I’m sure that by now you have heard the rumors about IBM potentially buying Sun. Even yesterday Intel CEO says Sun was shopped around (cnet news).

Why is this a significant announcement? And why I think Intel’s CEO is wrong (when he said that Solaris and SPARC will get EOL)?

Well, besides acquiring an iconic and historically-rich company in the Valley when it comes to technology, there are other items of interest:

  1. Java licensing – IBM has invested millions if not billions on Java technology. I remember years ago when the company totally committed to Java technology, and even created the San Francisco project on which IBM poured millions of dollars. IBM has its server-side J2EE and Java ME (mobile) technologies and VMs. Most of IBM’s products are Java based. On every Java Specification (JSR) voting cycle IBM always comments on their disagreement when it comes to the current licensing model. But, by acquiring Sun this would mean a long-term strategy on security and millions of dollars saved on a core technology that IBM is dependent on, now and in the future
  2. Access to great IP – Sun has a great Intellectual Property (IP) porfolio: from software to hardware. This will put IBM, the already leader in patents and intellectual property, much further ahead than everyone else
  3. Solaris and Sun servers (here is where I disagree w/ Intel’s CEO) – Sun has a lot of expertise and robust products from S/W to H/W. The UltraSPARC processor are pretty kick-ass design. Sun equipment and Solaris 10 is certified for telecoms (NEBS and ATCA) — IBM/AIX is not! This would give IBM immediate access to all telecoms; pretty big stuff, don’t you agree?
  4. Access to lots of smart people – Sun has lots of smart people, again from S/W to H/W and services
  5. Java open source – back to #1 above, IBM might end up (fully) open source Java and related technologies, all under the Eclipse model! This will benefit IBM and the whole community

    6. About about NetBeans? That probably continues but w/o funding/support from IBM — totally community based. OpenOffice on the other hand may have a different story as it doesn’t compete with IBM/Eclipse and is a pretty valuable office-suite, and thus would probably continue under the Eclipse model, meaning with funding/support from IBM. As a matter of fact, all open source projects acquired by IBM from Sun would move to an Eclipse or Apache licensing model.

    ceo