[osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Nik Masloff]

I know that this is mostly technology-related forum, but topic subject (in case 
of this will happen) will influence all ppl working with Sun`s technologies.

For those, who haven`t heard - this is the link 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/18/ibm_buying_sun/

I don`t want to spread "oh no, we`re all gonna die", neither "forget it" talks.

Just want to know your opinion - in case IBM will acquire Sun, and rights on 
Solaris/JAVA/MySQL etc - what will be Solaris/OpenSolaris future? Will it will 
replace niche AIX, or they will be both replaced by Linux? 

I just hope, that in case that IBM will buy Sun, they will not cutthroat 
Solaris, but rather develop it. Big vendor aid is highly appreciated in 
operating systems development.

Thank you.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Akhilesh Mritunjai]

Well, first of all, to me it just sounds nuts :-)

So long ago, over beer me and some of my friends were discussing about Sun. One 
of the future that we were contemplating was a buy out scenario. On the premise 
that market consolidation leads to competitors with almost same portfolio of 
products, we thought about Amazon, Oracle and even Apple as possible buyers... 
but NOT IBM.

I can't understand right now what is IBM looking to pay $6B for (though thats a 
discount of around 50%)! IBM already has a competing product portfolio that 
almost matches piece for piece with Sun, or even better - AIX, WebSphere, DB2 
etc are money making products and far up that ladder than Solaris, Glassfish or 
MySQL! Not to mention Eclipse that IBM uses as basis for many of its money 
making products (Lotus Notes etc).

So except may be for JAVA, I don't see any reason why IBM would like to buy 
Sun. Though I contend that $6B is one hell of a bargain price for being able to 
control that !! Rest are just baggage, at least for IBM unless they want to 
rebrand/replace some of their existing offerings, which I doubt.

- Akhilesh
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Mario Goebbels]

Should this deal go through, expect a dual-/relicensing galore somewhere down 
the road. Not necessarily a bad thing, but likely to end in incompatible forks 
(e.g. ZFS).

There, I said it.

-mg
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

This is HORRIBLE.
If IBM has any interest in taking over a smaller company with the same
products, then only to destroy competition:

Kill SPARC (T2 and Rock, not sure what they would do with Fujitsu's
SPARC64), move customers to PowerPC
Kill NetBeans, force customers to Eclipse.
Kill OpenSolaris, force customers to migrate to LinUX.

It would be hell.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Lurie]

I for one hope that this deal will not go through, otherwise OpenSolaris is 
doomed...
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Alexander Vlasov]

Oh no, we all gonna die!
Seriously, forget it.
It's third or fourth rumor of this kind this year. Should we discuss all 
of them?



Nik Masloff wrote:

I know that this is mostly technology-related forum, but topic subject (in case 
of this will happen) will influence all ppl working with Sun`s technologies.

For those, who haven`t heard - this is the link 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/18/ibm_buying_sun/

I don`t want to spread "oh no, we`re all gonna die", neither "forget it" talks.

Just want to know your opinion - in case IBM will acquire Sun, and rights on Solaris/JAVA/MySQL etc - what will be Solaris/OpenSolaris future? Will it will replace niche AIX, or they will be both replaced by Linux? 


I just hope, that in case that IBM will buy Sun, they will not cutthroat 
Solaris, but rather develop it. Big vendor aid is highly appreciated in 
operating systems development.

Thank you.


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| Alexander Vlasov.
| Solaris System Test: Hitting tomorrow bugs today
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Jonathan Blanchard]

I just hope that the OpenSolaris community and innovation continues even in the 
event of an acquisition. On the other hand it would fork and I wonder if 
OpenSolaris would be able to continue on it's own...
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Joerg Schilling]

Alexander Vlasov  wrote:

> Oh no, we all gonna die!
> Seriously, forget it.
> It's third or fourth rumor of this kind this year. Should we discuss all 
> of them?

If the other information (that Sun did approach HP before) was not available, I 
would of course ignore the IBM Sun rumor.

Jörg

-- 
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   joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: 
http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Lurie]

> It's third or fourth rumor of this kind this year.

Links please to rumours of the same magnitude, making Sun's share price jump 
74% (and it's still on the rise), reported by CNBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, Reuters, 
and pretty much everyone out there..
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Alexander Vlasov]

share price jump is the measure of people's belief in rumor, not reality 
of rumor itself.


however I must agree with you to some degree -- this one is far noisier 
than previous ones, theregister is not the only affected site ;)


Lurie wrote:

It's third or fourth rumor of this kind this year.


Links please to rumours of the same magnitude, making Sun's share price jump 
74% (and it's still on the rise), reported by CNBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, Reuters, 
and pretty much everyone out there..


--
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| Alexander Vlasov.
| Solaris System Test: Hitting tomorrow bugs today
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Mike DeMarco]

> Well, first of all, to me it just sounds nuts :-)
> 
> So long ago, over beer me and some of my friends were
> discussing about Sun. One of the future that we were
> contemplating was a buy out scenario. On the premise
> that market consolidation leads to competitors with
> almost same portfolio of products, we thought about
> Amazon, Oracle and even Apple as possible buyers...
> but NOT IBM.
> 
> I can't understand right now what is IBM looking to
> pay $6B for (though thats a discount of around 50%)!
> IBM already has a competing product portfolio that
> almost matches piece for piece with Sun, or even
> better - AIX, WebSphere, DB2 etc are money making
> products and far up that ladder than Solaris,
> Glassfish or MySQL! Not to mention Eclipse that IBM
> uses as basis for many of its money making products
> (Lotus Notes etc).
> 
> So except may be for JAVA, I don't see any reason why
> IBM would like to buy Sun. Though I contend that $6B
> is one hell of a bargain price for being able to
> control that !! Rest are just baggage, at least for
> IBM unless they want to rebrand/replace some of their
> existing offerings, which I doubt.
> 
> - Akhilesh
And don't forget storage Tek
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Mike DeMarco]

LPARS Yuck!
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=java


:-(
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Richard L. Hamilton]

I will be ok with this on exactly the day that IBM releases source for
z/OS and z/VM (plus ISPF and their compilers) under a license like either
BSD or GPL, and not until then.  (I would enjoy playing with something
newer than MVS 3.8j under Hercules, I admit...)

What can I as a mere individual with no vast wealth do to convince Sun
that they're just fine on their own, albeit perhaps cooperating with IBM and
others where it's in their mutual interest?  I have bought five used and one
new Sun workstation over the years, (far more than any other single brand
or even CPU type of computer I've had), plus a few hundred bucks of other
odds and ends (new).

I don't do stock; not anybody's, whatever I think of them, because I'd
become an obsessive market-watcher for sure.  And I have little or no
direct influence on how anyone but me personally spends money.
(Away from home, I do work with Sun systems, but have negligible influence
on spending, and would regard anything there as having to serve only my
employer's interests anyway, so that's off the table.)  At most, I might
give a relative a few hundred bucks to buy and hold some stock.

I'm not averse to parting with up to low three digits of $ (US) of my own
money for something that's of at least nominal use to me, nor with up to low
to almost mid four digits for something I could really use.  Not that I expect
that alone to amount to anything in the context of multi-billion dollar deals.

So what can I do to put this puppy to sleep?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Chris Steinke]

If anyone were to buy Sun, I'd prefer Fujitsu, Hitachi or Siemens . NOT IBM! 
Fujitsu doesn't seem to be hurting as badly as the others.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Linda kateley]

Richard L. Hamilton wrote:

I will be ok with this on exactly the day that IBM releases source for
z/OS and z/VM (plus ISPF and their compilers) under a license like either
BSD or GPL, and not until then.  (I would enjoy playing with something
newer than MVS 3.8j under Hercules, I admit...)

What can I as a mere individual with no vast wealth do to convince Sun
that they're just fine on their own, albeit perhaps cooperating with IBM and
others where it's in their mutual interest?  I have bought five used and one
new Sun workstation over the years, (far more than any other single brand
or even CPU type of computer I've had), plus a few hundred bucks of other
odds and ends (new).

I don't do stock; not anybody's, whatever I think of them, because I'd
become an obsessive market-watcher for sure.  And I have little or no
direct influence on how anyone but me personally spends money.
(Away from home, I do work with Sun systems, but have negligible influence
on spending, and would regard anything there as having to serve only my
employer's interests anyway, so that's off the table.)  At most, I might
give a relative a few hundred bucks to buy and hold some stock.

I'm not averse to parting with up to low three digits of $ (US) of my own
money for something that's of at least nominal use to me, nor with up to low
to almost mid four digits for something I could really use.  Not that I expect
that alone to amount to anything in the context of multi-billion dollar deals.

So what can I do to put this puppy to sleep?
  

outstanding! this is the kind of love money can't buy.

--
Linda Kateley
Solaris Architect 
612-807-6349


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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

Let us all hope it is only a trick in order to lift the stock for a while.
Otherwise, if he really intends to give Sun away for a few peanuts (a
joke of 6.5 bln), to one of the most hostile rivals, I will be VERY
disappointed by JS.

Then you have it black on white (or "Schwartz" auf Weiss), that those
"managers" are doomed to lie, whatever it is they are saying in press
releases or on their blogs, even if just a minute ago. Then they do
the opposite of what they had promised. Maybe he is selling his own
private stocks today, which he got as "bonus" last year in May, after
big losses had to be reported. Back then his 2008 bonuses had been
worth 20 millions or so, if I recall correctly.
After such a manager kills one company, get gets yet more bonuses and
"rewards" and moves on to do the same with the next company (e.g. a
former rival firm).
That's the difference between todays system and true capitalism from
150 years ago.

How else can one explain, for example, that the former CEO of BMW
moved on to become VW's CEO and so on?
It happens all the time.

Until recently every American wanted to teach other countries'
natives, "How capitalism works [T.M.]" or "how the markets regulate
themselves".
Meanwhile it should have become a bit more obvious, that most of that
had been wishful thinking, an illusion that uses to be re-iterated
every day until people believe it.

p.s. Yesterday the Fed pumped another 1 Trillion USD into the system,
created from air.
It is only a matter of a few years, until this continues to inflate
the USD. Effectively it is THEFT from all Americans and all others who
ever invested into the USD.

