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."
"commercial UNIX" (Score:4, Insightful)
If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix.
Really? I'm posting this comment from a workstation running a commercial UNIX. I'm using a Mac.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling MacOSX a 'commercial unix' just doesn't taste right coming out of the mouth. It's like calling Microsoft Windows a 'Server Operating System' or an 'Enterprise Solution'.
Yeah, there are people who use them that way, but that way madness lies.
'Enterprise Solution' tastes pretty damn foul all by itself.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Insightful)
True. Apple made a Unix so user friendly that people forget it is Unix.
And so small and light that it runs on a phone.
Maybe they really are a great company.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to eval a MySQL fork... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a number of decent forks of MySQL out there, time to look at them. People, list all of the forks you can think of here, I'll start with drizzle https://launchpad.net/drizzle [launchpad.net]
Drizzle's no good for me, I want those advanced features.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Insightful)
'Enterprise Solution' tastes pretty damn foul all by itself.
Because it doesn't really mean anything if you're not playing buzzword bingo.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:4, Insightful)
True. Apple made a Unix so user friendly that people forget it is Unix.
And so small and light that it runs on a phone.
Maybe they really are a great company.
Apple made a Unix so Baroque that you can't manage it from the command line.
They took an operating system usable on a NeXTStep with a 25MHz 68040 and made its file browser unresponsive on a machine with dual 2 GHz processors.
They opened and then closed the kernel, they bury knowledge base articles that make them look bad (e.g. B&W G3 Rev.1 UDMA data corruption errors which were in the TIL but didn't make it into the KB even though higher and lower-numbered TIL articles were transferred) and they locked the iPhone so that you can't run third-party software without hacking your phone and voiding your warranty.
If you think Apple cares about anything but your money, you must have drank all the Kool-Aid.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you have just proved that Java is a fluke. Solaris is... well, it's Solaris. What more need be said?
What more need be said? Well, please elaborate. What exactly is wrong with Solaris, according to you? What exactly is it lacking that other unixes do offer? What is lacking about the many features that other unixes simply do not have? Even an open source version is made available.
Drop Linux for Solaris? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will IBM drop their support for Linux and switch to Solaris and OpenSolaris for their hardware? They won't if they want to continue to receive the support of the FOSS community, which they have been enjoying for some time now, otherwise they will be seen as exploiters, like so many who use the FOSS community during their beta period but take their product proprietary. Are you reading this Skype? Get that 4.0 Linux version out NOW!
Will IBM release ClassPath under the GPL2, making Java ENTIRELY GPL? They will if they want Java to remain competitive to .NET and expand.
Re:What IBM get's for 7B (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not kidding. MVS lasted for what, 30 years or so, alongside VM/CMS (and both OSs still have supported descendants). IBM even kept OS/2 on life support until 2007.
How is Linux not "commercial"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time I checked, Red Hat was selling a version of Linux, and so was Novell. They make quite a tidy profit from their Linux business.
Much of Linux's success is due to its community of contributors, but that community also includes corporations.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:3, Insightful)
Even an open source version is made available.
OpenSolaris is a last-ditch effort to remain relevant in the face of Linux [zdnet.com].
Solaris is doomed to fail because Sun made it unnecessarily baroque. Speaking as someone who cut their Sun teeth on SunOS 4.1.1 on sun3 (now is your cue, crusty Unix overlords, to come and tell me you started with sun2) I can conclusively say that while SunOS has come a long way it has also become continually more of a PITA. If it's so fucking great, why is Linux eating its lunch? Maybe ZFS and dtrace just aren't enough?
Re:Do Not Want (Score:4, Insightful)
OpenOffice? They do seem to have a few decent devs there...
Except that OpenOffice sucks at so many levels that I really can't understand why you're bringing it up as an example of what a few decent devs can do.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Insightful)
If you think any company cares about anything but your money then you have drank the coolaid.
I run third party apps on my iPod touch. They are approved apps from the app store but still 3rd party.
