Shark Bait

Knowledge Centers

Operating Systems

Networking & Internet

Mobile & Wireless

Security

Storage

Business Intelligence

Servers & Data Center

Computerworld Reports

Industry

See your link here

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Cyber Cynic

Good-bye Solaris? The fate of Sun's top 5 technologies

61 comments

TAGS:IBM, Java, mergers and acquisitions, NetBeans, servers, Solaris, SPARC, Sun, Unix
IT TOPICS:Desktops & Servers, Development, E-Business & Web 2.0, Government & Regulation, Internet, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Windows & Microsoft

By this time next week, IBM will have bought Sun at a cut-rate price. I'd long thought Sun was going to down for the count, so the news that IBM was moving in didn't surprise me. What happens next though? Specifically, what's going to happen to Sun's product lines? As a long-time watcher of both Sun and IBM, here are my best guesses.

1) Solaris/OpenSolaris: Could IBM just kill this pair of operating systems? No, I can't see that. Solaris has too many customers even now. What I can't see though is IBM spending any more money on developing Solaris.

IBM already has its own house-brand of Unix, AIX, and Big Blue had invested a billion dollars in Linux back when most people were still ignoring the penguin. Besides, the Unix server market share has been dwindling for years. Sure, IBM plus Sun equals the lion's share of the Unix market, but it's a dying market.

OpenSolaris will likely live on as a purely community-based operating system. After failing to gain any real traction against Linux, I expect it to become like the BSD operating systems: useful in niches and with a strong, core group of developers, but never to become a major operating system power.

2) SPARC/SPARC Servers: In three words: SPARC is history. The high-end SPARC business has been getting knocked around for ages by low-cost AMD/Intel servers running Linux for years now. Fujitsu will run what's left of the SPARC chip and system business.

3) Java: Java's creator, James Gosling, probably won't like me saying this, but I've long though that IBM did a better job than Sun with its Java implementation and the Java-related projects it supported, like Apache Geronimo and Jakarta.

IBM, unlike Sun, has also long been a completely committed open-source supporter. Because of this, I suspect that IBM will commit to completely opening up Java and its related projects and put them under the control of a revised JCP (Java Community Process).

4) NetBeans: This is an easy one. The NetBeans IDE (integrated development environment) is history. Long live Eclipse. Oh, NetBeans will continue you on as a community project. Open-source code never really dies; it just doesn't get checked out of the repository much anymore.

5) MySQL: In some ways, I think this is the most interesting one of all. MySQL is the DBMS (database management system) of Web 2.0 sites and most open-source DBMS-related projects. After paying a billion bucks for MySQL in 2008, Sun managed to chase most of MySQL's top programmers out of the company and annoy its commercial customers. Today, it's not even clear who's running MySQL and which direction the DBMS is going in.

I think IBM will be able to bring some order and sense to the MySQL mess. This will make both customers and developers happier. And, if IBM can combine some of its DB2 goodness with MySQL, that will be all the better.

In the end, I think IBM will do better for both programmers and users with Sun's software products. Solaris and SPARC will end up dying on the vine, but, they were already doing that anyway. But, what do you think? How do you see Sun's various lines faring under IBM?

Email this

Digg this

What People Are Saying

Add new comment

Since IBM seems to have walked -

Submitted by theoldman59 on April 6, 2009 - 1:11 P.M.

Since IBM seems to have walked away, the fate of the technologies may lay in the bankruptcy courts hands.

Two things may happen. If SUN goes into Chapter 7, then other parties will buy technologies with value from the bankrupt company. If they go Chapter 11, or reorganizaition, then SUN will be forced to make hard decisions and drop money losers.

As for Open Office, I suspect that no matter which bankruptcy option SUN may choose, Open Office will be pushed back to the Open Source community to make it go. SUN will be financially unable to support anything that doesn't make a solid return to get out of bankruptcy. Open Office will simply move out of SUN's control and over to the Open Source community to control.

Not sure what would happen with Open Office if IBM buys SUN.

Since IBM offered over $9.50 and SUN turned them down, and SUN's stock is trading for $6.48, anything could happen now.

Reply | Report this comment

It's easy to be a cynic as you don't have to do real work.

