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."
sigh (Score:1, Interesting)
another day, another possible layoff.
drink and be merry tonight, for tomorrow we're unemployed.
Do Not Want (Score:5, Interesting)
... I.B.M. into the dominant supplier of high-profit Unix servers ...
Oh, how pleasent, what a smart move for IBM.
Woh. Hold on. Wait. Please, I beg of you, save Sun's software from IBM's slow moving process and lack of usability.
I must confess that while I have used Solaris, the only thing I have ever cared about from Sun enough to bitch is Java and Java related thingies. Now, I'm not saying that this is going to fall apart if/when it transfers to IBM's hands and I certainly hope that the people involved in those projects stay there but if I look at the products of the two companies I must say that Sun is far better at Software.
This hasn't always been the case but let's look at web application servers. The free open source Glassfish [java.net] container has been one of my favorites for development. Websphere [ibm.com], on the extreme other side of the spectrum, was the bane of my existence for a very short time in my life causing me to lose sleep night after night. I would take Weblogic, Tomcat, Resin, anything over Websphere. Please, baby Jesus, if you can hear me do not let this happens and if it does, let Glassfish be the source code they stick with moving forward.
Although I'm sure you'd love to hear me bitch for hours about Rational products, I'm just going to say that I think competition is healthy and also I prefer Sun Software to remain Sun Software. I hope this deal falls apart. I've loved IBM's tutorials but do not care for their software.
mac != unix (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? I'm posting this comment from a workstation running a commercial UNIX. I'm using a Mac.
Try running a mac os x server and a solaris server, side by side, running the same application, and tell me that mac os x is truly unix. Any OS requiring >90% of configuration changes to be made in a GUI does not count as UNIX, in my book.
I'll grant you that OS X is UNIX-certified, but OS X is _not_ SVR4 UNIX.
PS- That burning you smell is my karma going up in flames.
It would be kind of interesting.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sun somehow managed to butcher so many of its acquisitions, that it would be interesting to see what would be the outcome of IBM buying Sun. OpenOffice vs Symphony, DB2 vs MySQL, WebSphere vs Sun's offerings, Solaris vs AIX, and not to mention the hardware side.
If it goes ahead, of course....
ws
Stock (Score:2, Interesting)
I had a friend buy their stock in '01 expecting '00 prices to come back.
I heard about all this a few years ago and was like, get out of it, Sun will never be what it was then.
The make some great stuff, but decent has gotten good enough that the market for great is much smaller than it used to be.
They said "but it was worth so much", and I said "it may never have been worth that much"
It is funny looking at the two next to each-other since 1995, Sun took a ridiculous jump, IBM pretty much tracks with S&P and DOW, but slightly better.
What IBM get's for 7B (Score:3, Interesting)
What market SUN has which is still substantial in certain arenas. Then there is Java, MySQL, and many other products which has been clearly covered. But I think getting their hands on ZFS and dtrace will be big. With ZFS IBM can build cheaper versions of NetApps Filers. Did I use cheap and IBM in the same sentence?
Hopefully IBM will still push out OpenSolaris along with Trusted Solaris. I wonder if this means the sparc processor is done and Solaris will be migrated to the IBM's RISC. What of AIX then? I don't see IBM maintaining two operating systems long term.
"RISC is going to change everything."
I built an ISP on Sparc 4s (Score:5, Interesting)
Upstream was a Cisco 2500 running two T1s, bonded with that new cool PPP protocol.
Over 650 shell accounts, usually 500 going at a time. A Special variant of SunOS 4.1.3 and access to tin, trn, pine and even... lynx!
Those Suns never took a break, never died and were solid, despite being located in a colo facility that alternated between being 100 degrees, and being 40 degrees. (Don't ask). Had a mind blowing $7,000/mo of revenue coming in the door to pay three people and keep the lights on the worlds crappiest office.
Good times.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:4, Interesting)
I must say that Sun is far better at Software.
One word : javac
IBM's java compiler and IDE (Eclipse) are way better than Sun's....
Granted there are good things on both sides, IBM's javac is twice faster than Sun's.
What I hope from this transfer is:
- Merge of IBM and Sun code for reference java implementation
- MySQL forks cleanup, and kept as entry level DBMS
- Sun's HW products going to trash...
What I don't get is, what can IBM win from this deal ? Apart from the Java Brand....
