What should we expect with IBM’s acquisition of Sun?
For the past month or so I have been reading of the potential acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM. I have seen this dubbed as the Blue Sun. After a month of negotations it now looks like this may be a reality. What does the future hold if and when this pushes through? What are we to expect?
For years, I have been using Sun and IBM products. And coming from the data storage industry, I have also had the great opportunity of seeing where these systems get deployed. Sun’s Solaris UNIX operating system and related intellectual property (IP) have long been popular in the states. While their influence is world wide, I have noticed more IBM AIX deployments in Europe. Note that these comments reflect my personal experience as opposed to the reality of the situation.
While they have made great milestones in the development of AIX, IBM’s operating platform still seems somewhat arcane compared to the Sun Solaris counterpart. And while IBM offers their own UNIX OS, they still do an excellent job of supporting GNU/Linux.
I do not know what IBM’s intentions are if/when the acquisition is complete, but with the newly acquired IP, we may be seeing a lot of changes to both UNIX and Linux platforms. Will we see ZFS or DTrace relicensed under the GPL? Don’t know, it is still too soon to tell. This may also just be wishful thinking on my part.
I can say this: Microsoft may face a little more of a struggle in the enterprise computing arena. This may be especially true since the older standing enterprise class UNIX providers are slowly disappearing from the map. As is the case with SGI being acquired by Rackable Systems.
