback significantly without MySQL. Huge swatchs of "enterprise" grade software from the likes of Oracle, IBM, etc would be thrown into chaos without Java, so that alone would be a HUGE win for Microsoft. Obviously Solaris and its related technologies would be buried immediately, but the smothering of a non-Windows versions of ZFS and DTrace would be a big win for their server products too. Sure there are open source versions of them out there, but without Sun to guide their development they will diverge quickly and lose focus. It also opens up the possibility of Microsoft suing Apple and BSD for incorporating potentially patented technologies from Sun, just as they are doing against Linux.

All in all, it sounds like a fantastic idea for Microsoft to buy and bury Sun.

Hahah...

[cffrost]

Classic April Fools, IBM!

Re:Hahah...

[JAlexoi]

Late, as always...

Here comes the Sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

...It's all right.

Then Apple'd be making big irony AND big iron!

[weston]

There were rumors of a similar acquisition but the other way around -- Sun was looking at buying Apple -- a decade ago. This was 'round the time McNealy had said something like "Apple's best hope is to become the world's best Java thin client manufacturer."

How do you like them Apples, Scott? :)

An Apple-Sun merger really doesn't make a lot of sense. They do really different things. Schwartz's time in the NeXTStep development world, though, makes me think it's not completely impossible...

Re:Then Apple'd be making big irony AND big iron!

[644bd346996]

Combining the Apple's Cocoa and Sun's Java would be pretty awkward, considering that Java is so closely modeled after Objective-C. That's what really killed the Java interfaces to Cocoa: if you to learn the Cocoa class hierarchy, it wasn't much more work to pick up Obj-C if you already know Java. With Java running on the JVM and Cocoa moving to LLVM, the two languages would just get in each other's way, but each has such an established market that reconciling the differences would be nearly impossible.

of course

[larry bagina]

in my country (the US), we have a saying -- "why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?". This usually is a reference to pussy, but it also works with Open Source. A lot of Sun's goodies are available under an open source license (CDDL or GPL). Virtual Box, Open Solaris, MySQL, Open Office, Java, hell even SPARC chip designs. IBM can hire brown skin developers to work on Sun's code for less than the cost of purchasing Sun. Hell, they've been working on an OpenOffice fork for a couple years now.

Re:of course

[koutbo6]

u lost me at pussy

Poor IBM...

[__aaclcg7560]

Did someone at Sun pulled off a Steve Jobs by tossing the IBM contract into the trash can?

Re:Poor IBM...

[mkiwi]

I can't believe how horribly informed (or trollish) people are.
The companies that had a similar case were Microsoft and Yahoo.

Yahoo CEO = Jerry Yang (the guy the parent thinks he is referencing)
Microsoft CEO = Steve Ballmer (The guy who throws chairs and says "I'm going to fucking kill Google!")

You may return to 4chan now.

Re:Poor IBM...

[__aaclcg7560]

I can't believe how some people can lack a sense of humor. I was not referring to or thinking about either Yahoo! or Microsoft. If you know anything about Steve Jobs, then you would know that he did toss a 100-page contract into the garbage can in front IBM's representatives and demanded a five-page contract instead. That, my friend, requires balls. From what I'm reading about Sun, they might've (or should've) done the same thing.

M.S.G.S.

[Waffle Iron]

N.Y.T.: Most. Stodgy. Grammatical. Style.

Linux vs Solaris pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

They are all good, Solaris and OpenSolaris are very interesting, especially with ZFS and zones. It's pointless to pit them against each other.

RE: SUN Wins in overtime against anticrist IBM!

[Anonymous Coward]

In yet another stunning up-setl UNIX Stanford Network Systems faced down their archrival opponent International Business Machines in the Final Four UNIX match.

With IBM "flat-lining" Solaris, MySQL, SPARC and other production lines of SUN, SUN countered with a back-board slam fest from of "all walks of life" -- JAVA.