Context: (Score:5, Interesting)
Further, most "traditional Unix" setups, if they have graphics at all, use X. OSX supports doing so; but the mac users' howls of protest are deafening around any program that actually tries to do so. OSX is UNIX; but there are solid reasons for saying that it is hardly "traditional Unix".
Wow, what a deal (Score:5, Interesting)
I was reading about this earlier in the week, and remembering when IBM and Sun were arch-rivals in the high-end Unix market. I'm guessing IBM's going to kill AIX and maybe even the p-series servers now.
My question is, does IBM want Solaris, the hardware business, Java, or do they just want to get rid of a competitor?
Every IBM product I've seen in the past few years has had its user interface written in Java. Every piece of middleware they write now is Java. So it seems like they just want to consolidate the market.
That said, they got a good deal in this market, but what a lousy time to do this. How many thousands of employees on both the IBM and Sun side are going to get kicked out over this? I guess it all depends on how many products this kills. Worse still, IBM hasn't been known to be keen on keeping jobs in the US and Europe lately...
IBM is evil (Score:1, Interesting)
Any company they buy ends up dieing horribly. It's no coincidence they make the vast majority of their money off user support. They ensure that their products are impossibly frustrating to use.
IBM buying out Sun is a bad thing. A very bad thing. You can also kiss competition goodbye. You can also kiss competition goodbye.
Re:mac != unix (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? I love doing everything from the command line, but am unsure how to do the following (at least I can't find anything after scouring google for some of these). Is it possible to do the following? I just picked some from looking at the system preferences pane:
* Time Machine: Configure what to back up
* Time Machine: Restore files
* Configure Parental Controls
* Change an account's picture
* Configure an account's login options
* Configure when to put the monitor/computer to sleep
* Change the desktop background
* Change the screensaver
* Configure the sounds
* Spotlight: Configure what to index
* Configure filevault settings
* Disable automatic login
I'm aware that some of them may be achievable by editing plists, but of those, the plist may not be in a human-readable format. Others I don't know where to change those settings outside of the GUI.
MySQL vs Oracle? What about DB2? (Score:3, Interesting)
The article mentions "I.B.M. could also undercut Oracle by more actively promoting the free MySQL software" but bring up IBM's DB2. Isn't this the more interesting question? Won't there be fear of IBM cannibilizing DB2 with "free" MySQL? Will IBM try to bury (or join the ranks of those who disparage) MySQL so that it doesn't endanger DB2?
Re:Do Not Want (Score:3, Interesting)
- Sun's HW products going to trash...
While I may agree with you when it comes to Sun's generic x86 boxes (although they have some really nice engineering) and most of their StorageTek arrays, it would be a tragedy if Sun's Niagara boxes (T-series coolthreads processors) and storage servers (X4500 and 7000 "Amber Road" series) died. Those are truly innovative and unique products, and there is no equivalent out there from any manufacturer.
There's also some great software that Sun have developed, and it would again be a crying shame to see IBM b0rk it all up in favour of their own competing products. For instance, even though you may personally favour Eclipse over Netbeans, the competition from Eclipse lit a fire under Sun's behind and it's come on leaps and bounds recently.
Without competition, the market stagnates and innovation dwindles away. I can't see much good coming from this deal, if it goes through.
This makes about as much sense as... (Score:2, Interesting)
...GM buying Ford. Adding and combining more crap has never been a solution for a failing business.
Very Soon (Score:2, Interesting)
Very soon there will be 3 OS's: Windows, Linux, OS X
Of course windows will have 7 to 14 flavors;
Linux will have 700 to 14,000 different distributions.
OS X will run on all of your All-White appliances, but you won't know its there.
My Sun experience in the distant past (Score:5, Interesting)
I started using Sun Workstations back when they had the Motorola based Sun-3's. Later,
when they came out with Sparc based Sun-4's, I learned just how portable software written
in C is. I used to take a buffer of data read in from the network or serial port, cast to a char*,
bump along the buffer, then cast to an int* to get some piece of a network header.
On Sparc architecture, you can't de-reference a pointer to an int if the address is not divisible
by 4. So you have to do a byte copy into memory properly aligned for 4 byte data.
