Thought you all might find this breaking news interesting: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/More-IBM-Layoffs-Coming-608504/
...the nightmare continues... Now I'm not an IBM hater. I actually think certain things such as the REXX scripting language, Parallel Sysplex, and System Z mainframe hardware are actually interesting from a purely academic / computer geek perspective, but I think IBM's stance on open-source can sometimes be hypocritical (where's the source code for OS/2 , z/OS, z/VM and AIX?) and that IBM buying Sun makes absolutely no sense because their combined catalogue of "SINBM" offerings would be unnecessarily redundant. Think about it-- all of their products would overlap in a conflicting way (Solaris conflicts with AIX, SPARC overlaps with POWER, DB2 overlaps with MySQL, Eclipse overlaps with Netbeans, Websphere overlaps with Sun Java System Web Server, Lotus Symphony overlaps with OpenOffice, etc. etc.) Also given the fact that a lot of Sun's best stuff is already open-sourced means that IBM could easily port or fork some of the code (like maybe port Dtrace and ZFS to AIX or optimize Java to run faster on IBM hardware) without paying $6 billion to actually buy Sun. So what could IBM possibly gain by guying Sun? Sun's newer products are slightly better than IBM's IMO because they are more innovative and engineering focused and use more "cutting edge" technology which maybe makes them a little bit less stable right now than Trusted Solaris 8 on UltraSPARC was 10 years ago, but it will pay off in a very big way if Sun can stay around long enough to see it through to fruition. IBM has always stuck to tried and true money making concepts such as making things that are very stable and that "just work" without all the advanced tweaking and command line wizardry that using bleeding edge high tech Sun products might require (if you took SMIT, the Linux compatibility, and the workload partitions out of AIX, the result would probably almost be the same thing as a Solaris 9 for Power architecture). IBM's advantages over Sun include the most mature and evolved mainframe class software and hardware on the planet... they've been in the mainframe business for 40+ years; zVM is probably the most mature mainframe virtualization platform out there and parallel sysplex clustering on System Z is probably the most massively scalable high availability business computing architecture I can think of off the top of my head since you can have something like 64 hot swappable quad core CPU's and 1.5 terrabytes of RAM in one System Z mainframe and then you use Parallel Sysplex to cluster 32 of these mainframes together and make it think of itself that it's one big super-mainframe with 2080 CPU's (8320 cores) and 48 terrabytes of RAM... maybe the result would be like the "Master Control Program" in the movie Tron? Here's a good link that explains it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Sysplex IBM's DB2 enterprise database software also seems to be underrated in that it seems to perform as well as Oracle (while costing less money) and it's been around longer and is more mature than MySQL (although MySQL is definitely the most popular DB in terms of sheer numbers of installations and it pretty much dominates the Linux landscape). IBM's marketing people also seem to be more aggressive than Sun's people are in that they let existing Sun customers trade in their old SPARC servers for massive discounts on new IBM hardware. Still, even with these advantages, IBM buying SUN makes no sense at all and is sheer lunacy. CISCO buying SUN makes more sense from a purely business perspective because CISCO values engineering and Sun's engineers are the best. CISCO also seems to be interested in getting in to the server market (although the results would probably still be negative for the OpenSolaris community since CISCO is not a big friend of open source like Sun is). Google buying Sun also makes sense somehow because almost everyone who worked at Sun or AT&T Bell Labs 25 or 35 years ago seems to be some kind of a "honorary fellow" or high ranking executive at Google nowadays. The current CEO of Google used to work for Sun back in the day, didn't he? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