Submitted by Doug on April 5, 2009 - 12:56 P.M.

Steven I've valued your input on a lot of topics in the past. Your opinions here are a bit off base as it seams you haven't talked with many administrators using Sun equipment or Solaris.

Yes I am biased towards Solaris as we administer Solaris everyday along with Window, Ubuntu, Suse, CentOS on Sparc and x86 hardware(Sun and Dell). Solaris with ZFS and Zones allows us to maximize performance(usually disk IO is the bottlneck anywhere) and minimize hardware purchases.

We run an environment where 10 miliion page requests per day flow through only two Sun T1000 servers($3000 each). These servers are running at 10% CPU. Why Sparc for web servers? Cheap and secure. Who targets Sparc for buffer overflows?

We run Informix, DB2 as/400, MySQL, SQLServer and Oracle. IBM after buying Informix over 10 years ago still is releasing new software. Solaris is not going away.

In a large enterprise you use the tool that best fits a solution. There are no religious wars just solutions that get the most done at the best price.

IBM is sure to make a lot of money providing enterprise services for it's customers running Solaris. This is an area where Sun was surely lacking.

Reply | Report this comment

Who targets Sun for overflows?

Submitted by Anonymous on April 6, 2009 - 3:19 A.M.

Who targets Sun for overflows? ...what a cute

comment. Security through obscurity? Security

through depending on least popularity of

targets? Your apparently not a IT security

person in esence, go get a __thorough__

education, refer to OpenBSD for real security.

Reply | Report this comment

Actually Fully Patched on Solaris and Apache

Submitted by Doug on April 6, 2009 - 8:06 P.M.

My point was not obscurity. My point was less targeted and perhaps we get by when a zero day vulnerability comes out like what happened with bind this summer. We tested the new version of bind in a test environment, then internal DNS then external DNS this took about four hours.

I'll defer to you for further security recommendations.

Cheers.

Reply | Report this comment

Who targets Sun for overflows?

Submitted by Anonymous on April 6, 2009 - 3:16 A.M.

Who targets Sun for overflows? ...what a cute

comment. Security through obscurity? Security

through depending on least popularity of

targets? Your apparently not a IT security

person in esence, go get a __thorough__

education, refer to OpenBSD for real security.

Reply | Report this comment

Point! 10 million page

Submitted by Chetan on April 6, 2009 - 1:58 A.M.

Point!
10 million page requests per day
only two Sun T1000 servers, running at 10% CPU.

Solaris with ZFS and Zones allows us to maximize performance.

Reply | Report this comment

IBM and java

Submitted by TheBull on April 5, 2009 - 1:19 A.M.

If you think IBM has done better with java you've obviously never actually used any of their products. Websphere is a total POS, their JVM has been the slowest JVM for a good decade now.

Reply | Report this comment

mysql and netbeans are dead

Submitted by Anonymous on April 4, 2009 - 11:10 P.M.

The problem with mysql is not mysql, its the fact the IBM will not win back the creator of MySQL and forks will kill it.

MySQL is done from a marketing perspective. Billion dollars for nothing SUN.

As for NetBeans, what you fail to recognize is that IBM has to be careful declaring victory over Swing. Many hundreds of thousands more apps are written in Swing than the SWT.

IBM will have to rape the NetBeans visual editor and put it into eclipse by default.

Other than that NetBeans deserves to die all it did was copy eclipse features for the last 3 years.

Its a dud. And duds to duds all fall down.

Reply | Report this comment

Hello Steven, What's your

Submitted by AC on April 4, 2009 - 8:17 A.M.

Hello Steven,

What's your take on OpenOffice.org?

Reply | Report this comment

How can anyone even remotely

Submitted by Anonymous on April 3, 2009 - 10:49 P.M.

How can anyone even remotely trust MySQL after their disasterous 5.0 release? Who would ever, ever trust any production data to that monstrosity, even with giants like SUN or IBM backing the product?

RE NetBeans: They need to combine efforts on NetBeans and Eclipse and make the whole eclipse experience better. I love Eclipse, but out of the box it is terrible (slightly better lately, but not improving fast).

Reply | Report this comment