But a more detailed discussion of those issues might be OT on any
technically oriented list like this one.
_Fortunately_.

p.s. Google for last year's Presidental candidate Ron Paul. Listen to
what he says. Be sure to search youtube for him. Invest in Gold or
Platin.

Thank yourself, if you take the time.

Have a nice day.
%martin
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[UNIX admin]

> This is HORRIBLE.
> If IBM has any interest in taking over a smaller
> company with the same
> products, then only to destroy competition:

Usually, yes. Chances are good that's the case here.

> Kill SPARC (T2 and Rock, not sure what they would do
> with Fujitsu's
> SPARC64),

They can't do anything about Fujitsu, since it is its own company, producing 
its own hardware designs and its own processors; in other words, other than 
Solaris himself, Fujitsu would be largely unaffected.

And all the mainframe-class systems Sun sells today are actually a Sun 
rebranded Fujitsu hardware running Fujitsu's, not Sun's processors.

Other than T-series and the i86pc series, Sun doesn't really produce any SPARC 
based systems any more.[QUOTE]move customers to PowerPC[/QUOTE]It'd be nice if 
it really happened!

I would not mind running Solaris on POWER6. Not at all, provided that the 
hardware is *DIRT CHEAP* and easily available, in rang with the run 'o' the 
mill PC-bucket.

If anything, it would bring the PlayStation 3 port of Solaris closer to reality.

Otherwise, it'd be a disaster for Solaris. I'm so sick and tired of expensive 
proprietary systems; I hate them, passionately!

> Kill NetBeans, force customers to Eclipse.

Is that really relevant? From what I can tell, Eclipse is the defacto standard 
anyway.

> Kill OpenSolaris, force customers to migrate to
> LinUX.

Can't kill something that's open source. If IBM tries to pull any stupid stuff, 
I'm forking the OpenSolaris code immediately, no ifs, buts, or maybes. I will 
have no mercy.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Martin Bochnig  wrote:
> But a more detailed discussion of those issues might be OT on any
> technically oriented list like this one.
> _Fortunately_.
>
> p.s. Google for last year's Presidental candidate Ron Paul. Listen to
> what he says. Be sure to search youtube for him. Invest in Gold or
> Platin.


Never heard of Ron Paul??
Well, couldn't it be that those circles who control the mass media, do
not want you to???
During last year's US election campaign he had quite some popularity
and success not just in his home state. But his name had simply been
removed/omitted/ignore/snip-snap'ed out  of/from all that publicly
broadcasting. This includes falsified pre-election-polls where his
name simply wasn't listed.

If you cannot believe this, verify it  yourself.
Real change is never going to come.
The two CIA-murdered Kennedy's prove this.

>
> Thank yourself, if you take the time.
>
> Have a nice day.
> %martin
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 8:14 AM, UNIX admin  wrote:
>> Kill OpenSolaris, force customers to migrate to
>> LinUX.
>
> Can't kill something that's open source. If IBM tries to pull any stupid 
> stuff, I'm forking the OpenSolaris code immediately, no ifs, buts, or maybes. 
> I will have no mercy.


Yes, of course. Luckily!!
And I _know_, that most people on this list will jointly do this,
together with you, or you together with them   :))

We talked about this before. But it doesn't make any sense to make a
branch-off from Sun.
Under that new situation it would obviously be totally different.

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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Nik Masloff]

>> Kill OpenSolaris, force customers to migrate to
>> LinUX.

>Can't kill something that's open source. If IBM tries to pull any stupid 
>stuff, I'm forking the OpenSolaris >code immediately, no ifs, buts, or maybes. 
>I will have no mercy.

Let`s hope that this will not happen...I personally doubt, that IBM will slay 
Solaris in favour of AIX, Solaris so far is much more architecture-independent 
than AIX.

And (only IMHO and in theory) with Free\Open\NetBSD`s is going out from 
enterprise usage, (fork of) OpenSolaris could take this place and more. There 
were OpenSolaris, now it`s FreeSolaris :)

But let`s hope this will not happen.

Everything IBM touches is turned to gold, but loosing it`s inspiration and, 
well, unix-way :)
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Timo Schoeler]

thus Nik Masloff spake:

Kill OpenSolaris, force customers to migrate to LinUX.



Can't kill something that's open source. If IBM tries to pull any
stupid stuff, I'm forking the OpenSolaris >code immediately, no
ifs, buts, or maybes. I will have no mercy.


Let`s hope that this will not happen...I personally doubt, that IBM
will slay Solaris in favour of AIX, Solaris so far is much more
architecture-independent than AIX.

And (only IMHO and in theory) with Free\Open\NetBSD`s is going out
from enterprise usage,


Is it, really?


(fork of) OpenSolaris could take this place
and more. There were OpenSolaris, now it`s FreeSolaris :)

But let`s hope this will not happen.

Everything IBM touches is turned to gold, but loosing it`s
inspiration and, well, unix-way :)


Don't think so. Power is overwhelming :)

Best,

Timo
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Timo Schoeler
 wrote:
>> (fork of) OpenSolaris could take this place
>> and more. There were OpenSolaris, now it`s FreeSolaris :)
>>
>> But let`s hope this will not happen.
>>
>> Everything IBM touches is turned to gold, but loosing it`s
>> inspiration and, well, unix-way :)
>
> Don't think so. Power is overwhelming :)


Do you think IBM would not immediately discontinue SPARC and so many
other then-redundant things (such as Netbeand, MySQL etc etc) in case
of a takeover?
Is OpenSPARC.net not an "overwhelming" offering?

Do you believe IBM would invest the resources necessary to port
OpenSolaris to power (in a proper manner, with usable results)?
Unlikely. Instead the would cut the pearls out of OpenSolaris and for
better or worse put them into AIX and LinUX.

>From the way in which you argue you could also state "LinUX is
overwhelming". It sure is and many think so. But we are on a
Sun-OpenSolaris list here.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Timo Schoeler]

thus Martin Bochnig spake:

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Timo Schoeler
 wrote:

(fork of) OpenSolaris could take this place
and more. There were OpenSolaris, now it`s FreeSolaris :)

But let`s hope this will not happen.

Everything IBM touches is turned to gold, but loosing it`s
inspiration and, well, unix-way :)

Don't think so. Power is overwhelming :)



Do you think IBM would not immediately discontinue SPARC and so many
other then-redundant things (such as Netbeand, MySQL etc etc) in case
of a takeover?


There's OpenSPARC; there's Fujitsu; I don't see a problem here. 
Furthermore, imagine what could be there -- something like a Power/SPARC 
hybrid, which uses *both* ISAs? That would be a nice thing. Just as an 
option.



Is OpenSPARC.net not an "overwhelming" offering?


Yupp. I just wanted to say that IBM is not the 'uncool' way of doing 
Unix. Power hardware rocks, as does AIX (after a certain time you need 
to get used to it); it's way better than 'not-proprietary' x86/Linux 
stuff (isn't x86 as much as proprietary as 
Power/SPARC/PA-RISC/MIPS/ARM/etc is? ;)...



Do you believe IBM would invest the resources necessary to port
OpenSolaris to power (in a proper manner, with usable results)?


I don't know. Why not? Furthermore, there's already the Polaris project...


Unlikely. Instead the would cut the pearls out of OpenSolaris and for
better or worse put them into AIX and LinUX.


I don't see how; it starts with licensing issues... and that's not the 
end, I could imagine a gazillion reasons why this won't happen. :)



From the way in which you argue you could also state "LinUX is
overwhelming".


I surely don't and wouldn't do so, I'm a BSD addict; however, during the 
last years I became much less political in this regard, so... use the 
perfect fitting tool. Sometimes this even may be GNU/Linux.


> It sure is and many think so.

Maybe, maybe not.


But we are on a
Sun-OpenSolaris list here.


Sure; but discussion on this Sun/IBM thing wouldn't work without 
external influences and ingredients like this. It raises many many 
topics like 'continuing this or that CPU arch' or licensing issues etc...


Best,

Timo
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Karel Gardas]

Indeed! The problem is that I've read somewhere about fujitsu putting a knife 
on the throat of their computer division (or was it just pc division?) to force 
it to be more profitable otherwise it would be sold. (or was it siemens?)
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Karel Gardas]

Well, let see what happens at the end, but aren't NetBeans and OpenSolaris 
open-sourced already? In the worst case I'm sure they will get a chance to 
proof if they are really healthy open-source projects or not. W.r.t. 
OpenSolaris this would probably mean to resurrect the project which aims to 
make it compilable by GNU C (assuming IBM will kill SunStudio CC compilers 
product line or will not make them free (as a beer) anymore).
W.r.t. Fujitsu SPARC64 I would bet that this will survive since if I understand 
correctly SPARC design is already free, so here Fujitsu (using sparc/solaris 
combo) will compete with IBM (using their transitive product line) over 
existing SPARC/Solaris based customers -- the question is how many they are 
still. Perhaps just as many as for Sun to be worth the 6.5bn$.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[UNIX admin]

> Yes, of course. Luckily!!
> And I _know_, that most people on this list will
> jointly do this,
> together with you, or you together with them   :))

Gladly!

> We talked about this before. But it doesn't make any
> sense to make a
> branch-off from Sun.

I concur. Right now, it doesn't make sense to do that. But should things 
deteriorate, action will be taken.  I'm downloading the current snapshot of the 
code for archival tonight.

Sicher ist sicher.

I actually believe in the community. There are at least several *former* Sun 
engineers that kept working on Solaris code even after they were laid off, and 
that tells one a lot about true enthusiasm of the OpenSolaris community, and is 
a testament to excellence of Solaris.

This isn't about Sun any more. OpenSolaris *will* live on, come hell or high 
water.

> Under that new situation it would obviously be
> totally different.

Agreed.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[UNIX admin]

> Let`s hope that this will not happen...I personally
> doubt, that IBM will slay Solaris in favour of AIX,
> Solaris so far is much more architecture-independent
> than AIX.