Point forward of JAVA, Groshlong, commanded the JAVA troups and ... they dillevered threes in an unending toruent ... even from three-quartes of the court out. What a show! What defiance!

IBM never saw this coming! Completely blind they were! What a plan! How effeicent. So economical!

Reports tell that CEO Schwarts will be nominated Coach of the Year. A fine tribute!

Reporting from the Final Four.

Bloomberg link

[Amigori]

Here is a link to the Bloomberg news article. No registration or subscription required.

The VERY old refrain

[omb]

Solaris is(NT) more stable, on Intel it is junky, BUT the point is this type of comment is so DEC, 15 years ago, but SUN was the descendent of DEC, and much the same arrogance is there.

The sad thing is they died some time ago, and the world is just noticing.

Re:The VERY old refrain

[szundi]

they are not so arrogant now :) ehe

OK, IBM-haters, you got what you wanted

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we get to sit back and watch Sun slowly die and your precious precious ZFS/NetBeans/etc die of stagnation.

The Best I.T. News I've Heard In A Long Time

[Smackintosh]

If true.

And I say that for three very important reasons:

a) IBM was sure to 'consolidate' a great number of things. And I'm sure any remnants of Sun left after this process would have been IBM-ized. And I do say that with a great deal of negative connotation. IBM has a habit of having some great tech, but in many cases doing very dumb things to it to make it annoying to work with. (Exhibit #1 = AIX boxen)

b) Our choices for 'iron' and 'OS' variety in the IT space would have been reduced as I'm sure overalpping server lines would disappear, as well as perhaps an OS (AIX vs. Solaris). Some variety in the I.T. space is most definitely to our advantage as I.T. folks. Of course, pricing competition between rivals is always a good thing, too.

c) Lastly, the most important thing, is that we'd have lost one of the most innovative enterprise I.T. companies ever. Say what you will about their ability to turn it into large $$$, but Sun has come up with some of the most innovative ideas the server-related I.T industry has seen since their inception....and they continue to do so. I think many people lose sight of this as they like to whine about Sun simply because they're a big corporation.

Re:The Best I.T. News I've Heard In A Long Time

[drinkypoo]

(Exhibit #1 = AIX boxen)

AIX is going away. IBM sells more Linux than AIX. And by that I mean supported system installs, these machines are not getting Windows loaded on them. IBM will keep selling it as long as people keep buying it but it's not the focus.

Our choices for 'iron' and 'OS' variety in the IT space would have been reduced

If you're still using big iron any place it's not fundamentally necessary then you have missed the boat entirely. The boat is now clustering with a distributed architecture. I realize that there are some cases where it's useful to have one big database server, but the database systems are getting it together to make clustering more transparent to the application developer these days.

Lastly, the most important thing, is that we'd have lost one of the most innovative enterprise I.T. companies ever.

The problem is, they're not that innovative any more. Last time they tried to bring out a new architecture they failed, and their x86 offerings haven't been particularly appealing which makes that particularly egregious. If Java were really all that great it would have become a major force long before now. Java still compares unfavorably to Smalltalk in many ways... Sun has changed Solaris to have a more Linuxlike userland and even created an Open Source version to try to compete but they definitely still don't get it. The future doesn't involve control by a single entity.

Re:The Best I.T. News I've Heard In A Long Time

[sproketboy]

"If Java were really all that great it would have become a major force long before now."

http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Smalltalk isn't even on the list.

"Java still compares unfavorably to Smalltalk in many ways"
LOL. Smalltalk died in the 90s for good reasons. No one uses it anymore. Get over it.

Re:The Best I.T. News I've Heard In A Long Time

[Smackintosh]

AIX is going away. IBM sells more Linux than AIX.

Well, x86 hardware is cheap relative to Power hardware, so that's hardly a revelation. People will continue to buy AIX over Linux so long as it has more enterprise features and functionality than Linux...which I believe it will continue to have for quite some time. Also, Power hardware being higher quality than x86 hardware, enterprises will more likely use that platform if they have the budget...and it's only natural to use AIX on that platform over Linux. However, back to my original point, which was that in a consolidated IBM/Sun mix, the war of proprietary UN*X's would be in favor of an AIX over a Solaris if IBM took over Sun.