In those days, if you wanted spreadsheet software that ran on Unix, it cost about $1000. Most
software for Unix workstations cost much more than the same sort of thing for Windows. The
rationalization for this was a Unix machine could support way more users so they had to charge more.I used to think that Unix software vendors were responsible for the success of Windows.
The GPL prevents Linux from "winning" (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
"Eating its lunch"?
Really? Get thee to a real customer that demands five 9s or better uptimes. Yeah, there are probably some - running IBM mostly. We'll see how IBM likes handing support revenue over to RedHat now that it looks like they'll have their own open-sourced OS that's not burdened by GPL restrictions.
Until Linux guarantees backwards binary compatibility, Solaris is going to stay put. Nothing sucks more than applying a patch and having your customer's app fail to run. And as long as backwards compatiblity can be broken by some long-haired wackademic on his vision of free-software jihad deciding unilaterally "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!", Linux has a problem.
Ever try to back out an upgrade on Linux? Hint: enterprise customers do NOT upgrade their boxes by running yum or some other app against an internet repository.
Yes, I said burdened by the GPL earlier. Get this: there are a lot of companies that simply will NOT put their product into a mix that includes the GPL. Period.
The GPL allowed Linux to grow into what it is. It's also going to prevent it from "winning".
Re:It would be kind of interesting.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Do Not Want (Score:2, Interesting)
Forbes predicts 10,000 layoffs from Sun. (Score:3, Interesting)
Forbes predicts 10,000 layoffs from the merger, most on the Sun side, in "IBM and Sun: There Will Be Blood" [forbes.com].
Sun had a good run: 27 years. But they lost in workstations, they lost in servers, and Java isn't a big moneymaker.
This has serious implications for Java. To Sun, Java was their one remaining strong product. For IBM, it's just another software product line. IBM will do a decent job of maintaining it, as they do with all their corporate products. But they may not push it forward.
IBM also gets MySQL, which might be a problem, since IBM has other competing database offerings.
Sun's Silicon Valley operations have been shrinking for years. They overbuilt hugely during the dot-com boom, and have far too much office space. There's even an abandoned Sun industrial park in Fremont, where they built the parking lots and the building foundations before stopping construction around 2001.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Interesting)
"Apple is about peer pressure." Uh, how? Most of the world uses MS.
Most of the world uses Microsoft because of their Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish strategy that starts with lock-in and ends with monopoly. Apple users use OSX either because they think they need to have it because they have been sucked in, or because they believe it has technical superiority. Numerous developers went to Apple when Apple was opening parts of the OS, but then they closed the kernel and showed their true colors. Many have returned. Some are still lost.
The basic problem here is that you have taken your deepest insecurities and made Apple the source.
Snicker snort. Have you always had that account, or did you buy a low UID on ebay for the purposes of trolling?
You're acting like the only alternative is to go running for the skirts of a commercial entity. ("so now companies are not only supposed to give us superior products, but they must care about us as well, can't you just feel the love?") That's some bullshit sheeple behavior. How about trying to Love Thyself? Why go crying to Apple when you can personally get involved in the creation of a superior alternative? The same is true of Solaris. Why, because you can get support? Apple support doesn't. Solaris support is expensive. Both companies we're talking about here will fucking rob you blind if you let them. Why pretend that this is somehow better than the alternative? When even IBM, Big fucking Blue is selling more Linux than AIX and, I might add, even advertising the living shit out of the fact you have to wake up to the fact that an actual paradigm shift is occurring -- not one of the dizzy-headed applications of that term that happens in boardrooms and advertising meetings but an actual shift as dramatic as proving that the Earth orbits the Sun. Instead of users orbiting corporations, corporations are orbiting users.
What the hell am I talking about? Back in the old, old, ancient days if you wrote a script on an IBM mainframe it became the property of IBM - only your data was really yours, and while you might have had to pay for that system, computing was a service in an even more real way than it is today. Today, IBM is one of the largest contributors to Open Source software, and Linux in particular. Not only do they contribute to and indeed produce Open Source software, and have released some of their existing works as such, but they also produce immense volumes of documentation explaining how to accomplish various goals on Linux and give them away for free. IBM gets it -- they understand that to remain relevant in the age of Open Source they have to provide you a compelling reason to use them. They understand that the various barriers in the way of Linux are almost all artificial -- they are examples of major forces in computing exercising their powers (usually monopolistic in nature) to attack Linux in a futile attempt to slow its inexorable progress. One such attack was the release of OpenSolaris under a non-GPL-compatible license. It was only an attempt to distract from Linux. Like the former commercial Solaris/x86, it is not worth paying money for. Unlike the former product, they're not charging for it. (I have personal, commercial experience with Solaris/x86. It was dogshit.)
