IBM About To Buy Sun For $7 Billion 699
plasticsquirrel was one of several readers to send in the sharpening rumors that IBM is on the verge of acquiring Sun Microsystems, as we discussed last week. The pricetag is reportedly $7 billion. According to the NYTimes's sources, "People familiar with the negotiations say a final agreement could be announced Friday, although it is more likely to be made public next week. IBM's board has already approved the deal, they said." After the demise of SGI, one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix. If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix. And reader UnanimousCoward adds, "Sun only came into the consciousness of the unwashed masses with the company not being able to get E10K's out the door fast enough in the first bubble. We here will remember some pizza-box looking thing, establishing 32 MB of RAM as a standard, and when those masses were scratching their heads at slogans like 'The Network is the Computer.' Add your favorite Sun anecdote here."
Re:mac != unix (Score:5, Informative)
Any OS requiring >90% of configuration changes to be made in a GUI does not count as UNIX
100% of configuration changes in OS X can be made from the console. There is not a single setting that *requires* a GUI.
Some advice from an IBM'er (Score:1, Informative)
Already moving forward (Score:3, Informative)
Our Sun sales rep has already reported that 75% of the sales force has been let go - which may not be a bad thing... Sun couldn't sell/market themselves out of a wet paper bag.
I have the utmost respect for a large part of their technology portfolio... and they really do (or at least seem to) try hard, but in the last 5 years support, sales, and things in general with them have just degraded.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:4, Informative)
I think there are a lot of developers that would argue as of Netbeans 6 and on that Sun actually has the better offering in the IDE department.
Re:SparcStations (Score:2, Informative)
Oddly enough, Linux seems to be stable enough to do both things at once. Having sat at OSX I know firsthand that it is not. I had Crystal Reports and Adobe CS on XP and Quark, Indesign, and Adobe CS2 on Mac PPC (Dual G5) and the G5 crashed or locked up probably four times as much as the PC. The really hilarious thing is that I was taking the PC home every night, had a bunch of games installed on it, and it was the machine I surfed the web with... CONSTANTLY (heh heh) It's nice to have an isolated environment when your system is so fragile that the least little thing can take it out. Having used macs since System 6 (I did dip back into System 5 on a Lisa I set up for some people once, whee) I know firsthand what it's like trying to actually get things done on them. I think MacOS reached its peak at System 6.0.8 and that NeXTStep reached its peak on the Turbo Slab. Apple fans are still trying to make the whole thing look like genius; Amiga fans know that Apple succeeded purely because of marketing. A graphics-only computer with no graphics acceleration until its second (Arguably third) generation? Brilliant!
Re:Time to eval a MySQL fork... (Score:3, Informative)
Er, Drizzle is developed at Sun (lead developer Jay Pipes [launchpad.net], Sun Staff Engineer).
Re:How is Linux not "commercial"? (Score:2, Informative)
Linux is commercial but GNU's Not Unix.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Informative)
IBM: $6 387 mln.
HP: $4 561 mln.
Apple: $99 mln.
Sorry, but Apple can't be classified as "major unix competitor".
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Informative)
MacOSX is just FreeBSD
No.
Re:What IBM get's for 7B (Score:3, Informative)
IBM purchased Informix in the early 2000's.
IBM still sells Informix databases other than DB/2.
Re:The next headline is... (Score:5, Informative)
If only this wasn't true.
I know folks in IBM (used to work there long ago myself), and who have just been pushed out. Those who left think they're the lucky ones. The remaining American workforce is stressed out over heavy workloads and fear of the impending (inevitable?) axe. Morale is slightly better there today than it was inside Dachau in 1943.
And yes, CEO Sam Palmisano has been lobbying Barack Obama personally to get some of the stimulus package. So your U.S. tax dollars will go to accelerate offshore outsourcing.
I pity Sun employees. I really do. They are about to become part of a company that is, undeniably, bad for America. (And they won't be staying long either.)
