IBM in Talks to Buy Sun?

It would mean the end of Netbeans. Everyone would be forced into the hit-and-miss plugin treasure hunt that is called Eclipse. *Sigh.*

IBM would kill Netbeans and that would mean no competition on the IDE space. I would be sad if that happened.

I think it would probably be good for Java, as IBM has very deep pockets.  Perhaps the ideal scenario is they'd spin off the JavaSE stuff into a non-profit foundation like they've done with Eclipse.

Does anyone remember companies like Dynix or Informix which were bought by IBM? Basically this is end of life for everything distinctly Sun. This means: bye-bye:

- Solaris/Open Solaris

- Sparc

- ZFS

- Netbeans

- Glassfish

- Open storage

- Commercial MySQL (uggh, now they'll start punting DB2 as the commercial option)

- JavaFX

 

 

 

 

To anyone who likes Sun products, there couldn't be a worse buyer of Sun than IBM. :-)

Interesting take Fabrizio. So if it did go ahead, then the fact that people like you are willing to keep things like Netbeans going would be a good thing for the community..

I won't miss NB that much, Sun's energy would have been much better spent investing in writing proper Eclipse plugins for things such as Python/Groovy/Matisse/JavaFX/etc. instead of pushing their own IDE at a time when Eclipse is a de facto standard in most shops. It's called being pragmatic, especially when you have limited resources.

But the impact on things like Glassfish or MySQL is much more worrisome. 

 

Good point about the split, Umberto. There were rumors about it a few months ago, but you know, you can't guess which rumors are true in these cases.

Yacek, for what concerns NetBeans, it's not only the IDE. I mean - I obviously think it's much better than Eclipse, if the new NetBeans wasn't so successful and renewed I probably would have stayed with Eclipse - or maybe migrated to IDEA, since Eclipse proved to be very troubled during the PPC-Intel Mac OS X switch (not counting compatibility problems about plugins that occurred in the past). In any case, given what NetBeans is today, I would never switch back to Eclipse. A customer of mine, today, told me during the lunch break that there would be a "very bad mood" in his company if NetBeans went away since they are almost addicted to it.

But my fondness point about NetBeans is the _Platform_ - as I never liked the Eclipse Platform after having evaluated it a few time ago.

Come on, Jacek!

I think Sun would have supported Eclipse if it was based on Swing!

I tell you, Eclipse is not installed on my computer at work and neither at home and I am not missing it....

Peace

 

 

Ah that looks bad news for some great piece of software like NetBeans, Glassfish, MySQL, Hudson etc

I too see more negatives than positives..

God save Sun!

I'd hate to see that happen. Sun's portfolio is indeed very redundant to IBM's, except if you consider than in many cases, Sun's stuff is superior either overall or in specific features (IBM's products obviously have advantages too). In a worst case, IBM could just take the good bits (HotSpot, DTrace, ZFS, etc.) and port them to IBM JDK, AIX, WebSphere etc. and abandon Sun's products as we know them.

Even if IBM decides to embrace Sun's products, another problem is that IBM is not a very innovative company. I just don't see IBM pushing new cool stuff as aggressively as Sun... for example, the comparison of Solaris and AIX speaks volumes.

IBM's support for open source is ridiculous, they support some stuff like Linux and Apache projects but that's a drop in the ocean of IBM's massive proprietary portfolio. IBM posing as a FOSS leader is alike Microsoft doing the same due to their microscopic Shared Source initiatives.

There are also advantages in some areas, for example IBM's ownership of OpenOffice could be enormously benefical to that project and to the industry as a whole because Sun doesn't have the resources to seriously compete with Microsoft (as a professional tech writer & editor, I can't yet migrate to OOo because Word is much better in critical features like review). Differently from Java and Solaris, Sun didn't manage to find a way to convert OOo to a good revenue stream.

Truth be told, Jonathan Schwartz has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of Sun and to see that their best interests are served. Googling "sun ibm talks" and reading through most of the articles on the first page, there were mentions that Sun has approached HP and others seeking a sale and was turned away. It's rather odd, because one writer mentioned that news of the acquisition could come as soon as the end of the week, and another said that the talks could fall apart quickly... It was also pointed out that while it would be a good deal for IBM, it would be difficult to get investor approval since it would leave IBM in somewhat of a cash lurch and would directly impact their profitability at least for a little while.

The viability of the various opensource products in Sun's portfolio (if the acquisition actually does happen) would still be pretty good. Many open source projects / products would be able to continue to be used by many folks: NetBeans has developed as an excellent Rich Platform and an easy-to-use IDE, Glassfish has become a healthy RI for JEE 5+, and MySql will still need support. On top of that, there are plenty of consultants who would be more than glad to help companies install / implement these technologies and projects / products on top of them, and along the way, they'll find bugs and contribute back fixes. I wouldn't be surprised to see SpringSource hire a number of the talented Sun Java product developers since they're heavily invested in the JEE-based market.

Perhaps the most interesting question is what would happen to all of the CDDL licensed software? Would the licenses likely be changed to make the projects / products more compatible with other open source licenses?

With Solaris having more marketshare and demand than AIX (see http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=solaris,+aix&l= ), and Solaris having the ability to run on more platforms (including IBM hardware), it would only make sense that IBM would continue to invest in Solaris and to avoid doing so would only be at their peril. They might eventually attempt to merge the two codelines, but I imagine they would likely have to open source at least parts of AIX in order to do so.

Make no doubt, IBM is betting a huge amount of their future growth on Java, and I would have to guess they'll continue with the same level of investment in Java if not accelerate it. Let's face it - they want to up the ante in the competition with Microsoft and get as much of MS's market share as they can, and this would be a strategic acquisition in that quest.

Alas, JavaOne might not be the same ever again (even this year).

Well, I disagree strongly.

From an enterprise point of view, it should be all about Java. All other languages are *nice*, but what percentage of folks really use them in production? Companies don't want solutions written in X different languages...there needs to be a concerted push to ensure Java is the best of the best, not just always playing catch up.

 

 

There may be 50% overlap.

And while departures may happen, and inner political conflicts too, the remaining 50% of the SUN portfolio is going to suffer IMHO with such a deal.

 May be a good deal for shareholders, but not for customers. So, I don't really understand why $6.5 billion, indeed a lot of money in this depressed economy.

 So, I am not optimistic with such a deal.

 Why not doing instead more massive alliances on some subjects like Open Solaris and Open Office ?

 

 

Is this for real or just a rumor? My hope is that US anti-trust would not allow this because It will be the end of innovation over Java platform in a greater spectrum. IBM is a profit focused company. They will discontinue anything dragging their feet although I am pretty sure they will have JRE, JDK, Java plug-in, J2EE, J2ME and OpenOffice to continue. On the other hand, it will definetely be the end of all the other open source software Sun is promoting. Personal contribution to the orphaned projects would not cut it. The quality will be diminished over time as all the other open source software which are not backed by big companies or revenue.

I do not use any of the open source projects Sun offers, except the ones listed above so the IBM take over would not really change anything for me, but a technology icon like SUN should live on not disappear like Digital, Compaq, SGI (what good has left?) and others.