If you're still using big iron any place it's not fundamentally necessary then you have missed the boat entirely. The boat is now clustering with a distributed architecture.

I said 'iron' and not 'big iron'. I'm talking any variety of server hardware...not just big, monolithic boxes. The reduction of another vendor in the IT space....whether they provide big servers, small servers, industry standard servers or proprietary servers....is a loss in choice to us the consumer, which is a bad thing for I.T.

And as far as 'boats' are concerned, you can splash around with your clustered, distributed boxes all you want. Have fun. As an admin, I'll take a rock-solid, simple, yet completely redundant single machine any day over multiple smaller, clustered boxes that are a pain in the arse to keep synchronized and talking to one another.

The problem is, they're not that innovative any more.

Eh? I really don't think you know much at all about their technology if you say that...your comment smacks of someone who hasn't used any of their products. They're entirely more innovative than either HP or IBM. Niagara, Solaris 10, ZFS, DTrace, VirtualBox, MySQL, GlassFish, Java, Cloud Computing, SunRay thin clients, OpenStorage systems, blah, blah, blah. Seriously, the list is gigantic.

Last time they tried to bring out a new architecture they failed.

Are you talking about Niagara? Their T1 and T2-based systems have been quite successful. Which 'new architecture' are you talking about?

and their x86 offerings haven't been particularly appealing

Sun's x86 offerings are amongst the best in the business. What are you talking about? By and large, they are better designed, better packaged, consume less space, and consume less power than their IBM and HP counterparts. Please explain yourself? I've used all three vendor's x86 boxes and the Sun ones are as good or better than any of the others.

If Java were really all that great it would have become a major force long before now. Java still compares unfavorably to Smalltalk in many ways...

Um, last I checked Java was pretty damned pervasive. Where have you been? Smalltalk? You're seriously comparing them in this context? Outside of academic circles, please tell me about the ubiquity of Smalltalk.

Sun has changed Solaris to have a more Linuxlike userland and even created an Open Source version to try to compete but they definitely still don't get it. The future doesn't involve control by a single entity.

Sure, they want people weaned on Linux to be more comfortable working in a Solaris environment. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. You're fairly well delusional here, to be honest. Of all the major players in the UNIX-oriented I.T. world, Sun is truly the one that most gets it.

Name me another major UNIX vendor that open-sourced their cornerstone operating system? You know, the one they built the majority of their business on. Oh, that's right...there's only one - Sun Microsystems.

Sun may just turn around

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun has tons of innovation, a quality pool of software, hardware engineers and community, their servers are really good quality and their move to the storage segment with ZFS is definitely very interesting. Storage might be where they can turn around, they have everything ready to make a splash there. Storage on x86 commodity hardware, including SSD, with 10 GBe, OpenSolaris, ZFS and COMSTAR.

So is a concrete block....

[refactored]

yes Virginia, Solaris is more stable than Linux. Yip, solaris is stable alright. So is a concrete block. Which is about as usable as a solaris box. Sigh! I have used many suns and many linux boxen.... and I always heave a sigh of relief when I can get back to linux. All the tools I need are instantly available under Linux and installed right.

hostile takeover?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

What are the chances that IBM will try a hostile takeover instead?

Are rher more things to consider to that than the likelihood that they could get 51% of Sun shareholders to be willing to accept a near 100% mark up from pre-purchase rumor price?

Cause if that's all that it takes, in this market I think it would be easy to find that many people willing to take the money and run. And not even that many, since in my understanding IBM could already have secured 5%.

Re:My complaint against IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

It does look like the output of someone's pseudo-AI (Eliza-like) program.