WARNING: speculation.
This could go two ways,

a) IBM helps the OpenSolaris effort further

b) IBM moves in for the kill.

IBM stands to profit both ways, but a) is not the obvious way.

Solaris has been a thorn in IBM's behind for a very long time; IBM and AIX lost 
many a contract and sale opportunity to Sun and Solaris. If IBM pays USD $6.5 
billion, IBM gets a shot at finally shooting their biggest OS competitor in the 
head.

IBM wants to sell services around GNU/Linux, because IBM is against Microsoft 
and Linux goes against Microsoft. It is hard for me to see IBM investing 
considerable reasources to spearhead Solaris in that direction.

Solaris on the other hand does not go against Microsoft, and, in quite an 
ingenious move, Sun has a 10 year contract which allows them to integrate 
features out of Windows into Solaris, ergo CIFS kernel support. So it is the 
exact opposite, Solaris has benefited greatly from *cooperation* between 
Microsoft and Sun, the exact opposite of what IBM has been doing up to this 
point.

Finally, and here is the kicker --

> Everything IBM touches is turned to gold, but loosing
> it`s inspiration and, well, unix-way :)

Everything? How about a company, named IBM, that pretty much killed their own 
operating system, AIX, in favor of some hack-job effort called GNU/Linux?

Best case scenario, IBM treat AIX as an abused stepchild that they inherited 
along the way, and are now somehow stuck with an OS they themselves don't 
believe in: closed, expensive, proprietary, runs only on CHRP PPC, no gratis 
compilers, no gratis cluster, and definitely NO CHEAP HARDWARE TO RUN AIX ON.

They touch everything to Gold? Well, what I described above does not look like 
they'll be nice to Solaris.

But we will have to wait and see how this chapter of computer history turns out.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 11:21 AM, UNIX admin  wrote:
>> Yes, of course. Luckily!!
>> And I _know_, that most people on this list will
>> jointly do this,
>> together with you, or you together with them   :))
>
> Gladly!
>
>> We talked about this before. But it doesn't make any
>> sense to make a
>> branch-off from Sun.
>
> I concur. Right now, it doesn't make sense to do that. But should things 
> deteriorate, action will be taken.  I'm downloading the current snapshot of 
> the code for archival tonight.
>
> Sicher ist sicher.


I kept wget running since January 30th (the one operating over
www.opensolaris.org still didn't finish yet, maybe it came into an
infinite loop).

$ ls
WGET20090210tue__www.opensolaris.org.log3
WGET20090210tue__www.opensolaris.org.log4
WGET__www.opensolaris.org.log
WGET__www.opensolaris.org.log2
WGET__www.opensolaris.org.log3
WGET_cmd.sh
alicesuche.aol.de
cn.opensolaris.org
logfileMon Mar 16 10:07:28 MET 2009.log
logfileMon Mar 16 10:08:12 MET 2009.log
opensolaris.org
www.opensolaris.org

$ du -h .
[... SNIP]
 20K./alicesuche.aol.de
  36K   ./opensolaris.org/os/project/nwam/p1spec
  37K   ./opensolaris.org/os/project/nwam
  38K   ./opensolaris.org/os/project
  39K   ./opensolaris.org/os
 1.4M   ./opensolaris.org
  50G   .
$ cd ../006
$ ls
WGET__dlc.sun.com___osol   WGET__dlc.sun.com__osol.log5
WGET__dlc.sun.com___osol.log2  dlc-cdn-rd.sun.com
WGET__dlc.sun.com___osol.log3  dlc.sun.com
WGET__dlc.sun.com___osol.log4
$ df -h .
[SNAP ...]
 67M./dlc.sun.com/osol/xfce/downloads
  67M   ./dlc.sun.com/osol/xfce
 145M   ./dlc.sun.com/osol/zfsboot/downloads
 145M   ./dlc.sun.com/osol/zfsboot
 217M   ./dlc.sun.com/osol/zfscrypto/downloads/20071004
 217M   ./dlc.sun.com/osol/zfscrypto/downloads/alpha
 217M   ./dlc.sun.com/osol/zfscrypto/downloads/current
 651M   ./dlc.sun.com/osol/zfscrypto/downloads
 651M   ./dlc.sun.com/osol/zfscrypto
 149G   ./dlc.sun.com/osol
   8K   ./dlc.sun.com/mc-icons
   2K   ./dlc.sun.com/global
 149G   ./dlc.sun.com
   7K   ./dlc-cdn-rd.sun.com/c1/osol/opensolaris
 3.2G   ./dlc-cdn-rd.sun.com/c1/osol/indiana/downloads/current
 3.2G   ./dlc-cdn-rd.sun.com/c1/osol/indiana/downloads
 3.2G   ./dlc-cdn-rd.sun.com/c1/osol/indiana
 3.2G   ./dlc-cdn-rd.sun.com/c1/osol
 3.2G   ./dlc-cdn-rd.sun.com/c1
 3.2G   ./dlc-cdn-rd.sun.com
 152G   .
$

Be aware that I also made local mirror-alike copies of docs.sun.com
(with all pdfs) and sunsolve's system handbook. Also opensparc.net of
course.
Partially this was more problematic than in earlier times, because
some access has now been migrated to database, rather than plain
files.

I did those things to better "feel" and see what is there, locally on
my laptop's TB disk.
Now it could even become important in another light, as a snapshot of
how things were before abc removed or changed xyz?

Just in case ...
"Sicher ist sicher", I must agree.


> I actually believe in the community. There are at least several *former* Sun 
> engineers that kept working on Solaris code even after they were laid off, 
> and that tells one a lot about true enthusiasm of the OpenSolaris community, 
> and is a testament to excellence of Solaris.
>
> This isn't about Sun any more. OpenSolaris *will* live on, come hell or high 
> water.
>
>> Under that new situation it would obviously be
>> totally different.
>
> Agreed.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[UNIX admin]

> I don't know. Why not? Furthermore, there's already
> the Polaris project...

...Which hasn't gone anywhere after Genesi killed the ODW ("open desktop 
workstation"), the PS3 as the target wasn't accepted, and finally it was 
determined that the POWER hardware, the next logical target, was way too 
expensive.  Which it is.

Some work has been done on porting OpenSolaris to EFIKA, but as far as I know, 
that didn't get very far. Porting is a serious business, and the project is 
hurting from lack of human resources; don't expect to see any Polaris ISO 
images available for download any time soon.

PS3 is the target which is abundant enough and makes the most sense to port to, 
after all, would wouldn't want to be able to run Sun cluster on a pile of PS3s, 
or use a PS3 workstation but be able to run a game after a long day of work, 
but there isn't enough PS3 HW know-how to go around for that. At least not for 
OpenSolaris, at least not right now.

A shame, really. What a pity.

> I surely don't and wouldn't do so, I'm a BSD addict;
> however, during the 
> last years I became much less political in this
> regard, so... use the 
> perfect fitting tool. Sometimes this even may be
> GNU/Linux.

I'll tell you one thing: if any of the BSDs had any clustering solution akin to 
Sun or Veritas cluster, And the Solaris became irrelevant, I'd start using BSD 
immediately, just so I didn't have to end up on GNU/Linux!
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Timo Schoeler]

thus UNIX admin spake:

I don't know. Why not? Furthermore, there's already the Polaris
project...


...Which hasn't gone anywhere after Genesi killed the ODW ("open
desktop workstation"),


I know; on the other hand, this was a typical straw fire like all the 
others in the Amiga universe and surrounding galaxies. I don't want to 
make things worse, but in the end there was not a single project during 
the last decade that ended up successfully; they had super-glamourous PR 
teams, and -- maybe -- one geek with a soldering iron. Forget it. This 
is like being a 14 year old (thinking of myself) being 'in love' with 
his/her Power Mac, SPARCstation or whatever in the 90s. Well, I grew up ;)



the PS3 as the target wasn't accepted, and
finally it was determined that the POWER hardware, the next logical
target, was way too expensive.  Which it is.


Err, a very good friend of mine and I started to fork and port NetBSD to 
Power back in 2005 in order to build a whole new OS with an Exokernel 
and BSD userland. Even back then it was *no* problem to get a nice 
Power3 machine off eBay (or somewhere else). Perfect for developing! 
Accidentally, I checked prices for Power4+ workstations (Model 275) some 
hours ago, you can get the single CPU 1GHz model for about a hundred 
bucks (I'm talking of US$; EUR is about 70 - 80). Granted, those 
machines have scratches and missing doors, but still are good work horses.


I don't see why one should see PS3 as tier 1 target; it'd be nice to 
have Cell supported, but that's no necessity.



Some work has been done on porting OpenSolaris to EFIKA, but as far
as I know, that didn't get very far. Porting is a serious business,
and the project is hurting from lack of human resources; don't expect
to see any Polaris ISO images available for download any time soon.


I don't expect it, at least as long as they use non-existent hardware as 
their target. C'mon...



PS3 is the target which is abundant enough and makes the most sense
to port to, after all, would wouldn't want to be able to run Sun
cluster on a pile of PS3s, or use a PS3 workstation but be able to
run a game after a long day of work, but there isn't enough PS3 HW
know-how to go around for that. At least not for OpenSolaris, at
least not right now.


It's a nice tier 2 target.


A shame, really. What a pity.


I surely don't and wouldn't do so, I'm a BSD addict; however,
during the last years I became much less political in this regard,
so... use the perfect fitting tool. Sometimes this even may be 
GNU/Linux.


I'll tell you one thing: if any of the BSDs had any clustering
solution akin to Sun or Veritas cluster, And the Solaris became
irrelevant, I'd start using BSD immediately, just so I didn't have to
end up on GNU/Linux!


:)

Best,

Timo
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Tim Scanlon]

I'd prefer they not be bought out. I don't think it's a good idea, and won't 
create customer value.

I do think the talk about a possible purchase has flushed out the persistent 
short sellers. I seriously hope those people lose their shirts, they deserve 
every nickel of loss they suck down.

