Friday, April 3, 2009

IBM-Sun accord, what's up for Java, ... ?

According to the Wall Street Journal, IBM is in talks to buy out Sun.
Sun has been a real great promoter of Open Source Technology so far (Java, Netbeans Glassfish, MySQL, OpenOffice, ...) and has also great worthwhile technologies like ZFS (File Management System), Solaris/OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, Cloud infrastruture (Jini and other technologies...), ...
The merge between IBM will give certainly great opportunity for IBM in the domain of Virtualization and Clouds computing/storage.
IBM has been more focused on the business aspects while Sun has been more involved in High Technologies Innovations.
The Sun real value is not reflected in the Nasdaq Stock Market, but Sun has always been a real visionary company with very talented technical people (Network and distributed computing, ...) .
Is the right thing to do for Sun ?
IBM has great products as well, but are certainly sometime in competition with the Sun portfolio (Eclipse/Netbeans, WebSphere/Glassfish, AIX/Solaris, ...).
What will be the future of the Sun technology in this context ?
Java will surely survive as it is, IBM is a great sponsor of the technology.
Netbeans compared to Eclipse is much simpler to manage and maybe should be simply improved (Performance maybe principally) and extended, through plugins, to support the IBM specific products.
Glassfish already with the version V3 Prelude allows to extend the platform with modular approach based on OSGi which is already used in many different context.
Solaris and Open Solaris are already supported on the IBM hardware and are very important products in Open Source field compared to AIX. Do IBM need to extend AIX with ZFS and other technologies or to adopt Solaris as a foundation for futur AIX ?

I hope that the fusion between IBM and Sun will bring innovations to both side with real Open Source strategy for the products foundation and keep a margin of 12/18 months for commercial product based on the Open Source ones like for Glassfish ...

What impacts do you think IBM taking over Sun would have on Sun and Open Source Technologies ?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Time will hopefully tell soon, but I'll start hating IBM if they kill NetBeans. Hopefully they'll also keep Glassfish v3.