At first I thought it was a cut and paste of some long diatribe against some religious organization, with "IBM" substituted. But I couldn't find that from googling. However, when I searched for some pieces at random, I found a reference to

the "right" way to read Plato, Maimonides, and Machiavelli.

The programmer likely has a hobby of collecting these pretentious phrases to stock his program's database.

This is amusing, but not an especially impressive achievement. A bright person with less than one year of programming experience could've done it.

That, my friend, requires balls.

[falconwolf]

f you know anything about Steve Jobs, then you would know that he did toss a 100-page contract into the garbage can in front IBM's representatives and demanded a five-page contract instead.

I've never heard of this but if so then I applaud Jobs.

This reminds me of the EU constitution the French voted down. It was several hundred pages. But the Constitution of the USA fits on only a couple of pages. If something requires so many pages how are people supposed to understand it all?

Falcon

Re:That, my friend, requires balls.

[__aaclcg7560]

When I read that IBM had 100 attorneys doing due diligence on the deal, I remember the incident with Steve Jobs (IIRC from "iCon, Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business" by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon). Too many lawyers can ruin a good thing.

Not only that...

[Junta]

But Cisco is trying to be a 'virtualization solution' company too. They have the networking reputation, Sun would flesh out the server rep, *and* Sun owns a Xen fork *and* Virtualbox.

The servers/workstations alone would be enough to make it a potentially wise decision for Cisco to pursue Sun, but with ownership over two virtualization technologies that are gaining mindshare against the high-cost VMWare, I would think that would cinch the deal for a company like Cisco.

IBM + Sun = Bad for American Software Industry

[cleandreams]

Sun is a terrific innovator. IBM is a great company. What's not to like? IBM outsources everything that isn't nailed down. They are a global company, not an American company, and they cut staff in the USA while growing elsewhere. Outsourcing is something Sun isn't that good at. They try but their heart's not in it. Keep Sun out of IBM and keep a chunk the the software industry in the USA.

Re:IBM + Sun = Bad for American Software Industry

[mzs]

Sun has competent engineering talent in Ireland, England, Germany, and Russia. IBM hires lots of people in crazy markets where they leave for greener pastures just as they are getting good at what they do. Who does it right again?

dweebs

[Gary W. Longsine]

I swear to God man, I've heard exactly that same line of shit from many a dweeb trying to convince some manager that Windows was going to be just as good as (UNIX, Linux, Solaris, AIX, Mac OS X, BSD, etc.) Did you cut and paste the Windows dweeb argument from an old UNIX vs. Windows flame war?

Re:dweebs

[szundi]

THEY did the cut&paste! ;)

Regulation

[mahadiga]

Sun acquired http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Networks and KILLED it.
IBM could have done the same to Sun.

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, REGULATE it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."-- Reagon
Hence Govt must regulate market capitalization of all listed companies to TWICE their quarterly revenue.
This will

1. Prevent Ponzi scams in Corporate Management and Stock Markets
2. Will open markets for start-ups resulting in millions of new jobs.

http://polldaddy.com/p/1322136

User space device drivers? No.

[benjamindees]

Solaris on SPARC has device drivers in user-space.

According to the Sun website, for Solaris 10:
Device drivers run in kernel mode and are prevented from directly accessing processes in user mode.

The 'add_drv' command on Solaris does the exact same thing that the 'insmod' command does on Linux, that is dynamically linking device driver modules into the kernel.

You are confused.

Penny pinching for the deal

[MrKaos]

I shit you not.

Today IBM announced that it would no longer be supplying Tea or Coffee to their office workforce.

This is a true story, don't laugh, it's not funny.

Re:Penny pinching for the deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. Sad, too. Like so many dedicated workers who spend time after hours at work, you think IBM wouldn't penny pinch like that.

Sun used to have "donut days" in the 1990s/very early 2000s. One day a week, donuts and bagels would be provided for free across Sun's campuses. Then Ed Zander (Sun) killed it, claiming to have saved Sun over $800k a year.