If there were no choice but to sell, I'd rather see the company sold to IBM 
than a non-US entity, having dealt with some of the names mentioned in this 
thread, I am convinced that a foreign sale would be a complete disaster. Sun is 
a well managed company, staffed by people who for the most part have common 
sense and technical clue. Some of these other companies are staffed by 
management teams that are mired in dysfunctional corporate culture that's worse 
than any I have ever seen in my life. Would you want Sun to be bought by a 
company who's management refused to use version control on major custom 
software revisions? That kind of thing wouldn't pass muster at IBM, or at least 
so I hope.

And how much of this is ZFS driven Linux envy? IBM's already in bed with 
Redhat, they own AIX, and the list goes on. That list is no expression of 
market efficiency either, and that's one of my largest concerns. I don't see 
the market efficiencies in a situation where Sun is purchased by a company that 
already is not making the most of what it has.

If I had to take my pick for a sale, I'd rather see Sun bought by Cisco than 
most other companies that I can think of. It'd probably not trigger the same 
regulatory issues, create technical opportunity for both parties, and the 
cultural fit would be better too.

Tim
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[UNIX admin]

> I don't see why one should see PS3 as tier 1 target;

For a very simple reason: they are cheap and abundant, and can be had new, 
instead of being forced to scavenge off of ebay (and I should know, about 50% 
of my private server park is hardware scavanged "boots to some kind of a 
prompt" off of ebay).

> it'd be nice to 
> have Cell supported, but that's no necessity.

I'd say it's easier to get it ported to PS3 first, and then CHRP POWER second, 
if need be. Which I seriously doubt there would be.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Timo Schoeler]

I don't see why one should see PS3 as tier 1 target;


For a very simple reason: they are cheap and abundant, and can be had
new, instead of being forced to scavenge off of ebay (and I should
know, about 50% of my private server park is hardware scavanged
"boots to some kind of a prompt" off of ebay).


Granted, versus following reason why it's NOT tier 1: What can be done 
with such a box besides booting it and


- display a nice screensaver

- maybe show some content (streamed movie, blueray, whatever)

On the other hand, a Power machine (don't forget Apple's G3 to G5 
machines!) has far more options...



it'd be nice to have Cell supported, but that's no necessity.


I'd say it's easier to get it ported to PS3 first, and then CHRP
POWER second, if need be. Which I seriously doubt there would be.


This is a shame...
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Zoltan Farkas]

If IBM will own Solaris it will have no incentive to send more money the RedHat 
Way  Solaris will become a revenue source for them, Linux is not.
They will probably port Solaris for Power, and migrate AIX custommers via AIX 
Brandz... this way they can consolidate on one OS across all their platforms...
I would also not worry about relicensing Solaris technology to be used in Linux 
because it would benefit HP,  DELL and that is not in IBMs interest... They 
will maintain Linux as a "low end" option as they always did...

If IBM takes over SUN, I wonder what impact Netapp will have since IBM OEMs 
their gear... Another opportunity for IBM to redirect money in own pockets...

the more I think about it, this deal makes sense for IBM...
The bad thing is that this will reduce competition and eliminate jobs...

Just read JS blog post today, and looked at the Mac OSX screen shots he posted, 
and was wondering why he did not use the opportunity to promote opensolaris... 
I would not be surprised if Apple buys Sun 
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Peter Jones]

Maybe this is talk to get the price down further on IBM's part? Maybe pot shots 
at Sun is sourer grapes by IBM employees sensing their jobs are threatened.Sun 
needs to gain things it does not have to survive.International management 
experise,good marketing and expertise,cash for development and further sales 
expansion.From a business prospective IBM and Sun could form a joint venture 
company to develope opensolaris.Or a MS competitor like Google could see their 
dreams realised with a spring board they have been looking for.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

Forget about the rumors!!! This URL link describes the true story of what is 
going on behind the scenes in the IBM / SUN acquisition negotiations:

 http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2009/03/ibm_near_to_jon.html

  ;-)

If it doesn't actually go through, then it was a brilliant move by Sun 
executive management to boost the value of Sun's stock price in tough economic 
times.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Anon Y Mous  wrote:

> If it doesn't actually go through, then it was a brilliant move by Sun 
> executive management to boost the value of Sun's stock price in tough 
> economic times.


That's exactly my hope which I expressed as early as last week, in
that message where I mentioned that I would be disappointed by JS, if
he was really serious about giving away S U N for a few peanuts:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss/2009-March/045439.html

Martin Bochnig wrote:
"Let us all hope it is only a trick in order to lift the stock for a while.
Otherwise, if he really intends to give Sun away for a few peanuts (a
joke of 6.5 bln), to one of the most hostile rivals, I will be VERY
disappointed by JS."

-
Ahh: 'ne ny-Mouse   :)
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

FYI, in their own words, this is what IBM's opinion of Solaris is:

"Migrate from Sun Solaris: Don't get burned"
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/migratetoibm/sun.html?&ca=qapromo-s0stg-b0stg-l0mig-d0stgsmb-n033-o0fromsun-g0usen

Guide to porting from Solaris to Linux on x86
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-solar/ 

Solaris to Linux Migration (a WHOLE BOOK!!!)
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247186.html?open&ca=qapromo-s0sd-b0sd-l0rb-d0sdrb-n050-o0solaris-g0usen

You guys really think they would keep Solaris around to compete with Linux and 
AIX if they bought Sun?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Malte Hahlbeck]

What would happen to Opensolaris and other open sourced software like 
Glassfish, Netbeans etc.?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Malte Hahlbeck
 wrote:
> What would happen to Opensolaris and other open sourced software like 
> Glassfish, Netbeans etc.?


I think any code that has been published under a FSF-approved license
simply cannot be withdrawn / taken back. And this includes the CDDL
because it is FSF approved. So whatever they would do, e.g. take all
sites down and change all projects to proprietary licenses, they could
not do this backwards. So the community can simply branch-off and host
it somewhere else, such as on sf.net .

I am not a lawyer, but this is what makes sense to me.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[ольга крыжановская]

On 3/23/09, Malte Hahlbeck  wrote:
> What would happen to Opensolaris and other open sourced software like 
> Glassfish, Netbeans etc.?

Solaris customers are migrated to Linux. There's no point to allow
competition to own products. IBM will be committed to existing
contracts but no new contracts will be allowed.
-- 
  ,   __   ,
 { \/`o;-Olga Kryzhanovska   -;o`\/ }
.'-/`-/ olga.kryzhanov...@gmail.com   \-`\-'.
 `'-..-| / Solaris/BSD//C/C++ programmer   \ |-..-'`
  /\/\ /\/\
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

2009/3/23 ольга крыжановская :
> On 3/23/09, Malte Hahlbeck  wrote:
>> What would happen to Opensolaris and other open sourced software like 
>> Glassfish, Netbeans etc.?
>
> Solaris customers are migrated to Linux. There's no point to allow
> competition to own products. IBM will be committed to existing
> contracts but no new contracts will be allowed.


Называешь ли ты один "фантастическое будущее"? Ну страшно!

(Dou you call this a "fantastic future"? Not nice.)
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Alexander Eremin]

On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 14:51 +0100, Martin Bochnig wrote:
> 2009/3/23 ольга крыжановская :
> > On 3/23/09, Malte Hahlbeck  wrote:
> >> What would happen to Opensolaris and other open sourced software like 
> >> Glassfish, Netbeans etc.?
> >
> > Solaris customers are migrated to Linux. There's no point to allow
> > competition to own products. IBM will be committed to existing
> > contracts but no new contracts will be allowed.
> 
> 
> Называешь ли ты один "фантастическое 
> будущее"? Ну страшно!
> 
> (Dou you call this a "fantastic future"? Not nice.)
> ___
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May be this not so terrible. I think that opensolaris community will
survive even in an underground ;)

Regards,
Alexander Eremin
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Alexander Eremin  wrote:

> May be this not so terrible. I think that opensolaris community will
> survive even in an underground ;)
>
> Regards,
> Alexander Eremin



Hi Alex, yes, we all will.

 :)

rgds. %martin
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Zoltan Farkas]

Hmm, I will disagree here, IBM is a business, and as such they will always look 
to maximize revenue.

Currently they resell Redhat Linux, If they buy Sun, they will pretty much own 
Solaris.

Do the math... what brigs them more money? Selling Solaris or reselling Linux?

I am not saying that they will stop selling Linux, but I have a very good idea 
of what they will recommend to their customers ...

What is the most interesting in this possible acquisition is: What will happen 
with SPARC? 

But then again, is this deal going to happen? Will IBM buy the whole company, 
or only part of it?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Lurie]

> Do the math... what brigs them more money? Selling
> Solaris or reselling Linux?

In order to sell Solaris, they have to develop it, which costs a lot of money.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Zoltan Farkas]

If solaris dev costs < solaris revenue then IBM will be fine.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Alexander Vlasov]

Zoltan Farkas wrote:

Hmm, I will disagree here, IBM is a business, and as such they will always look 
to maximize revenue.

Currently they resell Redhat Linux, If they buy Sun, they will pretty much own 
Solaris.

Do the math... what brigs them more money? Selling Solaris or reselling Linux?

I am not saying that they will stop selling Linux, but I have a very good idea 
of what they will recommend to their customers ...


Yes, it would be Linux -- for bunch of reasons.

--
| Regards,
| Alexander Vlasov.
| Solaris System Test: Hitting tomorrow bugs today
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Tim Scanlon]

I think it's a horrible, horrible mistake. I have worked for IBM, I have had to 
work with them as a vendor, and doing either has become something that I seek 
to avoid. I would not recommend them to anyone as a vendor, and I sincerely 
hope that this deal does not go through. 

I do not think the deal will provide value for Sun shareholders. Instead I 
think that value will be lost, and they will see a loss on their present 
investment in the long term. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not done much 
basic research into IBM's other corporate and managerial activities, both now 
and in the past. One of those activities has been to ask for US $30 billion in 
taxpayer aid. This activity is incompatible with Sun shareholder interests, and 
those of US citizens.

Talk of a deal has driven off malicious short sellers like tick spray, but so 
far that's about the only positive return I see on the horizon for this deal.

