IBM in Talks to Buy Sun?

Netbeans would probably die - I am not sure about Solaris/ZFS - I would be that Solaris would become another offering in the OS lineup for IBM and some of its tech might be used in other IBM offerings (although, since it is open source, they could now if they wanted to). Solaris has some cool features, but how many enterprises really use it except in legacy systems?

As for mySQL, I doubt they would kill it - not many people would prefer DB2 over mySQL unless they were already married to IBM and DB (and AIX). Worst case, someone else would pick it up because much of it is open source. Personally I much prefer PostGres.

Glassfish would probably die - not that many people use it in production? Tomcat, JBoss, Websphere, Weblogic are the big containers.

Even if IBM stopped dev and support of the competing Sun tech not many people who aren't already IBM shops would prefer most of the IBM tech. The main tech that would worry me if they tried to kill it would be Swing and Swing is iffy now with Sun anyway. SWT is okay for what it does, but it doesn't have the breadth that Swing does - yet.

IBM is a big Java supporter and has a lot of Java projects, many of which are OSS. Overall I think it would be a good thing as they currently have the wherewithal to support Java.

My sentiment is that many innovative products from Sun will be killed. Not only there are too many similar products overlapped between Sun and IBM, IBM is more focus on enterprise market than consumer market. JavaFX seems to fall under consumer market. Swing will probably be uncertain as SWT is used extensively for Eclipse application development. A lot of question marks remain. To me, it is more of a bad news than good news should Ibm acquires Sun.

How can antitrust not allow it ?

 

In terms of hardware there is plenty of competition from Linux PCs , in terms of Java there is no difference ( as far as the regulator is concerned) between IBM and SUN owning it. 

 

This will be past without issue.

 

Re Open Office - I bet they let it go and setup a cheap paid version , they are looking at Office revenues in the long term.

Although IBM does a lot of very sophisticated research, I haven't been impressed how their Java releases were always lagging behind. Way behind sometimes (adoption of Java 5 for one). Sun and IBM together, who knows what'll happen to progress. I'm not sure if it's good or bad. IBM has their own development research on Java, and they've done amazing work on many fronts for their versions of Java. Far *far* more than most realize I bet.

I *think* I'd rather see IBM pick them up, rather than, say, an Oracle. I'm cautiously exited...

NetBeans is dual licensed and one of those licenses is the GPL. Because of that, IBM can't kill it. The worst they can do is stop finanically supporting its development and turn it over to the community. But they can't kill it.

I'll miss Netbeans! I don't agree with Jacek saying that Sun guys should spend time on writing Eclipse plugins rather than NB! Competition is always good. Windows is also a de facto standard. Should Linux guys spend their time writing apps for Windows instead of writing Linux? ;-)

Cat's already out of the bag for Java - it's already an open standard, and open sourced (OpenJDK, IcedTea).  Plus, other powerful players, such as Oracle and Google, to name but two, won't let Java become a WebSphere centric platform - they have too much vested interest in an open Java platform.

 Also, IBM itself has a vested interest in keeping Java open and cross platform.  Making Java Websphere centric would marginalize Java, causing mass defections, and in turn marginalize WebSphere.

 With Java, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Problem maybe solved.

Today Sun stock + 79%, IBM -1%

Just hoping it's not IBM who bought the shares.

http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:JAVA 

"Also, if IBM plays shenanigans with Java and Swing, to gain competitive advantage over Oracle, et al, then look at OpenJDK really taking off."

 

However if they do play "shenanigans" they will put in say Billions ( after all they saved $30B++ from not buying SUN in 2002)  and improve the product say a big Eclipse/Axis/UI over haul or a Xaml rendered UI.   This will make the choice very hard for people.

 Sun own all ( almost)the rights... name libs etc  these will move to IBM  ( A regular visitor in the patent courts in the past) will sue those individuals out of existance if they become relevant.