Re:Do Not Want (Score:3, Informative)
Well, having worked more than I ever wanted to with HP-SUX and almost not at all with AIX I guess that's a moderately valid argument. On the other hand, the only HP-SUX customers any more are those who can't find an upgrade path out of that hellhole (I've formerly discussed the 8-way itanic server at a certain community college, where I had to make it interoperate IPSEC with Windows - hint: examples in HP's documentation are backwards. Either the person who made the HP-SUX IPSEC tools or the person who wrote the manual completely failed to understand something important, and figuring out which makes my brain hurt.)
AIX on the other hand at least has reasons to live, like having a fairly competent GUI management tool which shows you the commands (to be fair, so does HP - but I've seen both and IBM's is better) and having unique codes assigned to each error message. That is a great idea.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:4, Informative)
IBM still sells AIX, and I would guess they plan to continue selling Solaris after purchasing Sun. HP still sells HPUX, but I think that they're trying not to. I get the impression that they'd rather use something off the shelf like Linux, but can't quite get all of their customers on board.
Re:mac != unix (Score:2, Informative)
Try to load /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist in vim and tell me if that is an xml file. However there is a converter that can convert non-xml (binary) plists to xml format, so it doesn't matter that much.
The point still remains that there are configuration items that cannot be changed outside of the GUI (not everything is represented in plists as far as I can tell). I would love to be proven wrong in this.
Another example outside of my list above isn't exactly OSX, but it is close. The Airport Extreme router cannot be remotley restarted or configured without using the proprietary GUI. I came close by doing some applescript that I invoke from the shell, but that doesn't work all of the time.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:mac != unix (Score:5, Informative)
For those things that can't be editted with the defaults command - and can't be edited with your favorite text editor, 'plutil' is your friend - you can convert plists between binary and xml very easily. Spotlight indexing for a specific volume can be turned on or off using the mdutil command, and indexing of specific subdirectories of a given volume is (i believe) controlled by metadata on the directory in question.
You can list all the plist domains controllable by defaults by doing 'defaults domains' that'll give you a (huge) list of plists controllable by the defaults command. In there, com.apple.desktop has all the desktop background picture settings.
Disabling automatic login is an ldap property, i believe, and you can disable it by using dscl (at least in leopard, in tiger and earlier that property lived in the now dead netinfo database).
Admittedly, there's one item on your list that I can't, off the top of my head, figure out - FileVault. If I didn't have work to do - I'd spend some time figuring it out - but, alas, I do.
Re:The GPL prevents Linux from "winning" (Score:4, Informative)
I'm going to break one of my own rules and explain to you why what you have said is stupid, on the assumption that you actually meant what you said. The ready availability of clustering solution has changed the game. People who need five nines can't use a single Solaris machine either; they need some kind of real mainframe from someone like IBM or Tandem who actually knows how to build hardware that can stand the test of time, hardware that can do shit like fall through a floor and keep running, or they need a cluster. OpenSolaris is a terribly immature platform which will never have the hardware support of Linux unless it goes GPL, at which point everything good about it will immediately be sucked into Linux and the last reasons for OpenSolaris to exist will vanish as well. Solaris itself has a per-node licensing cost which makes it less attractive in a clustering environment. You may have noticed that Linux runs on the lower-end Sun equipment worth building clusters out of, and that IBM sells more Linux clusters than AIX clusters. Solaris is going away just like AIX is going away and like we all wish HP-UX would go the fuck away.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The GPL prevents Linux from "winning" (Score:5, Informative)
you're spouting red herrings. I migrate enterprises from Unix(tm) to Linux, we use compatibility matrices, for everything from hardware to kernel and OS patch versions to application software versions. If we upgrade the software the process is planned the same way. Backwards compatibility is never an issue. And GNU/Linux on the proper hardware and correct systems architecture can do more than five 9's same as any Unix(tm). And sorry to break your bubble, but backwards compatibility has been broken by the major Unix vendors many with their patch sets, I've over two decades of experience with all the major commercial Unix(tm) if you want to argue. And I've seen the major Unix ass-plode and dump core because of bugs on mission critical apps, which if you ever took time to read the descriptions of patch sets you'd quickly realize some poor S.O.B. had their "rock-solid" big iron Unix box take a shit on their face....
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Informative)
can you explain to me why someone with a UID in the 500k range would not understand how to reply to a quote properly?