Sun recently stopped supplying various drink supplies. Instead, they're working with a company called FLAVIA.

Sun recently added FLAVIA's Creation 400 drink systems to various break areas. It's a fantastic, tasty beverage system. Coffees, teas and wellness drinks are available--and the environment angle of their product line is fascinating to examine. Yes, Sun DOES recycle the drink packets, although more employees should use their own cups, not waste tons of paper cups as I witness on occasion.

Yes, I work for Sun. And yes, I feel the cancellation of the IBM deal is a sound one. Too many product overlaps. Too much risk of mass layoffs--which would critically wound Silicon Valley. And too low of an offer, regardless of other existing contracts. Sun has extraordinary IP. That alone should warrant a higher price. And I think IBM will mull that a bit longer before coming back with another offer. (That's my opinion, not fact.)

Re:Penny pinching for the deal

[Anonymous Coward]

We used to have beer every second Friday at 4PM and a fridge stocked with soda in the lab. We had lots of practical jokes and we worked hard long hours and then went out for dinner. We would have comp time after milestones, not layoffs. The cafeterias were good then too. Sun was a great place, it felt a lot like a university.

Interesting

[afabbro]

Two things were cited in the FA.

One was the "change of control" provisions in executive contracts, and the fact that they extended more widely than IBM had anticipated. I suspect this is a result of Sun's dot-com history. There are probably a ton of stock-options spread around and the better deals had change-of-control equity clauses that make things more expensive for IBM. At the end of the day, this is probably not the deal-killer, though.

The other reason: "Sun was most concerned about securing tighter provisions to restrict I.B.M.â(TM)s ability to walk away from the deal." In other words, IBM wants flexibility to say "ewww, we discovered X and we're backing out" and Sun wants them to ink the deal in blood. Backout provisions and who can walk away in what circumstances before consummation is all part of the negotiations and lawyering, but I suspect Sun wants IBM to be totally committed when they sign, while IBM wants more flexibility.

At the end of the day, Sun needs to be bought by IBM. IBM would like to buy Sun, but it's hardly vital. I expect the next move is that Sun's stock drops back to $4 a share, IBM sits back, Sun reapproaches them, IBM buys them for less than $7 billion, and Jonathan Schwartz spends the next three years defending himself form shareholder lawsuits.

Name Merge

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Should IBM wind up buying SUN after all, I think the name of the company should be Blue Sun.

Re:Name Merge

[Anonymous Coward]

Should IBM wind up buying SUN after all, I think the name of the company should be Blue Sun.

According to me Oracle taking over Sun will be the best option

I only hope that someone company with good managem

[melted]

I only hope that someone company with good management buys them out. There are very few of those, but they do exist.

Sun could have OWNED the entire server side, the way Microsoft owns the desktop, if only they played their Java deck of cards as well as Microsoft is playing .NET. Young uns don't remember it now, but there was a time when Microsoft was scared shitless of Java, and rightfully so. You install a runtime and the OS sorta doesn't matter anymore - that goes to the core of their entire strategy and rips it apart.

The problem was (and is) that Sun's software strategy was sorta like a chicken running with its head cut off - it went from the web to embedded to desktop to servers and everywhere in between without getting particularly good at anything (at least not thanks to Sun's efforts - community saved their server story, but that's about it).

What they should have done is they should have absolutely nailed desktop and server, and done so in late 90's before their cash cow hardware and support business started drying up.

McNealy is single handedly responsible for Sun's demise. Instead of building Java platform into a formidable weapon that would let them take over the world pretty much, he spent much of the late 90's trying to screw with Microsoft, when it wasn't even seriously in the enterprise server business - Sun's core market.