Both Sun and IBM's lack of response to potential problems with this idea across 
the board from interested communities is very troubling.

Tim Scanlon
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

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?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Mykola Maslov]

I think it's a horrible, horrible mistake. I have worked for IBM, I have had to work with them as a vendor, and doing either has become something that I seek to avoid. I would not recommend them to anyone as a vendor, and I sincerely hope that this deal does not go through. 


I do not think the deal will provide value for Sun shareholders. Instead I 
think that value will be lost, and they will see a loss on their present 
investment in the long term. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not done much 
basic research into IBM's other corporate and managerial activities, both now 
and in the past. One of those activities has been to ask for US $30 billion in 
taxpayer aid. This activity is incompatible with Sun shareholder interests, and 
those of US citizens.

Talk of a deal has driven off malicious short sellers like tick spray, but so 
far that's about the only positive return I see on the horizon for this deal.

Both Sun and IBM's lack of response to potential problems with this idea across 
the board from interested communities is very troubling.

Tim Scanlon




BTW - is Sun shareholders in US is capable to have influence on Sun 
acquisition/non-acquisition by third party? I have a legal higher
education also, but I don`t have a clue re US legislation.


I mean, here in Ukraine, if shareholders haven`t gave their approval, such
acquisition much probably will not happen.




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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Tim Scanlon]

system5 said:

"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?"

Either of those outcomes would be vastly more preferable than a sale to IBM. 
Then too in my opinion, getting kicked in the head over and over would be 
preferable to dealing with IBM. Far less painfully stupid and ingrown at least.


Tim
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

More bad news Oracle and HP are bidding on a joint "Sun Dismemberment 
Deal"

  http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/03/26/oracle_hp_joint_sun_deal/

I'm still hoping that this going to fall through and end up doing nothing but 
raising Sun's stock price over the short term.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

>More bad news Oracle and HP are bidding on a joint "Sun Dismemberment 
>Deal"

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/03/26/oracle_hp_joint_sun_deal/

>I'm still hoping that this going to fall through and end up doing nothing but 
>raising Sun's stock price >over the short term.


I'm guessing that Oracle's main interest is in killing off the open source 
MySQL database that Linux relies on while IBM's main interest is in killing off 
Solaris and Dtrace / ZFS HP probably only cares about getting Sun's high 
tech server technology and engineering skills, which are technologically years 
ahead of everyone else (including IBM and HP).
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[John Brewer]

Competition is good for the marketplace and brings innovation, I believe Ben 
Franklin coined the orig quote. 
The other hidden issue that no one talks about in these deals is how much they 
would save in royalties in buying a target company.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[W. Wayne Liauh]

> BTW - is Sun shareholders in US is capable to have
> influence on Sun acquisition/non-acquisition by third
> party? I have a legal higher
> education also, but I don`t have a clue re US
> legislation.
> 
> 
> I mean, here in Ukraine, if shareholders haven`t gave
> their approval, such
> acquisition much probably will not happen.
> 

Of course, Sun's shareholders have a final say on the rumored deal.  I have 
heard--no basis whatsoever--that Sun's largest shareholder Southeastern Asset 
Management ("SEAM") is not happy with the offer. SEAM's flagship mutual fund 
Longleaf Partners acquired 161,048,623 shares, or 22%, of Sun's common shares 
last year at a total cost of $2,144,337,495 (this represents an average cost of 
$13.3 per share).

Longleaf Partners is known in the industry for taking a long position 
(something like at least 5 to 6 years) on the stocks it holds.  If SEAM says 
no, it is very unlikely that anything will happen.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[john kroll]

The deal could still get ugly for regular legitimate business vs open exchange 
client / management vs CEO . I would have atleast picked a different vegetable. 
He's not small anything.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Tim Scanlon]

I'm hearing rumors of piles of layoffs to go with some announcement tomorrow.

What I wish was that someone would take My Little Pony out into a field, shoot 
him, and make glue out of his stupid ass. This is the same crap he did with 
LightHouse Design, and when Sun picked him to lead I was very afraid that he'd 
do to Sun exactly what he'd done to his own company, which was to let value 
evaporate like piss in a hot desert. Sadly, I obviously should have been more 
worried, because the fool only knows how to play one hand.

Tim
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Paul Nichols]

Although many consider IBM to be a leader in Open Source, I find quite the 
opposite to be true.

Yes, IBM has been good to Linux. They have been good for Apache. To some 
degree, they have been good with Java. But that is where it ends.

None of the IBM products outside Eclipse are open source or free. 

No, not WebSphere. No, not MQ. Not any other of their software portfolio.

You cannot even get a Developer copy for use for development only for any of 
their products, except a limited DB/2. Every other IBM product cost you and 
cost you big time.

You are not going to get the equivalent of a mySQL from IBM (they probably will 
not kill mySQL, but could greatly limit the free features in binary form). You 
cannot get the equivalent of a free Glassfish (Geronimo <> Glassfish). No free 
LDAP Enterprise Directory service, no free Message Queue system, etc. IBM 
owning Sun means that your real Development versions are limited to JBoss, Open 
LDAP, and as far as a Messaging Server, you are pretty much consigned to buy 
one, even for development.

Sun is much friendlier to Open Source and free than IBM.

I really worry where Java will be going with IBM at the helm. No, I am not 
suggesting IBM would even remotely try to kill or alter the free portion of 
Java, -- Java is too important to IBM as well as Sun for Enterprise 
Development. But I do not see IBM as committed to Java's future as Sun has been.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[W. Wayne Liauh]

> I'm hearing rumors of piles of layoffs to go with
> some announcement tomorrow.
> 
> What I wish was that someone would take My Little
> Pony out into a field, shoot him, and make glue out
> of his stupid ass. This is the same crap he did with
> LightHouse Design, and when Sun picked him to lead I
> was very afraid that he'd do to Sun exactly what he'd
> done to his own company, which was to let value
> evaporate like piss in a hot desert. Sadly, I
> obviously should have been more worried, because the
> fool only knows how to play one hand.
> 
> Tim

My opinion about TLP took a 180-degree turn when I saw him on national TV being 
interviewed as the present day digital nomad--using a Mac!

If this little nobody of yourstruly can do his own globetrotting using an 
OpenSolaris notebook, I am sure the CEO of its creator is more than capable of 
doing the same.  Especially when on National TV.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Zoltan Farkas]

Look at his blog, and you will notice the macOS screen shots, 
I attempted to post a comment about how I think as a Sun CEO he should use 
every opportunity to promote Sun products... my post was censored and did not 
go through... I am wondering why...

he should install opensolaris on his macbook pro like:
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/bleonard/archive/2008/05/_opensolaris_20.html
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Ghee Teo]

On 03/31/09 16:08, Zoltan Farkas wrote:

Look at his blog, and you will notice the macOS screen shots,
I attempted to post a comment about how I think as a Sun CEO he should use 
every opportunity to promote Sun products... my post was censored and did not 
go through... I am wondering why...

he should install opensolaris on his macbook pro like:
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/bleonard/archive/2008/05/_opensolaris_20.html
   

HUH, even since when Brian Leonard beomes Sun CEO :)

-Ghee

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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Moinak Ghosh]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Zoltan Farkas  wrote:
> Look at his blog, and you will notice the macOS screen shots,
> I attempted to post a comment about how I think as a Sun CEO he should use 
> every opportunity to promote Sun products... my post was censored and did not 
> go through... I am wondering why...
>
> he should install opensolaris on his macbook pro like:
> http://weblogs.java.net/blog/bleonard/archive/2008/05/_opensolaris_20.html

   I have heard from an earlier SUN colleague who was at the Dtrace Conference
   (http://wikis.sun.com/display/DTrace/dtrace.conf) that almost every person
   there including all the SUN folks were using Macbooks :-P

   To my knowledge, one place in SUN where you will exclusively find
every single
   person running Solaris 10/OpenSolaris on their laptops and desktops is SUN's
   India Engineering Center in Bangalore. I know this since I used to
work there.
   Every single person there is simply passionate about OpenSolaris. People will
   be carrying OpenSolaris laptops to every conference and use that unless the
   projector is so weird that it will simply not work with Osol. We
even forced other
   product teams there to use OpenSolaris laptops for all demos/talks
when attending
   opensource conferences like FOSS.IN.

Regards,
Moinak.
-- 

http://www.belenix.org/
http://moinakg.wordpress.com/
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Fredrich Maney]

I don't believe the issue is that he is using a Mac laptop, but that
he is using OSX instead of Solaris/OpenSolaris. Sun (sadly) doesn't
make laptops, so he is obviously going to use another vendor's product
for that. However Sun does make operating systems that can run on
other vendor's laptops, so he should be using them.

fpsm

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Ghee Teo  wrote:
> On 03/31/09 16:08, Zoltan Farkas wrote:
>>
>> Look at his blog, and you will notice the macOS screen shots,
>> I attempted to post a comment about how I think as a Sun CEO he should use
>> every opportunity to promote Sun products... my post was censored and did
>> not go through... I am wondering why...
>>
>> he should install opensolaris on his macbook pro like:
>> http://weblogs.java.net/blog/bleonard/archive/2008/05/_opensolaris_20.html
>>
>
> HUH, even since when Brian Leonard beomes Sun CEO :)
>
> -Ghee
>
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>
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 7:28 PM, Fredrich Maney  wrote:
> I don't believe the issue is that he is using a Mac laptop, but that
> he is using OSX instead of Solaris/OpenSolaris. Sun (sadly) doesn't
> make laptops, so he is obviously going to use another vendor's product
> for that. However Sun does make operating systems that can run on
> other vendor's laptops, so he should be using them.
>
> fpsm



Oh, they did resell re-branded SPARC Laptopts until not so long ago
(only for a short time) :
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/30/HNsparclaptop_1.html

And during all the years before, they could have used non-re-branded
Tapdole Laptops, an then also Nature Tech ones for a couple of years.

I really miss good old Scotty, he has always tried to prevent layoffs
under all circumstances.