He must be new here and this whole subthread is all wrong. Commercial Unix is a misnomer, but certainly Apple's OS X and any other derivative of BSD or Linux need not apply.
Solaris is directly descended from AT&T Unix, all of the others are not (no matter how much the trolls like SCO, et al want to proclaim).
Re:mac != unix (Score:3, Informative)
I think it might be more honest (and fair) to say that all the "Unixy" features of OSX can be configured via text files. Some of the stuff Apple designed from the ground up might be unable to be text configured (although it all maybe, I'm not sure), but all the underlying Unix parts of the OS, and any Unix daemons or services that Apple installs or you install later can be. Almost all of the things you list are things Apple added to the "Unix base" of the OS. I could sit down right now and write a "Time Machine" clone for Linux that used a proprietary database back-end for configuration info and could only be configured via the GUI (it'd be kinda silly to do of course, but I theoretically could). That wouldn't make my version of Linux "not Unix like" it would make it a "Unix like system, that has GUI configurable backup software."
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:2, Informative)
Really? I'm posting this comment from a workstation running a commercial UNIX. I'm using a Mac.
Colloquially, when someone talks about commercial UNIX, they're talking about the descendants of System V - Xenix, IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris/SunOS and the like. OSX is based on FreeBSD.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:2, Informative)
While Linux and the BSD's aren't OS X 10.5 is a certified unix by the open group. Making it a real unix.
That being said while love it for desktop it won't ever touch my servers.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about that. The last time I was at a Sun seminar, at least a third of the attendees had MacBooks. Including this one.
Which says zero about whether or not they can (or are) running them like they would they Solaris, HP UX, AIX, or anything else machines. I'd be more than willing to bet that they're "adminning" them just like any other Mac user would - ie: mostly through the GUI.
Server vs. Desktop revenue (Score:5, Informative)
IBM Unix Servers: 6.387b
IBM Unix Desktops: Essentially 0
HP Unix Servers: 4.561b
HP Unix Destkops: Essentially 0
Apple Unix Servers: 0.099b
Apple Unix Desktops: 14.27b (FY 2008)
In other words, Apple makes TWICE as much money selling Unix-based systems as IBM.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:4, Informative)
Not only is it Posix compliant, it is certified by the Open group as meeting it's Single Unix Specification:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html [apple.com]
Since the Open group is the current owner of the UNIX trademark, that's about as official as it gets. Whether that makes it "UNIX" all depends on how you define it I guess.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:2, Informative)
Which makes no sense. Why would you pay the Apple tax for a pretty face on X11, xterm and emacs when you can get the same thing from a Linux machine (or even an OpenSolaris PC, if you're a traditionalist) for probably half the price ?
Well, because not only do I get my X11, xterm and emacs, I also get my MS Office, Lotus Notes, Aventail Connect, Mobility Client, Sametime, RDC and other productivity apps that I need to function in a business environment I'm not gonna get on Solaris or Linux. That doesn't even count the apps like iTunes, Quicktime, VLC, etc. The point is, I can use it as a Unix workstation, and I can also use it as business/consumer laptop.
Also, running Solaris or Linux is going to be every bit as much of a battle, if not more so, as running Windows, requiring constant tweaking and configuration to get your hardware recognized (if you can) and getting all your applications to play together nice. Yes, it *does* Just Work. As I happen to be an actual sysadmin in a shop with over 1700 Solaris, HP, AIX and Linux boxes, I already have enough problems without going out my way to create more for myself.
And no, Cygwin does not do it just as well. The only thing Cygwin gives you is all of the problems of Window, with an additional layer of aggravation. Cygwin is what finally drove me over the edge to get a Mac in the first place. Just try doing cut and paste between your Windows productivity apps and your X or bash shell environments in Cygwin, and you'll find out fast. On a Mac your Unix and productivity environments are integrated seamlessly.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:2, Informative)
I'm a Unix wizard.
That's like saying that you're 'cool' or a 'maverick'. If you call yourself one, chances are, you aren't.
Of course, you could spend the ten seconds to google the guy.. Let's see.... MIT media lab; Worked at MIT since '86, now at Harvard... "8 years experience architecting and administrating large networks of Unix workstations." I think he can use the label if he wants to. :)