IBM became a service company out of nececity after they lost market share on software (OS2 , Lotus ) and Hardware  . 

 

 

I just hope that NetBeans survives this. 

I'd rather use Netbeans than Eclipse, for, well, everything, any day.

that sounds good news!

I also worry about Java and NetBeans if Sun is bought by IBM.

I guess why so many worry about NetBeans and not about Java is the fact, that Java is anyway the core of a lot (all?) products of IBM, but NetBeans is a competition with Eclipse.

I like very much the fact that I could choose between SWT+Eclipse and Swing+NetBeans. Although even better would be if I could choose between Eclipse plus SWT and Swing seperately.

Although I like the idea of Umberto about splitting the company and sell only a part of it I do not really think that IBM would like that.

I am glad that the Java core is already Open Source with a large community.

There are two things I really hate:

1. People just looking at the stock and share prices and attributing value only to those with high share prices. Don't they realize that it is just the gamblers that create those prices. I imagine most of the brokers do not know much about what both comanies really do and just want to minimize money loss in these tough times.

2. The strategy of growing and growing and growing just to gain more power. It seems to me (from current point of view) that IBM still didn't notice that general strategies in economy should change. This is not a sign of the ability to establish efficient and productive partnerships.

As far as I have read, and that's not all, I totally agree. IBM should not buy SUN at any circumstances. This will be a catastrophe for the Java community.

But my reasons are:

- IBM and SUN are the top competitors in the Java world. If they merged, there will be no competition. Competition is what makes us look for a 'better' product; not an 'only' product.
- IBM attitude is for commercial products. Not interested in open source. Eclipse was opened sourced for having the IBM staff focus entirely on developing plug-ins for the readymade Eclipse. It's a very smart 'commercial' move.
- SUN on the other hand, is taking open source seriously and they have ported most of the viable products to open source community.
- I won't dig about each product, but the main concern remains about the main two projects that SUN leads and which decides the Java future: JDK and JCP

I personally, like both products from SUN and IBM. I like GlassFish, as much as I like Websphere. I like NetBeans as much as I like Eclipse. For me, each one of them has its own usage. And each one of them is a 'better' product but for a certain situation.

I love Java and cannot imagine using another language. But really, it will be a killing move to the Java community if IBM bought SUN.

But of course, I am sure that this will not be the only concern that SUN will think of. They will think of it financially as well. Which, I am not sure if it will be easy for SUN to say No. For SUN, it's not all about Java, GlassFish or whatever products they have. But it's also about money. It has always been and will always be for such organizations. Keep that in mind.

Will, I personally pray that this would not happen. :)

yes, it's the worst scenario ever. Not only will they kill off anything for which they have their own alternatives, they will do their utmost to so tightly what they have no alternatives for (including the Java language) into their own platform that it becomes quite useless outside of that.
As a result, Java will likely disappear except as a sort of embedded scripting language for WebSphere, similar to serverside Javascript in the old Netscape application server (anyone remember that one?) or Silverstream Pages in that server. IBM inventing SWT as a corruption of Swing that works solely in the context of Eclipse (an IBM product open sourced mainly to attract cheap labour to maintain it) is a good example of what will happen, and I fully expect them to retire Swing and AWT as there's no place in the WebSphere Application Platform for multiple GUI libraries.
IBM isn't going to invest in Java as a standalone product if that product can be used profitably by their competitors (like Oracle and JBoss to name but two).
OSS implementations will soon wilt and die with no largescale corporate guidance and funding from Sun.

IBM are likely to give eclipse a big overhaul  ( $$$) , they will probably develop some new Java libs in the vein of products like Microsofts WPF/Silverlight and WCF (RCP , Java.fx and axis) , the Java offerings are very weak in comparison but it takes big $$$ to come up with a new desktop/web rendering engine ( MS spend 9 figures on each and IBM is not known for spending less than Microsoft on projects) .While it will have a commercial bent it should be a good thing for the community.