PLUS:  He was known to run a Tadpole SPARCle himself:))
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/08/tadpole_turns_frog_into_prince/

Sun Micro Execs running MacOSX in public (even TV) : FIRE THEM with a kick!!
Plus hold them responsible for the damage made through their behavior,
SEND THEM A BILL and CUT BONUSES!!
I hate folks of that nature.

%m
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Zoltan Farkas]

This is why Oracle kicks their ass. All oracle products are free to download 
and develop for...

Frankly I know about Linux scaling issues from a IBM white paper... So I am not 
that convinced about their Linux love,  Linux is also something their biggest 
competitors (not Sun) are embracing... they don't have any motivation to 
advance Linux for the benefit of their competitors... So every time they will 
need to respond to competitive features like DTrace you will get something like 
SystemTAP (years in development and still not ready)
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

>Frankly I know about Linux scaling issues from a IBM white paper... So I am 
>not that convinced about their Linux love

Can you post the link to the IBM white paper about Linux scalability issues? I 
work as a Linux admin for a living because that's where all the hype and 
developer mindshare is, and where there's hype that corporate execs buy into 
there's always $$$ to pay my rent and food bills however, I'm always 
interested in squeezing a little Solaris or *BSD in there wherever I can 
because I think those platforms are a little bit more stable and more secure 
than Linux is (which means less work for me in the long run).

I'd bet that Linux doesn't scale vertically as well as things like Solaris, 
AIX, and z/OS do on large high-availability systems with more than 32 CPU's, 
but if Linux's horizontal scaling (i.e. Red Hat cluster) is so bad, then why do 
all the super-computing centers use Linux for their "world-breaking" records?

Those "Texas Ranger" guys built one of (the most?) powerful supercomputer(s) in 
the world out of a huge pile of Sun gear and then they chose to run some 
customized version of CentOS on it what a shame.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

To show how far behind technologically IBM's AIX is in comparison to 
OpenSolaris, check out these links:

  http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/system-i/usb-flash-support-for-aix/
 
  http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg1IZ2

Looks like AIX finally got USB flash drive support some time between November 
2008 and January 2009!!! That really makes a persuasive argument for AIX being 
the most technically advanced System V UNIX operating system, doesn't it? 
...OpenSolaris is already years ahead of AIX working on USB support for Virtual 
Machines running inside VirtualBox Maybe if IBM gave out the source code 
for AIX so developers could work on it then AIX would advance technologically 
at a more advanced rate instead of still being stuck somewhere back in the 
1990's.

For me the most compelling and interesting engineering achievement IBM ever 
came up with was the Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex or GDPS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Geographically_Dispersed_Parallel_Sysplex

That would fall under the category of "mainframe clustering technology" and it 
seems like it would work great for high availability cloud computing, but too 
bad no developers are going to actually use it for cloud computing because 
Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex and mainframe operating systems like 
z/OS and z/VM are not open source anymore like they were back in the days of 
open source MVS 3.8J punch cards.

I would probably be tinkering around with z/OS right now if it were free open 
source software and if it were possible to compile it and IPL it in a Hercules 
emulator.

Note: for those of you who don't speak the IBM mainframe Klingon language, IPL 
stands for "Initial Program Load" and it's the word mainframers use to describe 
booting up the operating system on a mainframe.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[UNIX admin]

> Granted, versus following reason why it's NOT tier 1:
> What can be done 
> with such a box besides booting it and
> 
> - display a nice screensaver
> 
> - maybe show some content (streamed movie, blueray,
> whatever)

What can be done?

For starters, a PS3 can house a 3.5" drive interally, and has USB ports, which 
immediately makes it possible to do two things:

- stick a 1.5TB drive in, and connect another identical drive over USB or 
EtherNet (iSCSI)

- configure mirroring

One could also connect a USB hub, and connect a whole bunch of drives and 
configure a zpool, for nice amount of external storage (TERABYTES!)

This is assuming Solaris ran on the hardware, of course.

Another variant, also assuming Solaris ran on the PS3 hardware, would be to 
build CLUSTERS of PS3s running for example Sun cluster. Cheap inexpensive 
clusters, high availability, active-active configurations, for fault tolerance.

Yummy.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Zoltan Farkas]

I can't find that paper anymore..., The white-paper was about scaling on smp 
systems, and was showing that above 4 cores/cpus the Linux kernel(at the time) 
did not scale well, and the paper was showing AIX scale linearly above 4 
core/cpu. (I read this paper about 3 years ago). At the time the famous Big 
Kernel Lock had probably a significant impact on scaling...  I also don't 
remember what application was used for benchmarking(quite relevant info :-)), I 
only wanted to point out a case where IBM was not recommending using Linux and 
instead was recommending another product of theirs AIX. 

Horizontal scaling is not something that is done by Linux, it is done by grid 
engines, map-reduce frameworks and cluster file systems...

About developer mindshare, here is what a Linux dev said (recently):

"Particularly because we need a way to stem the loss of mindshare to ZFS in the 
storage space, which is significant at the moment." 
(http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0810.1/0238.html)

Developers are not the loyal type ... 

"Until something better comes along!"

--zoly
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Lurie]

"IBM Near Deal to Buy Sun for Lower Price" 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123869375752683145.html

Sun Microsystems shares again on the rise..
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Lurie  wrote:
> "IBM Near Deal to Buy Sun for Lower Price"
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123869375752683145.html
>
> Sun Microsystems shares again on the rise..


That news was already 15 hours old.
But here is something new, now with the exact day (next Monday) when
it is believed to make "big bang":

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090403/ibm-mulling-sun-resource-action/?reflink=ATD_yahoo_ticker

"""And after the deal, then what? Massive layoffs, most likely.
Analysts say redundancies between the two companies’ businesses could
cause IBM to sack as much as a third of Sun’s employees in one of
those “resource actions” it’s so fond of. “This deal is definitely
going to lead to a lot of combined layoffs,” Forrester Research
analyst James Staten told Forbes. “And it wouldn’t be a surprise if
most of that bloodletting happened on the Sun side.” """

and

"IBM Said to Plan April 6 Announcement on Sun Purchase (Update1)"
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=akNk_HK.8cUI


As mentioned many times, always the most recent summary of press
releases, rumors, financial blogs, analyst reports etc.:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=java


Kick ponytail.
He sells you out   (Rather gives you away for free: Sun for just
6Billion USD  ==  just 4.5Billion EUR, who would ever have thought
this.)

 :-(
He is a joke of a "leader".
He did lead Sun: Into hell.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

This is an interview with the CEO of Intel:

 
http://idea.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/50863/95013409005968/f51917a3exv99w2.htm

If you scroll down to the bottom of page 17 and beginning of page 18, he says:

"I can tell you that Sun was shopped around the valley and around the world in 
the last few months. A lot of companies got calls or visits on buying some or 
all the assets of the company. It looks like IBM is in the hunt now. And at a 
hundred and some odd percent premium, I suspect they’ll get it.

I don’t think it had anything to do with Cisco. I think IBM is trying to 
consolidate architectures. IBM has the strongest Java license in the industry. 
By picking up Sun—which is the creator of Java—they really consolidate their 
position not just in Linux, but also in Java.
 
I think the stuff on Solaris and SPARC is likely to see EOLs over time through 
the IBM acquisition. But no strategic reason for IBM to maintain that except to 
attempt to convert the very large Sun
SPARC Solaris base to power. I think that would be their most likely strategy 
as part of this.

Is it good or bad for us? I don’t know. I’d rather have Sun be independent I 
guess. You had a question."
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

The part that bothers me the most was where he said:

 "I think the stuff on Solaris and SPARC is likely to see EOLs over time 
through the IBM acquisition. "

WE CAN'T ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN!!!

Where's Scott McNealy and his golf clubs when you need him? Maybe he can pummel 
some sense into the rest of the Sun executives. He's still the majority share 
holder in Sun right? How can they sell the entire company without his 
permission? I'm sure McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Eric Schmidt, Bill Joy and 
Vinod Khosla have enough cash between the five of them that they could buy up 
enough shares to block this IBM takeover if they really wanted to.

In bad economic times like these, Sun needs to focus on it's military and 
government customers and make money that way. The United States is at war, and 
I'm sure it won't be too difficult to justify buying more SPARC servers with 
Trusted Solaris on them to expand the military / government secure computing 
infrastructure to fight terrorism.

If Sun downsized to the point where they only focused on their government 
customers and put all their effort into developing even more advanced security 
features for Trusted Solaris, they could probably still make enough money to 
survive on those contracts alone.

Also, if we could get the entire U.S. Federal government and the medical 
industry to replace all their insecure Windows desktop machines with green, 
energy efficient, Sun Ray thin clients that connect to secure SPARC servers 
running Solaris, and if they did all of their office work in OpenOffice or Star 
Office, then that alone would be enough income to keep Sun afloat for the next 
10 years and save billions of dollars in tax payer money (which is going to 
unworthy companies like Microsoft and Dell). 

Why isn't anybody talking to their senators and congressmen about doing this?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

Why does SUN even need to be purchased by another company when they supposedly 
"have so much cash laying around" (which is what everyone says anyway)?

Why would Sun buy MySQL for $2 billion only to have IBM buy all of SUN for $6 
billion? It makes no sense I would have rather had SUN not buy MySQL and 
focus instead on making money through better government and defense contracts 
that involve Solaris and SPARC hardware.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Octave Orgeron]

I totally agree. Selling out to IBM is a huge mistake on soo many levels. I 
encourage people to sign my petition ASAP and pass along the link to fellow 
supporters of help keeping Sun independent:

http://www.petitiononline.com/smi09/petition.html



 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Octave J. Orgeron
Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant
Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com
E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*



- Original Message 
From: Anon Y Mous 
To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Sent: Saturday, April 4, 2009 12:29:28 AM
Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

The part that bothers me the most was where he said:

"I think the stuff on Solaris and SPARC is likely to see EOLs over time through 
the IBM acquisition. "

WE CAN'T ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN!!!