Once they jail break version 3 I will probably do a jail break but I have no real want for any of the jail broken apps yet.
Hey so Apple does what Microsoft and Intel have done.
They still made a user friendly Unix. You may say NeXT did but they where even more expensive than Apple.
As far as the lack of command line tools? I have heard OS/X users say otherwise but I am not an expert on OS/X. For most end users the GUI is far more important than the command line.
But please keep the venom to your self. I am not any type of fan boy and really don't have the time for such rants. If you want a light fast Unixish OS might I suggest Mint Fluxbox edition? It is still in beta but it is very light and fast. You have to know the command line but it is pretty full featured.
If you are a strick FLOSS person the Debian with Fluxbox may be more to your liking. I have also had good luck with Zenwalk on older slow machines.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Insightful)
What else should Apple care about besides my money?
I'm glad they care about getting my money, because it means they will continue to try to build products that I want to pay for.
Re:What IBM get's for 7B (Score:3, Insightful)
Scary.
Re:mac != unix (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stock (Score:3, Insightful)
"The make some great stuff, but decent has gotten good enough"
If decent is good enough, that explains why so many people still run Windows.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:2, Insightful)
Calling MacOSX a 'commercial unix' just doesn't taste right coming out of the mouth. It's like calling Microsoft Windows a 'Server Operating System' or an 'Enterprise Solution'.
I'm guessing you've never actually opened up a shell on the Mac. It's right there in "Applications" or maybe "Utilities". MacOSX is just FreeBSD with a kickass GUI and nice apps. Doesn't get more Unix'y than that.
Yeah, there are people who use them that way, but that way madness lies.
'Enterprise Solution' tastes pretty damn foul all by itself.
Any decent Unix admin will be at home on MacOSX. It's just another Unix.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:4, Insightful)
The base IDE maybe, but it simply can't compete with Eclipse's plugin ecosystem, which was after all the whole point of the Eclipse project.
Wish it were Google or someone else... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do Not Want (Score:4, Insightful)
What more need be said? How about "at least it isn't AIX". Or, better yet, "Thank GOD it isn't that abomination known as HP-UX aka H-PHUX aka Unix-on-Crack".
Re:Drop Linux for Solaris? (Score:3, Insightful)
Aye, I know what you mean. I've been especially liking their sudden support of Ubuntu in that past year or so. I've almost moved my entire dev environment over to it, and I'd like to continue to be able to appreciate the support.
Re:mac != unix (Score:5, Insightful)
According to all technical definitions, OS X is Unix. The kernel is XNU which is based on Mach with BSD subsystems. Its roots can be traced to OPENSTEP based on NextSTEP's OS. All that qualifies it as Unix. The early versions of OS X were POSIX compliant. That qualifies it as Unix. As of 10.5 on Intel (Leopard), Apple went through the long procedure to have it blessed as Certified UNIX 03. In my mind OS X is what Linux on desktop has tried to be: The stability of Unix systems with a GUI that the average person can use.
HPUX? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix.
Do we really still count HP as 'being in the market' for commercial Unix? Last time I checked HPUX was as dead as a commercial Unix OS can be, and that was 5 years ago. Which wasn't surprising because it's probably the most archaic and outdated OS I've ever used, a real masochist OS.
Re:They should have folded sooner? (Score:1, Insightful)
Probably. It's certainly worth a lot more than $7b *now*, and although there's been a tremendous amount of inflation in the last few years, I think it's safe to say that $7b then was still too low. The problem with Sun is that, like most technology companies, it's run as a welfare program for its employees rather than a corporation for the benefit of its shareholders. A Sun with 12,000 employees would have around $7-9b in annual revenue and around $1.5b in annual profits with as much as $1.8-2b in free cash flow. Even at very conservative multiples, that's worth more than $7b, and it doesn't include the $1.4b in cash the company still has on hand. If this deal as speculated (and I do mean speculated - it has been "imminent" for weeks now) goes through, IBM will be getting the biggest steal in modern corporate history. All IBM has to do to turn a profit is fire the entire Java organisation and sell off a campus or two. After that anything they get right is free money.