You are viewing the world through rainbow-colored, Apple-shaped glasses. Apple very much marketed OSX as a Unix, to draw users away from Linux which was then starting to gain massive popularity. Those who forget history are doomed to look like idiots.
Re:The singular of "War Stories" is "Anecdote" (Score:3, Interesting)
Java, OpenOffice/StarOffice, Solaris, xVM, VirtualBox, NetBEans, Sun Studio (their development suite for both Solaris and Linux on both Sparc and x86), Sun Grid Engine, their storage business, their hardware vendor relationship with telecom companies, the Sparc engineers, and their goodwill are part of the package, too.
IBM and Sun had talked previously a number of time about Solaris on Power, AIX on Sparc, and in swapping source back and forth to make both products stronger. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's a major portion of the deal from IBM's point of view.
hybrid server datacenters (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM wants to sell you different hardware that works better for your different software needs rather than shoehorning everything into Power, x86, or System z and trying to force those into your racks. They've made lots of press with this lately. Just search for "IBM hybrid server", as there are too many articles to link from here.
There are some workloads that the Niagara, Rock, and such are just phenomenal at running. These tend to be ones that Power, which is fewer faster cores, aren't so great at running.
IBM and Sun both have different strengths in their closed Unixes, too. They both have their own connections to Linux. They both have their own strengths developing software for Linux.
MySQL could complement DB2 as the entry-level DB. IBM has lots of middleware software written in Java. They have Lotus stuff and Sun has OpenOffice.
They both have blade products, and Sun's x86 ones are IMHO better than IBM's. They oth have torage products, and they are each one stronger in different parts of that market. Sun steps all over most other server companies in the telephone and telecoms market with their Fire and related servers.
I think there's a good match to be made here if IBM doesn't kill the engineering culture of Sun. The two are rumored to have very different product development styles, and it'd suck to see IBM chase off all the good employees who are more comfortable with how Sun does things.
Sun likes to put an inordinate amount according to IBM's figures into R&D. Maybe they can become an IBM Research subsidiary or something, sort of like AT&T had Bell Labs. That could be awesome for the IT industry.
Re:mac != unix (Score:3, Interesting)
According to all technical definitions, OS X is Unix. The kernel is XNU which is based on Mach with BSD subsystems.
You do understand that XNU is an acronym standing for "X is Not Unix"? XNU is basically Mach + FreeBSD + I/O Kit, with glue obviously added. I/O Kit is radically different from traditional Unix driver models. OS X is, as you say, certified UNIX 03. Linux is not. But which do you really think is "more Unix"?
Re:I built an ISP on Sparc 4s (Score:4, Interesting)
For most of us, it was our second job. We'd get off work at our real jobs at 5pm, go hang out until midnight in this little hole in the wall. We'd do all the account maintenance then. We each put about $30k of our own money in. We each took about $15k out each year. The remaining money went to the PRIs, we had a T3 from the telco to handle that many calls coming into our PBX. We outgrew the Bay equipment and had a dozen Cisco AS5200s with Micah modem chipsets. Crappy Nortel Meredian PBX, programming it was like doing assembly language.
We ended up having shell account surcharges that helped bring in additional revenue, and we tacked on a small fee for usenet news access. Still, overall - it was a fun time, but I wouldn't do it again.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Interesting)
Your typical UNIX admin will be lost at sea, trying to run a Mac like his Solaris or HP UX machines.
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.
Re:mac != unix (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The GPL prevents Linux from "winning" (Score:1, Interesting)
Got the stones to try running your production Oracle database under "strace" on Linux?
I've run production Oracle databases under Solaris "truss" and now "dtrace" many times. I don't even hesitate.
Would you go down to your biggest customer's DB server and drop their database under strace?
Why am I guessing the answer is, "Fuck no! I wouldn't DARE do that!"
And that just says it all, doesn't it?