There was NOTHING Microsoft could do to stave off Java except for two things:
1. Brain dead reliance on bytecode interpreter in early Java VMs (compare that to unconditional JIT on first call in .NET).
2. McNealy's preoccupation with secondary issues, like keeping Java pure on MS platform. What he should have been thinking of is how to make it BETTER than MS implementation. Microsoft VM blew the doors off Sun's own at the time, its UI controls looked native (they WERE native), it had much faster startup time. The situation with lack of portability would have rectified itself had Sun's stack been superior to Microsoft's - people would just develop for Sun's version and ship a JRE on CDs, no big deal.

The only thing I want from them (or whoever buys them in the end) at this point is release ZFS under GPL. It's seriously difficult to get me excited with anything computer related these days, and ZFS is one of those things I want really bad on my Linux boxes (I know there's FUSE version, but I want production quality code).

After they do that, they can just fold up the tent and go out of business. I wouldn't care.

Don't worry

[ClosedSource]

MS has no interest in buying Sun. If they were really interested they would have bought them a long time ago.

IBM and uptime.

[mcrbids]

IBM (and to a lesser extent, Sun) GET uptime. They understand what it takes to develop systems with uptime measured in more years than slashot has even existed... think DECADES and you are starting to get the idea.

For all the bluster about uptimes with Linux, it really isn't all that great about it. For example, if you really do have 1 year of uptime on a public-facing system, you are a bad admin because there have been a number of security bulletins over any given year's time w/ Linux.

The miracle of Linux is that the uptimes are as good as they are, as cheaply as it costs. It's damned impressive that you can sustain 3-4 nines of uptime with a system board purchased at pricewatch for 60 dollars, yet the numbers don't lie - this isn't unusual!

The real question is whether or not those 4 hours per year of downtime at 99.95% actually is worth the jump from a $2,500 dollar server to a $75,000 dollar server. (I have no idea what an AS/400 really costs)

The number of cases where the additional costs are really worth it is rare. Less is more, better is worse, etc....

My two cents as a conspiracy theory.

[transiit]

It struck me when I read this article at MSNBC

The stock price doubled since the initial rumors? Really...so who stands to benefit from this? Are Sun and IBM execs pals enough to hint at talks (without committing to any deal)

Understanding that IBM has invested quite a bit in java, I can see how they'd like to acquire Sun. However, it's a bit odd that they'd offer a significant premium (unconfirmed) and then bail on the possibility of another company getting to bid. Yeah, I can see how they'd not want to get into a bidding war over this, but I would've thought they'd retracted their offer as soon as a hint of the possibility of acquisition became news/gossip without something legally binding in place. This is IBM, they aren't known for bold initiatives, after all.

Something about this sounds off, regardless of the rest of this article's speculation on who would be a better Sun benefactor.

$78?!

[jonnyt886]

Did anyone else see the headline and thought it said 'IBM Withdraws $78 offer for Sun Microsystems'?

EMC ?

[shinzawai]

I hope EMC/VMware take a look at them. Purely for ZFS. Netapp would of course jump up and down but it would be nice to have ZFS on EMC SANs.....even better if it was re-licensed to work with Linux.

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

When an open source project dies often all that remains is the code - and the code won't be nearly enough to jump-start the corpse.

There is currently little motivation for massive outside investment into Open Office because there is no need for it: Sun has been doing a pretty good job. This would instantly change if Microsoft ever bought Sun, as the open source movement would quickly realize that Open Office was in danger and would fork it.

Believe it or not, something like this has happened before: the X.Org Foundation took over from xfree86.org when the latter, perhaps under MS's evil influence, was clearly trying to kill the X Window graphics system. The attempted assassination didn't work because copies of the X Window source code were all over the Net, and the takeover was nearly instant. X.org has been maintaining X Window ever since, with huge success.

The same thing will happen with Open Office. So regardless of who buys Sun, or even if Sun goes out of business, I have no doubt that the open source office suite will continue strongly.

Stuck between a rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to see Sun disappear, they have a great OS and have done the development community lots of good with the Java technologies, especially the server-side stuff.

But I hope IBM don't take them over, they have been known to mess up what they buy out. Look at Lotus Notes (I used to be a Domino web developer) - IBM nearly killed that product by holding it back so it didn't compete with Websphere.