Of course, a Sun without StorageTek and MySQL would also have an extra $5b in cash on its books, and a Sun that didn't give away enormous sums of cash - estimated in press releases at $500-600m for the 6000-8000 in the current rounds, or perhaps $80k each! - to its least-useful employees as it fires them would have a couple billion more than that. In other words, just a few decent managerial decisions in the last 5 years would have this company valued at perhaps $30-40b and with almost $10b in cash put it completely out of reach of its competitors as a buyout target.
Let this be a lesson to those of you in the engineering world who think executives don't matter. Sun with merely ordinary management: $30b and a vibrant, profitable, independent company. Sun with McNealy and Schwartz: $7b if the government agrees, maybe, and eaten by a soulless monster. Same company, same businesses, same revenue streams. 4x difference in market price, and I'm being conservative.
Re:IBM is evil (Score:3, Insightful)
Any company they buy ends up dieing horribly.
You mean like Tivoli?
Re:MySQL vs Oracle? What about DB2? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fun ways to save cash: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Insightful)
Any decent Unix admin will be at home on MacOSX. It's just another Unix.
No, they won't. OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.
Your typical UNIX admin will be lost at sea, trying to run a Mac like his Solaris or HP UX machines. OS X isn't really a UNIX from a usability perspective, nor does Apple market it as such. Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list. It could just as easily be running atop the Windows NT kernel (and for a while there, nearly was).
Re:mac != unix (Score:3, Insightful)
IF you think installing a distro makes you elite, then perhaps you shouldn't be trying to judge such things.
If you want to come out as a smart-ass maybe you should make sure you're not retarded in the first place?
Re:Do Not Want (Score:3, Insightful)
What more need be said? Well, please elaborate. What exactly is wrong with Solaris, according to you? What exactly is it lacking that other unixes do offer? What is lacking about the many features that other unixes simply do not have? Even an open source version is made available.
I'll bite
I always thought it was odd that every Solaris machine I've ever been given (including the Blade 1500 at my last job which came with Solaris 10) I had to spend hours, weeks, months and even years applying patches and setting up keyboard maps so that when I hit backspace it actually deleted characters, and for the most part I always used the factore keyboards with these workstations. I always thought it was retarded that the stock keyboard didn't actually work with Solaris 8/9/10 out of the box.
Solaris 10 out of the box when I logged in via the UI had no less than 5 separate dialogues warning me about various configuration errors or something (some were bugs I had to patch, others were things I had to fix by hand). None of these machines were ever fully fixed and had tons of subtle issues that no-one including me seemed to be able to fix, but since I had work-arounds it worked well enough. And talking to friends I found most Solaris machines seemed to be this way - working, but lots of small annoying issues that never went fixed. Every one of these machines was brand new purchased straight from Sun and pre-configured at the factory and nothing ever worked.
Being a Sun customer for years - I felt that their hardware was just fine (I only recall one problem with a cpu which they replaced fast), but Sun software seemed to be QA'd by monkey's - you shouldn't ship something with loads of error messages. Not a single app they ever sent me worked out of the box. Not a single damn app without hours of fiddeling. Same with 3rd part apps certified for Solaris. The fact that to view their KB and download these fixes costs money just pours salt into your wound.
Moving to Linux as most people are doing was like a dream - seriously. You install packages and they usually worked with minimal configuration. The keyboard worked without lots of fiddling - actually looking at most common Linux distos like Debian and Unbuntu the keyboard worked perfectly out of the box.
Solaris is fine enough as an OS, but it lacks polish in every single way imaginable and needs serious design help. I find it hilarious that they used to try to market it as a replacement to Windows a long time ago (search computer chronicles archives if you don't believe me).
