Thoughts on IBM buying out Sun? / Future of Java

agent_paul

agent_paul

agent_paul

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The last week or 2 theres been news that IBM will buy Sun microsystems (along with it Java) and with this news theres been a lot of talk about what would happen to Java if that were to happen.

So what id like to know is, what are you thoughts about this possible buy out? Do you think its a good thing? will we finally get a decent competitor against Microsoft / .Net?

what would you think will happen to the Java ecosystem? would it just die and leave developers re-skilling?

Just an open thread looking for thoughts and feelings

thanks
 
Even if IBM bought SUN, I would imagine they would leave the companies as they are now but just all be owned by IBM.

I doubt they can do much to change Java since that could cause a lot of problems to current applications and also force developers to relearn some things.
 
Hi Smit,

i hope that would be true if that were to happen. but there are apparently quite a few cases (im told) in the past where IBM buys out a company and ends up totally trashing it (the only one i can remember seeing in that list was lotus notes or something like that).

if everything does go down the plug hole, then we're all doomed :(
 
Might have been true in the past companies but they can't really do anything with Java unless they make any changes which are 100% backwards compatible with the old code or else everything could just break.
IBM aren't stupid :)
 
It'll get spun off - probably to Oracle if you believe the rumblings; along with OpenSolaris and MySQL. I hear IBM wants to keep ZFS however - which will make Solaris' implementation of it in the future "interesting".
 
Actually I think that one of the reasons IBM wants Sun is because of Java. IBM license their own version of Java and it is at the heart of many products which makes them a huge amount of money; Websphere and the some of the Rational toolset. IBM invest a lot of money in many open source initiatives with Java, including Eclipse (the base product which WSAD / RAD are built on.

It would be a disaster for IBM if another company bought Sun. Right now Sun is weak and it is a case of either IBM buying them or someone else. They need to buy Sun to ensure the future of Java and their own products. I want Sun to stay independant but if it has to be bought then I'd rather IBM bought it than another company. Although I do think that they will reduce their spend on Java related open source if this happens.

I think a bigger question is what happens to Solaris? It is a direct competitor to AIX. And I can't see much benefit in MySQL for them either. Although that is already open source so it will live on even if IBM tries to kill it.
 
philip2009 said:
I think Java is safe, NetBeans apparently not so much.
Click to expand...

Couldn't give a **** about Netbeans as Eclipse is wwwaaaayyyy better anyhow. But I don't necessarily think it's a great thing to see IBM eat up Sun. Less competition is usually a bad thing.

Don't think it'll affect Java much, if anything it might be a good thing from a Java perspective.
 
Java has a future? :D

Sorry I'm just annoyed with it lately...

I remember having azureus which was programed in Java and that sucked balls in comparison to uTorrent sooo... what's the point? :S
 
ok intellix your post i didnt quite understand, i program written in a language is rubbish, so the language is rubbish?? perhaps just the coding is rubbish not the language :-P

Anyway as many have said, IBM uses java and expands on it for their products, so java would continue I would have thought.
 
MySQL isn't dead but future support does look under question with this deal. At least MySQL is open source. So it could be forked and an enterprising company still push it forward.
 
Well Java is going to be fine with Oracle behind them as they are a big user of Java technolgies themself. I think Oracle would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did anything stupid to MySQL, it's used by the majority of web companies today, it's esentially their own customers now.
 
RobH said:
Well Java is going to be fine with Oracle behind them as they are a big user of Java technolgies themself. I think Oracle would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did anything stupid to MySQL, it's used by the majority of web companies today, it's esentially their own customers now.
Click to expand...

There are two schools of thought on this one:

1) They value MySQL due to its wide acceptance in the lower end of the web business. This is a good protection against MS SQL.

2) They want to kill off MySQL which is a threat to Oracle. They could then convert some of the Oracle MySQL installs into profit making Oracle sales.

Could go either way really on the database side.

I agree that Java is safe (although how does this affect the license IBM have for their JDK?). There has also been some talk of them wanting Solaris and Spark to be able to provide a complete application to hardware stack. This makes sense. Overall it's a good buy for Oracle although I think IBM may now regret matters.
 
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Peve said:
I really hope that they GPL ZFS so that it can be intgrated into Linux.
Click to expand...

I don't think this will happen in the near term, Sun where pushing Open Solaris quite heavily before this news, and I doubt that will change much. I'd say that Open Solaris has *lots* of potential and by simply giving it's best bits away doesn't make too much sense. I think Oracle will use Open Solaris to demonstrate that Oracle on a ZFS Open Solaris can be a very decent high end database server solution.

LabR@t said:
PostgreSQL can it step up and take over from mysql if they do anything to disrupt it?
Click to expand...

In a word no.:p
 
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