WTF The Ribbon???

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate that damn ribbon and cannot even turn the fucker off. It takes 10 times longer to do things and takes up 1/3rd of my screen. The ribbon is one of the reasons I work exlusively with OpenOffice. ..and don't even get me started on that bastard of a standard OpenXML, which was such a fucked up standard that Microsoft had to bribe people to support it and corrupt the ISO process. Shameful.

Sorry to the little kiddies about my foul language, I have a Microsoft disorder and the bad words spew out of my mouth uncontrollably whenever the word Microsoft is mentioned.

Yay!!!!!!

[whatevah]

So let Novell or Redhat buy them ...
step 1) Buy Sun
step 2) GPL DTrace, ZFS, other cool tech..
step 3) Profit!!!!

Noooooo! Anyone but HP!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems

Not HP! Anyone but HP!

Remember when Compaq acquired DEC? They quickly went out to all of DEC's unix customers and told them "Good news! We're migrating you to Windows!" A few made the switch, but most of them replied "Fuck you. If you're killing off your own unix business then we're moving to Sun." And most of them did.

Compaq and HP are now merged, and the once-great DEC unix business has all but been dissolved. Is that the fate which awaits Sun if they are acquired by HP? HP is firmly under the control of Microsoft. The day after the merger, they would receive their marching orders from Redmond: quietly suffocate Java and OpenOffice.

Java is currently the lingua franca of business logic, and whether you like it or not, it's a key enabler for Linux's success in the enterprise. Without Java, the data center would slowly be taken over by .NET running on Windows. And although Linux has finally started to gain some traction on the desktop, that too would come to a halt without OpenOffice.

Cisco is a slightly better bet, but I'm not sure they'd really know what to do with Sun. Cisco is fabulous at merging networking companies, but when they buy other types of companies (such as WebEx or the people who built Openchange) they really don't seem to know what to do with them. IBM would have been a good merger. Now I'm worried.

Thank God

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM would have killed Sun and Java. I hope that if anyone buys them out, it'll be Google.

Re:Thank God

[hort_wort]

Here here! Get em, Google! I love how those guys buy things out of nowhere -- keeps the world interesting.

Re:Thank God

[nessus42]

Why in the world would IBM kill Java? IBM loves Java and probably does a lot more Java business than Sun.

Not that I'm a huge fan of IBM. I'd much prefer to see Sun remain Sun, while also figuring out how to stay in business.

Regarding Google buying Sun, I don't think Google has the slightest interest in Solaris, which would be a shame, since Solaris 10 is pretty darn sweet.

|>ouglas

Re:I only hope that someone company with good mana

[anomalous cohort]

You make it sound like Java somehow failed or has been beaten by .NET

That is not my take. My anecdotal evidence from friends and peers indicates that ASP.NET and J2EE are about equal in the market. As of the time of this posting, ASP.NET search results on dice are 2307 and J2EE search results on dice are 3475.

IBM bids for Satyam

[Anonymous Coward]

If you remember IBM has submitted a bid to buy the fraud hit India based company Satyam. Does this mean they are very keen to buy Satyam than Sun?

Re:I only hope that someone company with good mana

[Anonymous Coward]

I can agree with much that you say, but why do you need ZFS on Linux when you can have ZFS and so much more with Open Solaris?

The OS kernel is much more capable than Linux, particularly for heavy multi-threaded workloads that will matter much more in future with many-core systems.

Or do you simply need GPL for GPL's sake?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You don't know how insightful you are

[default luser]

Sun is like a mini-IBM: they have their own CPU architecture, their own UNIX, their own database software, etc. They both live and die on server sales and support. The major differences are, IBM is a much larger company, and IBM has already managed to build the services arm that Sun craves.