Where's Scott McNealy and his golf clubs when you need him? Maybe he can pummel 
some sense into the rest of the Sun executives. He's still the majority share 
holder in Sun right? How can they sell the entire company without his 
permission? I'm sure McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Eric Schmidt, Bill Joy and 
Vinod Khosla have enough cash between the five of them that they could buy up 
enough shares to block this IBM takeover if they really wanted to.

In bad economic times like these, Sun needs to focus on it's military and 
government customers and make money that way. The United States is at war, and 
I'm sure it won't be too difficult to justify buying more SPARC servers with 
Trusted Solaris on them to expand the military / government secure computing 
infrastructure to fight terrorism.

If Sun downsized to the point where they only focused on their government 
customers and put all their effort into developing even more advanced security 
features for Trusted Solaris, they could probably still make enough money to 
survive on those contracts alone.

Also, if we could get the entire U.S. Federal government and the medical 
industry to replace all their insecure Windows desktop machines with green, 
energy efficient, Sun Ray thin clients that connect to secure SPARC servers 
running Solaris, and if they did all of their office work in OpenOffice or Star 
Office, then that alone would be enough income to keep Sun afloat for the next 
10 years and save billions of dollars in tax payer money (which is going to 
unworthy companies like Microsoft and Dell). 

Why isn't anybody talking to their senators and congressmen about doing this?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

Does anybody who knows McNealy know if this is true:

  http://www.i-newswire.com/pr269855.html

Here comes the cavalry charge riding in on a white horse with his bag of 
golf clubs

  :-)
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

McNealy commented: “The terms IBM is offering are far below the intrinsic value 
of the company.  IBM is trying to swoop in during a bad economic time and buy 
Sun assets and revenues with no regard to developing real value for Sun 
shareholders.”

  :-)
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

You know... Sun should have used all the "cash" that they had lying around to 
buy themselves instead of buying MySQL and they shouldn't have bought the 
"Cobalt" Linux server appliance business in the 1990's either.

AND, most importantly, Sun should have bought a company like Juniper during the 
dot com boom in the 1990's instead of buying Cobalt If you combined Sun's 
switches with Juniper routers fifteen years ago, Sun could have annihilated 
CISCO IMO (at least performance wise) and would have billions in cash on hand. 
The network is the computer, right? So why focus on only making servers and not 
on routers and switches and VOIP phones and firewalls and network appliances 
like that?

Andy Bechtolsheim keeps leaving Sun to make high performance switches and 
network appliances and then Andy's companies inevitably get bought up by CISCO, 
it just doesn't make sense.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Anon Y Mous]

Another great McNealy quote from my article:

"McNealy also commented that the vision and product strategy of Sun has been 
building towards just this moment for decades and he’s not surprised that IBM 
wants to snatch it just before their strategy is fully vindicated by the 
massive adoption of cloud computing where Sun is a leader."

I think he's talking about that new feature in OpenOffice and VirtualBox where 
you can save all your data and applications and virtual machines to Sun's cloud 
and run it there:

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/20090318

If Sun could pull that ^^ off and be the first company to bring the cloud down 
to Earth and turn it into a fog, then they could possibly make even more money 
than Google. Who knows?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Anon Y Mous  wrote:
> You know... Sun should have used all the "cash" that they had lying around to 
> buy themselves instead of buying MySQL and they shouldn't have bought the 
> "Cobalt" Linux server appliance business in the 1990's either.
>
> AND, most importantly, Sun should have bought a company like Juniper during 
> the dot com boom in the 1990's instead of buying Cobalt If you combined 
> Sun's switches with Juniper routers fifteen years ago, Sun could have 
> annihilated CISCO IMO (at least performance wise) and would have billions in 
> cash on hand. The network is the computer, right? So why focus on only making 
> servers and not on routers and switches and VOIP phones and firewalls and 
> network appliances like that?
>
> Andy Bechtolsheim keeps leaving Sun to make high performance switches and 
> network appliances and then Andy's companies inevitably get bought up by 
> CISCO, it just doesn't make sense.



I agree 100%: Sun has made a real mistake, by making exactly the same
mistake (more than) TWICE:

In September 2000 they spent 5 Billions for Cobalt, during the climax
of the stock market.
Just weeks before everything went down the toilet. At a completely
overvalued price tag.

Then again in 2005: The same with Storage Tek, at 4 Billions.
Plus, even more recently: At 1 billion MySQL.


Each time during the peek and heights of hype, shortly _before_ market
prices started to fall to bottom levels.
In German there is a saying for this: "How you won it, so you lost it ...
I wonder what all those degrees from Stanford et al are worth, if that
crowd makes - and repeats - mistakes like that.

It is a joke, actually.

I assume the reason behind ponytail's willingness to sell is
constituted by the fact, that he got so many JAVA stocks as bonuses,
google for what I mean. If I call correctly he got 20 Millions in
stocks last year (value at that time).
Instead of rescuing the company in order to bing back the JAVA stock,
HE SIMPLY SELLS THE COMPANY, and shortly afterwards - probably - his
private stocks.
Brilliant leadership:

Suntanic
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Joerg Schilling]

Anon Y Mous  wrote:

> Does anybody who knows McNealy know if this is true:
>
>   http://www.i-newswire.com/pr269855.html

This looks like good news.

I did see Scott again last year at Technical University in Berlin. Since 
then, I understand why Scott tried to find a successor for his position (from
comparing my current impression with the impression I had from hin 15 years 
ago) but it seems that even though he may believe that he needs to resign as 
CEO, I believe that he still is the better choice for Sun.

When looking at the video in

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/20090318

I was remembered to a steering board meeting where we listened to a 
talk and where Bruce Perens asked: "Are we playing bullshit bingo?
If so, I have already three hits..."

At least the first half of the video is full of empty phrases. I have
the impression that Jonathan does not understand what inside Sun is
different from other companies. The important thing however is that
the whole video looks displaced with the aquisition talks in mind.


IBM cannot be interested in Sun but seems to have interes in Sun's "organs" 
only. 

Given the fact that the most important cause for the current depression is the 
fear of the depression, I am sure that a better driven Sun company does not need
to look for an investor. 

Sun does not properly use opportunities outside the USA that could help Sun as 
a whole to place Sun for new customers and to sell more. A problem I see with 
Sun is that Sun USA sees e.g Sun Germany only as a selling desk for Sun that
cannot influence total Sun sales even though it could be nuch more. During the
past years, Sun did aproach easy markets instead of important market places.
It is now easy to sell in Russia or China but it is important to sell in Germany
because selling in Germany is apraoching key markets and allows to get 
lighthouse customers that help to find similar customers in Europe later.

We in Europe and in special in Germany currently have a major move towards 
eGovernment and Sun has a very interesting product portfolio for eGovernment.
We tried to approach Sun for several years in order to get Sun involved in the
chances from the evolving eGovernment market to no avail. It seems that Sun 
Germany cannot do the needed steps from own force and that Sun USA is not 
willing to get involved. It is interesting to see that Microsoft USA at the 
same 
time sees that this is an important future market.

Sun was aproached by the city of Berlin to make a bid for then thousands of 
SunRay desktops and failed to be cheaper than HP. Now Sun does not get any money
and in addition misses an important example customer.

Trying to help only works if Sun is willing to get help. Is Sun willing to get 
help?

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
   j...@cs.tu-berlin.de(uni)  
   joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: 
http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Calum Benson]

On 4 Apr 2009, at 14:09, Joerg Schilling wrote:


Anon Y Mous  wrote:


Does anybody who knows McNealy know if this is true:

 http://www.i-newswire.com/pr269855.html


This looks like good news.


I'm afraid the source of that supposed "story" is BSNesswire, and no  
prizes for guessing what the "BS" stands for...





Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer   Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.ben...@sun.comOpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Joerg Schilling
 wrote:
> Anon Y Mous  wrote:
>
>> Does anybody who knows McNealy know if this is true:
>>
>>   http://www.i-newswire.com/pr269855.html
>
> This looks like good news.
>
> I did see Scott again last year at Technical University in Berlin. Since
> then, I understand why Scott tried to find a successor for his position (from
> comparing my current impression with the impression I had from hin 15 years
> ago) but it seems that even though he may believe that he needs to resign as
> CEO, I believe that he still is the better choice for Sun.
>
> When looking at the video in
>
> http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/20090318
>
> I was remembered to a steering board meeting where we listened to a
> talk and where Bruce Perens asked: "Are we playing bullshit bingo?
> If so, I have already three hits..."
>
> At least the first half of the video is full of empty phrases. I have
> the impression that Jonathan does not understand what inside Sun is
> different from other companies. The important thing however is that
> the whole video looks displaced with the aquisition talks in mind.
>
>
> IBM cannot be interested in Sun but seems to have interes in Sun's "organs"
> only.
>
> Given the fact that the most important cause for the current depression is the
> fear of the depression, I am sure that a better driven Sun company does not 
> need
> to look for an investor.
>
> Sun does not properly use opportunities outside the USA that could help Sun as
> a whole to place Sun for new customers and to sell more. A problem I see with
> Sun is that Sun USA sees e.g Sun Germany only as a selling desk for Sun that
> cannot influence total Sun sales even though it could be nuch more. During the
> past years, Sun did aproach easy markets instead of important market places.
> It is now easy to sell in Russia or China but it is important to sell in 
> Germany
> because selling in Germany is apraoching key markets and allows to get
> lighthouse customers that help to find similar customers in Europe later.
>
> We in Europe and in special in Germany currently have a major move towards
> eGovernment and Sun has a very interesting product portfolio for eGovernment.
> We tried to approach Sun for several years in order to get Sun involved in the
> chances from the evolving eGovernment market to no avail. It seems that Sun
> Germany cannot do the needed steps from own force and that Sun USA is not
> willing to get involved. It is interesting to see that Microsoft USA at the 
> same
> time sees that this is an important future market.
>
> Sun was aproached by the city of Berlin to make a bid for then thousands of
> SunRay desktops and failed to be cheaper than HP. Now Sun does not get any 
> money
> and in addition misses an important example customer.
>
> Trying to help only works if Sun is willing to get help. Is Sun willing to get
> help?
>
> Jörg
>
> --
>  EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
>       j...@cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)
>       joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: 
> http://schily.blogspot.com/
>  URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily



One of the best messages covering that topic.
Respect.