Re:mac != unix (Score:4, Insightful)
As you saying that OpenOffice is more like Microsoft Office than Microsoft Office is? As a sentence it makes no sense. I use Office on OS X and OpenOffice on Ubuntu daily. I can tell you with a high degree of certitude that Microsoft Office is more like Microsoft Office than Openoffice is.
I also use (but much less often) Microsoft Office on Vista. Microsoft Office on OS x is more like Microsoft Office on Vista, and the opposite is also true, than OpenOffice on Ubuntu.
OpenOffice is a good product for the price (really it isn't because with a price of zero you wind up with an infinity in the answer... but while I do well at finance I am really no math guy). However, There are times I consider putting OX x on my netbook just so I will have Microsoft Office available, it is that different.
Re:mac != unix (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Insightful)
At first I thought this was just a troll. But then it dawned on me that you might actually hold these opinions. Wow.
So I wanted to add my two cents.
I'm a Mac user and I find the implication that I've chosen a Mac in order to be cool or because of peer pressure plainly insulting. I don't think the OS is great, but for my needs I think it's the least bad of the major desktop OSes.
Using those statements as a guide, OS X was the clear winner. By a long shot. Of course that evaluation is subjective--what you want to do and what I want to do are likely rather different.
Frankly, I don't give a shit whether someone know what OS I use. It isn't a part of my identity and it isn't part of an image I wish to project. It's just a preference. Lighten the fuck up.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think your typical AIX UNIX admin would be lost at sea trying to run a Solaris or HP-UX machines. Every Unix vendor does things differently. Apple just takes things a bit further with their GUI and subsystems.
Re:mac != unix (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok smart guy, so how do you reassign F11 and have it actually function in Xcode?
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer to that is 'yes' OS X 10.5 is Posix compliant http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html [apple.com]
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:1, Insightful)
Mac OS X 10.5 is *certified* as UNIX. It's not just unix-like or 'a unix' is bloody well *is* UNIXâ full-stop.
"OS X" was never "nearly" running atop the Windows NT kernel. Building on top of NT was one of a host of things looked at as alternatives to the cancelled Copland project back in '96 along with BeOS, IBM OS/2 Warp PowerPC Edition, Solaris and the winner NeXT's OPENSTEP/Mach.
Re:Fun ways to save cash: (Score:2, Insightful)
I just don't see how average Americans tolerate companies who fire 5000 of their own (American) employees to raise enough cash to buy another company to increase their stock margins. Isn't this the sort of business policy that got us into this recession?
No not at all. What got us in to this mess was the government forcing banks to lend money to people who couldn't afford housing. Go to youtube and search on Freddy and Fanny and you will see who was behind this. They did this by creating "GSEs". Government Sponsored Entities and those entities basically forced the other "normal" banks to follow suite. This is EXACTLY what the current president wants to do with a lot of other companies. He wants this with Healthcare, Student Loans and to a degree the Auto Industry. Unfortunately when one side controls most of the media, it makes it difficult to get real information, and to a lot of people he is Christ reborn. It shocks me every day that somehow people still believe that Capitalism is to blame for this meltdown and that moving more towards Socialism is the answer.
Now back on topic.
It sucks when one competitor is going out of business. Specifically it sucks for the customers. In this case Sun has made some bad decisions in the past but has some great value. IBM isn't dumb to realize that now is the time to kill off a competitor, while getting more technology solutions. Does IBM want to kill off any of the Sun product lines? Probably not because they LOVE complexity, and the more complex a solution is the better chance you will need them for support.
Whatever anyone else says here about IBM loving open source is kind of a joke. I work closely with a few exIBMers and they have many stories about their jobs being threatened anytime they suggested using ANYTHING that wasn't IBM. They would do it ONLY if the customer demanded it. Anyone want to prove me wrong on this one? Care to give an example when IBM consulting recommended Tomcat or MySQL? How about SuSE or RedHat on non IBM hardware? If so then you have seen something I haven't in the last 20+ years of dealing with them.
I personally hate the buyout as a Sun customer, but it could have been far worse. Imagine if Microsoft bought them and just killed everything. Why not?