The problem is, no company (except IBM) wants to buy a mini-IBM, because it means a whole lot of effort to consolidate and streamline. So, if IBM won't buy Sun, Sun will have to slowly spin things off to make themselves attractive to a smaller buyer. The last time we saw this sort of thing happen, it was with the sale of DEC (another mini-IBM) in the 1990s. In the end, DEC had to be partitioned over several years - Oracle bought the database, Quantum bought the storage tech, and Compaq bought almost everything else. It was a mess, and very little of the old DEC survived the transistion intact.

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ... But, is it really

[davidsyes]

Sunset, or is Sun NOT set?

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ... What if ms buys

[davidsyes]

Sun, to preempt Red Hat? Out of some far-reaching(?) strategy, ms could stab at the industry by taking over Sun for Unix/Linux/Open Source opportunities, if nothing else, just to muddy up the waters. Just a scary thought...

One of these things is not like the other

[westlake]

X.org has been maintaining X Window ever since, with huge success.
The same thing will happen with Open Office. So regardless of who buys Sun, or even if Sun goes out of business, I have no doubt that the open source office suite will continue strongly.

These are two very different problems.

X Window System...in its standard distribution, is a complete, albeit simple, display and human interface solution, [with] a standard toolkit and protocol stack for building graphical user interfaces on most Unix-like operating systems

X Windows is a foundation on which you can build a GUI for a *NIX based OS.

It doesn't attempt to answer the more subte questions of how the design of a UI will affect the workflow in an office.

Re:One of these things is not like the other

[Anonymous Coward]

X Windows is a foundation on which you can build a GUI for a *NIX based OS.

It doesn't attempt to answer the more subte questions of how the design of a UI will affect the workflow in an office.

Now that is what I call a really minor nitpick. If this is all you can come up with, the future of Open Office is assured.

I advocated Apple-SGI at one time

[swb]

Say, circa 2000.

Both companies were graphics oriented. Apple had the desktop publishing & still photo design markets and multimedia aspirations, SGI had high-end visualization and 3D.

A marriage of the two, especially before OS X development had gone too far down the road, would have given Apple a chance to import the good parts of Irix and work towards a single OS runnable across all the architectures. Apple would have gotten datacenter credibility and access to workstation markets, and research markets dependent on workstations could have more easily run Apple desktops without losing workstation features.

Add in X-windows style display redirection, and you have a neat system that runs intensive 3D visualization locally but does the crunching remotely.

All this made more sense circa 2000 or earlier.

Well, ASP.NET is MUCH younger

[melted]

>> ASP.NET and J2EE are about equal in the market

You're forgetting that ASP.NET is much younger. And Java COMPLETELY failed on the desktop and on the web. Not so with .NET, which is about to come to fruition with Silverlight and WPF.

Re:Well, ASP.NET is MUCH younger

[anomalous cohort]

Hmmm, sounds like you've been drinking the kool-aid again.

Re:I only hope that someone company with good mana

[mzs]

Regarding the JRE, yes the MS one was faster, but it was also far buggier and all that cool stuff you alluded to was not only WIndows specific but almost all of it was only in the MS JRE. That is what MS did to kill Java, in fact there was a long drawn-out legal battle about it. At that time an entry sparc work station was somewhere between 4 and 5 times faster and had 2 to 4 times as much memory than an office PC. MS had plenty of time to hone .NET until the commodity hardware was ready for fat run time environments. Also it did not help that the Mac version of the JRE was always a bit out of date and had its own peculiar set of bugs. Basically Java was moving too fast and too different form one machine to the next for it to succeed and only had the performance that was barely good enough on expensive sun boxes.

Re:I only hope that someone company with good mana

[melted]

OpenSolaris is a broken piece of shit with no community. Try to set it to boot in text mode, and you will see what I mean. :-)

Re:I only hope that someone company with good mana

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun can still pull of a few tricks but they should first learn and accept their mistakes, which they probably won't. One of the things Sun can do is go back to "Net is computer" strategy, there is a lot more to it than those three words.

Sun mimicking Yahoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Price too low".