E10K (Score:3, Interesting)
uhhhh, no. Sun entered the consciousness of the unwashed masses in 1995-1996 when, in an entirely unprecedented maneuver, it spent millions of dollars advertising a programming language. My mom actually called me to ask me about this "Java" thing and what she should do about it. No, my mom does not know how to program.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:3, Interesting)
OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.
Amen to that. I'm guessing that out of all the Apple proponents who have hijacked this thread, not a single one of them has seriously tried to use OS X the way a Unix system is normally used.
Any sort of serious Unix user quickly encounters numerous differences and peculiarities that hamper the use of OS X as a Unix system. For example, the pathnames are different, leading to widespread breakage of shell scripts and (crucially) build scripts and makefiles. Of course, a well written program would be able to deal with this, but in the real world not all programs are perfect, and some programs just don't compile correctly no matter what you do. If the program that you're looking for is in DarwinPorts, then you're okay, because somebody else has already gone to the considerable trouble of fixing the package so that it works, but otherwise you're SOL.
A specific example is the PBC [stanford.edu] library, which works great on Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux, FreeBSD, and even versions of OS X prior to Leopard, but won't build on Leopard.
I've been a Linux/Unix admin for 12 years and as far as being a unix goes, even Cygwin does a better job than OS X of acting the way Unix users expect.
Nostalgia (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Do Not Want (Score:3, Interesting)
Websphere [ibm.com], on the extreme other side of the spectrum, was the bane of my existence for a very short time in my life causing me to lose sleep night after night. I would take Weblogic, Tomcat, Resin, anything over Websphere. Please, baby Jesus, if you can hear me do not let this happens and if it does, let Glassfish be the source code they stick with moving forward.
I will concur. Websphere seemed less like a serious product and more like a torture from myth and legend, some malign god's idea of a just punishment. Loki with the serpent forever dripping poison in his face, Prometheus getting devoured and reborn anew the following day to be devoured again, and we poor bastards tasked with writing an ecommerce site with Websphere. Whenever I saw the little blue letterbox commercials with trendy business people intoning "We are so ready for IBM," I felt like punching a kitten in the face.
I helped produce the E10K (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked on the E10K team - we were called "Cray Research" then.
Most people only pay attention to the big vector boxes but Cray also had a SPARC shop in San Diego. There was a Cray blessed version of Solaris and a 64 processor beast called the "SuperDragon".
When SGI bought Cray, they couldn't figure out what to do w/us. After a few weeks Sun got the SPARC shop for basically the cost of inventory.
The SuperDragon was renamed the E-10K, got new colorful cabinets and people started to eat them up. I still don't understand why Cray couldn't have done just as well w/those boxes.
Anyway... I still own a nice SS-20 which I boot up a few times/year (and turn off when I can't take the noise). I am sad to see Sun go (just as I was sad to see Cray and Tandem and other employers go). Hard to believe that IBM will do a better job of managing Sun but we will see.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:1, Interesting)
Who the fuck cares about javac speed? I care about the bytecode that it produces and it's obvious that sun is eating everyone lunch on that and VMs except maybe JET and even now hotspot is getting ss2 instrisics for array access.
Re:mac != unix (Score:3, Interesting)
except that OSX covers the extremes. It has a kernel for low level engineers and a userspace GUI for flashy, point and drool end users.
It doesn't have the nice middle ground that Linux has. Linux command line userspace tools and organization is light years ahead of OSX command line, and really any other UNIX as far as that goes.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Well, you don't admin an AIX box like Solaris box like an HP box. There's no smitty on Solaris or SAM on AIX. If you're saying that OS X is different from the others, sure. But not really so much different from them than they are from each other. A Solaris admin isn't going to be any more at sea learning to admin an OS X box than he would learning AIX or Linux. It's a difference without a distinction.
So?` (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people attending MS presentations have Symbian phones and run embedded non-ms in their cars. Nobody in their right mind would run a laptop as you would a server.
Re:The GPL prevents Linux from "winning" (Score:3, Interesting)
Solaris itself has a per-node licensing cost which makes it less attractive in a clustering environment
You got that backwards. I can download and use Solaris in production for free, no matter how many nodes. Even their Open HA Cluster [opensolaris.org] software is free and open source.
In the corporate world here in the US, linux means redhat. Go download RHEL and do the same thing without forking over cash. Oh you can't.
Even when you pay for support, Solaris support is cheaper.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:3, Interesting)