What about Oracle, or HP? Both would be bad... What about Apple? In my opinion that would be almost as bad as Microsoft. Apple would kill off all Java stuff as soon as possible, and start the vendor lock down ASAP. So given all the major companies out there IBM isn't anywhere near the worst.
Re:mac != unix (Score:5, Insightful)
There's more to Unix than just being minimally complaint to some written spec.
And yet nobody in this thread can seem to put their finger on it without demanding something that you can do with MacOS X. (Example: configuration from the command line...see the man page for 'defaults').
This whole thread smells bad to me. If a Solaris admin tried to claim that AIX wasn't UNIX because he couldn't run dtrace, he'd be laughed out of the room.
I shouldn't be surprised, though. NeXTstep was similarly ostracized back in the day, too. I think UNIX weenies must be a bunch of religious fanatics who view useable software as the work of the devil. Unix minus the arcana makes certs valueless, after all.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Insightful)
Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list.
To which users? For the majority of users surely you are correct, but we weren't talking about the majority of computer users-- we are talking about Unix users.
OS X is cleaning up in the university worlds where I live, because most of the Unix nerds, such as myself, are perfectly happy with OS X, which I use mostly as a pretty front-end to X11, xterm, and emacs.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:1, Insightful)
This?! This gets modded as informative?! ?!?!
I was going to give more of an explanation but, apparently, it's not required.
Re:Drop Linux for Solaris? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think the FOSS community really understands IBM. Maybe because you don't have IBM sales people coming in trying to sell you million dollar contracts.
When you meet with IBM sales reps and tell them you want a to build a stable database platform, they're going to want to sell you DB/2 on AIX.
IBM will sell you open source stuff if you ask for it, but they'd rather sell you on their own stuff.
ClassPath is a GNU project. Don't know what you're talking about there. IBM seems to be more involved with Apache's Harmony.
Really... WTF are you talking about?
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Insightful)
People who want UNIX don't use OS X.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Maybe it's true in your little world, but it's not true in mine.
Which makes no sense. Why would you pay the Apple tax for a pretty face on X11, xterm and emacs when you can get the same thing from a Linux machine (or even an OpenSolaris PC, if you're a traditionalist) for probably half the price ?
Many reasons, including:
(1) To get a Unix machine that works out of the box without a lot of fiddling. That works with your network card, and your display card. That works with a 30-inch monitor without endless hacking on the XF86Config file.
We had an employee who insisted on a Linux notebook computer. It never worked for him. He couldn't get the display driver to work with whatever weird video card Lenovo was shipping that week.
(2) To be able to run more polished or popular commercial apps when you want to, even if that's not the main thing that you do.
(3) Mac Books have excellent industrial design.
(4) Mac minis are small and quiet and not much more expensive than inferior imitators.
(5) Etc., etc., etc.
There are many excellent reasons to use OS X. That your primary interest is a familiar and typical UNIX-like environment, but with a pretty face, is _not_ one of them, because the UNIX aspect of OS X is neither familiar, nor typical, once you move past trivial usage (stuff even Cygwin does just as well).
You haven't a clue. I'm a Unix wizard. OS X's Unix is completely familiar and typical to me. Sure I have to use fink or Ports to make it so. So what? They're no better or worse than the package managers on any other Unix/Linux.
Regarding Cygwin -- you're nuts. It can't handle signals properly and does forks incredibly slowly. Also the NT filesystem really bites when you're looking to just be happy with Unix.
Regarding the Apple tax, my precious time is worth oh so much more than a few bucks. You can be penny wise and pound foolish if you want. Many people chose otherwise. Or, if you have fun endlessly fiddling, feel free. I used to have fun with that sort of crap too. Now I prefer to get other stuff done.
You can have whatever opinion you want, but your facts are wrong.
|>ouglas
Re:Context: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no specification. Its a feeling thing. Fuzzy (GP) did a pretty job describing the differences.