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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Funny)
OS X is a unix. It is commercial in that it's being sold and to a large market. I don't see the problem.
The difference being the market. One is a server market, the other is a cult.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Funny)
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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).
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ahem...
http://www.hillside.co.uk/articles/cult.html [hillside.co.uk]
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:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Funny)
Sure it does, 'Enterprise Solution' is an industrial grade solvent used for dissolving piles of money stuck to the floor of vaults. It's also available in 25ml bottles for removing embarrassingly large numbers on corporate bank account statements.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:4, Funny)
Sure it does, 'Enterprise Solution' is an industrial grade solvent used for dissolving piles of money stuck to the floor of vaults. It's also available in 25ml bottles for removing embarrassingly large numbers on corporate bank account statements.
It is? I thought a proper Enterprise Solution is what you get when you blend [youtube.com] your IT infrastructure properly.
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Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Informative)
MacOSX is just FreeBSD
No.
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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:"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.
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:"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:"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: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: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.
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.
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.
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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 bac
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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: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.
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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.
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)
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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:"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: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.
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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
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:"commercial UNIX" (Score:4, Funny)
Apple sells smugness.
I get my smugness for free. I run NetBSD.
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.
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"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 a
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".
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".
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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:5, Funny)
It has lost most of the characteristics people identify as Unix though.
The usable GUI? :)
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:4, Funny)
'Unix' machines need to start up with a cross shaped cursor, a horrible background color and two-color windows with a 3x3 grid of lines across them when resizing.
X11 is a separate download/install on Mac so it's not a realman's Unix.
Re:"commercial UNIX" (Score:5, Informative)
The singular of "War Stories" is "Anecdote" (Score:4, Funny)
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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
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.
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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.
I think you have just proved that Java is a fluke. Solaris is... well, it's Solaris. What more need be said?
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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: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.
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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: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: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: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".
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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 wrot
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....
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: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.
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- 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
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
I just want to know.... (Score:5, Funny)
...when I should start going back to calling things "IBM-compatible."
Re:It would be kind of interesting.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The next headline is... (Score:5, Funny)
IBM today announced the outsourcing of 90% of Sun employees. "This will save us a good chunk of the $7B we paid for them," said an IBM representative.
Meanwhile, in Washington, IBM was approved to receive $3B in taxpayer money from the Keep America Working fund.
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.)
Fun ways to save cash: (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:What IBM get's for 7B (Score:5, Funny)
You don't know IBM very well, then.
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.
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Scary.
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IBM purchased Informix in the early 2000's.
IBM still sells Informix databases other than DB/2.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Er, Drizzle is developed at Sun (lead developer Jay Pipes [launchpad.net], Sun Staff Engineer).
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: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.
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 About To Buy Sun For $7 Billion (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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: (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.
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.
Those were the days... (Score:4, Funny)
Back in college in the 1980's I administered a cluster of Sun2's with 160MB rack mounted hard drives. You could define those days as when a "hard drive" would kill you if dropped on your head from a height of 3 feet.
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Next on their list (Score:5, Funny)
Alpha Centauri, followed by Betelgeuse.
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.
Wish it were Google or someone else... (Score:5, Insightful)
My favorite Sun-related syllogism (Score:4, Funny)
If
The Computer is the Network
and
The Network is Down
then
It's Time to Take the Rest of the Day Off
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
IBM About To Buy Sun for $7 Billion (Score:5, Funny)
I'm willing to sell them the Moon for $1 Billion or Mars for $1.5 Billion
nice headline (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Makes one wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
How much would they be willing to pay for some other celestial body. Say for example... Uranus?
Re: (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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Any company they buy ends up dieing horribly.
You mean like Tivoli?