+1


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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Calum Benson  wrote:
>
> On 4 Apr 2009, at 14:09, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>
>> Anon Y Mous  wrote:
>>
>>> Does anybody who knows McNealy know if this is true:
>>>
>>>  http://www.i-newswire.com/pr269855.html
>>
>> This looks like good news.
>
> I'm afraid the source of that supposed "story" is BSNesswire, and no prizes
> for guessing what the "BS" stands for...
>
> 
>
> Cheeri,
> Calum.



Unfortunately this may be the case, although it doesn't necessarily need to.
The original "press release" is dated March 30th, rather than April 1st.
Whatever, even on the Titanic they didn't stop playing music and dancing.
So, let's all be happy and funny. I can organize some excellent
Ukrainian Vodka for us.

Here is a funny Scott McNealy fake-blog (ok, maybe it is only a
cover-up for the real one) :
http://fakescott.blogspot.com/

"""The Secret Diary of Scott G. McNealy

I'm the first ex-CEO to ever have a blog! Ain't I?
Thursday, April 2, 2009
The Fight Has Begun!!! Answer My Poll, Sun Shareholders!!
I'm weighting the support I'd have if I decide to fight against the
IBM merger, so I just added a poll in this page.
It is intended for Sun shareholders, so if you have some shares, let
me know if you'd support me with yours to avoid this Devil's son, I
mean, this mistake of a merger. And do it soon, rumor has it that next
week could everything be over. And they are offering halve what they
spend on peanuts...

Of course, once I take the control of the company back I'd fire My
Little Pony first thing in the morning. No hard feelings. I chose you,
I fire you.

If you feel like, you can add comments saying how many shares you'd
retain with you or would be willing to sell me (in that case say your
price). It would be better to send me and e-mail, but we don't want to
fill (real) Scott's account with spam, so I'm sure he'll read this
blog and make the calculations.
Again: I'm not Scott McNealy pretending not to be me. Namaste..."""



Cheers,
%martin
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Uwe Dippel]

system5,

we discussed this elsewhere. Now it gets to the point that most considered 
'pure speculation' then.
If I were a SUN shareholder, I'd have sued the hell out of the incompetent 
management. If I were a SUN employee, I clubbed Ponytail into the next best 
ocean. Yes, SUN was and is partially leader in technology; and admired as such. 
But the last 10 years or so, it was steered without vision, without a target, 
even, or shall we say with an ever moving target? And this list is a proof of 
this truth spot on in here. There is no clear command, and there is no real 
community. There is not all too much of a say from those managers, and neither 
of those, who are supposed to be community. People like me, for example. Having 
been in a few communities, I can warrant that here is no such thing. Here some 
clueless managers decide the roadmap, when and what to do, how to call it, etc. 
And the 'community' doesn't have a say on the where-to-go. Example: we don't 
get the latest builds when they are available. Some big shot can even decide to 
drop one or another. I may report bugs, but not even
  follow up on my own ones. 
But all this has been said before.
Maybe what I might have missed: Aside from more then dubious acquisitions (were 
we in a third world place, I'd guess Scotty and Ponytail had premeditated a 
nice percentage of kickbacks of the inflated prices), there was Ian as well. He 
came in, talked about GPL, and in the end, we have yet-another-package-manager. 
And yet-another-free-license. Instead of replacing the Linux-kernel (yes, I 
know what Linux is!) with something really solid, we have a solid kernel with 
lower usability and an effectively flimsy userland plugged thereon. 
In the end someone is responsible for this mess, and Jonathan is one of those 
in the center of those being directly responsible. Even if the IBM-deal does 
not materialise, something else will; someone else will take SUN over. At least 
with this failing management. Because there is high value in SUN as company. If 
need be, also in some of its parts.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Lurie]

> and in the end, we have yet-another-package-manager.

while I agree with you on some of the points, I have to say that I love IPS and 
how it uses ZFS, if the code would have been based off some Linux package 
manager then the changes would never go upstream due to the lack of bootable 
clones/snapshots.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[C.]

Lurie wrote:

and in the end, we have yet-another-package-manager.



while I agree with you on some of the points, I have to say that I love IPS and 
how it uses ZFS, if the code would have been based off some Linux package 
manager then the changes would never go upstream due to the lack of bootable 
clones/snapshots.
  
Do you have any clue how many patches Sun maintains for packages in 
onnv-gate that never go upstream?  Anyway.. they say love is blind so it 
all seems fitting..

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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Moinak Ghosh]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 10:09 PM, Lurie  wrote:
>> and in the end, we have yet-another-package-manager.
>
> while I agree with you on some of the points, I have to say that I love IPS 
> and how it uses ZFS, if the code would have been based off some Linux package 
> manager then the changes would never go upstream due to the lack of bootable 
> clones/snapshots.

   And the BeleniX package manager (spkg) that I put in 6 months of
part-time effort
   has all these same features, zfs cloning, multiple boot envs and
more like transaction
   pause and resume, currently with the exception of change handling
and non-root user
   image support, primarily because it is a layer over SVR4 which we
will be dumping
   shortly anyway.

   The ZFS cloning features are provided by the Boot Environment Management
   library which is a part of the Caimain Installer suite, not IPS. I
really do not
   understand why is it not possible to enhance an existing mature package
   manager and put in all these features in a modular fashion rather
than re-inventing
   15 years of community work on packaging. Modular features should be able
   to detect the platform and enable appropriate functionality.

Regards,
Moinak.
-- 

http://www.belenix.org/
http://moinakg.wordpress.com/
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Claudia Hildebrandt]

the original article was written at 1st of april and at the end of it 
she, the author ,   said "April fool". I cannot find the link to the 
original article at the moment, but this announcement is nor true.


claudia

On 04/04/09 17:13, Martin Bochnig wrote:

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Calum Benson  wrote:
  

On 4 Apr 2009, at 14:09, Joerg Schilling wrote:



Anon Y Mous  wrote:

  

Does anybody who knows McNealy know if this is true:

 http://www.i-newswire.com/pr269855.html


This looks like good news.
  

I'm afraid the source of that supposed "story" is BSNesswire, and no prizes
for guessing what the "BS" stands for...



Cheeri,
Calum.





Unfortunately this may be the case, although it doesn't necessarily need to.
The original "press release" is dated March 30th, rather than April 1st.
Whatever, even on the Titanic they didn't stop playing music and dancing.
So, let's all be happy and funny. I can organize some excellent
Ukrainian Vodka for us.

Here is a funny Scott McNealy fake-blog (ok, maybe it is only a
cover-up for the real one) :
http://fakescott.blogspot.com/

"""The Secret Diary of Scott G. McNealy

I'm the first ex-CEO to ever have a blog! Ain't I?
Thursday, April 2, 2009
The Fight Has Begun!!! Answer My Poll, Sun Shareholders!!
I'm weighting the support I'd have if I decide to fight against the
IBM merger, so I just added a poll in this page.
It is intended for Sun shareholders, so if you have some shares, let
me know if you'd support me with yours to avoid this Devil's son, I
mean, this mistake of a merger. And do it soon, rumor has it that next
week could everything be over. And they are offering halve what they
spend on peanuts...

Of course, once I take the control of the company back I'd fire My
Little Pony first thing in the morning. No hard feelings. I chose you,
I fire you.

If you feel like, you can add comments saying how many shares you'd
retain with you or would be willing to sell me (in that case say your
price). It would be better to send me and e-mail, but we don't want to
fill (real) Scott's account with spam, so I'm sure he'll read this
blog and make the calculations.
Again: I'm not Scott McNealy pretending not to be me. Namaste..."""



Cheers,
%martin
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**
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Komturstrasse18amailto:claudia.hildebra...@sun.com
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Germany
Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/claudia
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Shawn Walker]

C. wrote:

Lurie wrote:

and in the end, we have yet-another-package-manager.



while I agree with you on some of the points, I have to say that I 
love IPS and how it uses ZFS, if the code would have been based off 
some Linux package manager then the changes would never go upstream 
due to the lack of bootable clones/snapshots.
  
Do you have any clue how many patches Sun maintains for packages in 
onnv-gate that never go upstream?  Anyway.. they say love is blind so it 
all seems fitting..


Do you know how many patches Sun maintains for packages that are never 
accepted by upstream because they don't agree with the design or 
implementation?


I can tell you with certainty that Sun works hard to ensure 
contributions go upstream, it's ultimately less work for them and less 
code to maintain.


Cheers,
--
Shawn Walker
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[C.]

Shawn Walker wrote:

C. wrote:

Do you know how many patches Sun maintains for packages that are never 
accepted by upstream because they don't agree with the design or 
implementation?


I can tell you with certainty that Sun works hard to ensure 
contributions go upstream, it's ultimately less work for them and less 
code to maintain.
Yes.. writing an entire package manager from the ground up is *less* 
work than maintaining the patches.  Did someone tell you this or did you 
come up with this on your own?  Knowing you're a contributor to the pkg5 
team makes you a bit biased, but try to separate your job from reality 
and stay on the point here..

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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Martin Bochnig]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 10:42 PM, C.  wrote:
> Shawn Walker wrote:
>>
>> C. wrote:
>>
>> Do you know how many patches Sun maintains for packages that are never
>> accepted by upstream because they don't agree with the design or
>> implementation?
>>
>> I can tell you with certainty that Sun works hard to ensure contributions
>> go upstream, it's ultimately less work for them and less code to maintain.
>
> Yes.. writing an entire package manager from the ground up is *less* work
> than maintaining the patches.  Did someone tell you this or did you come up
> with this on your own?  Knowing you're a contributor to the pkg5 team makes
> you a bit biased, but try to separate your job from reality and stay on the
> point here..



It seem "./C" never wrote perl scripts to (auto-apply- and) maintain patches.
I also wonder which package manager he wrote from ground up. I only
see him talking about existing stuff like Smart and pkgcore.

If you want to see how it looks like, if something worthwhile is being
written from scratch, either look at IPS on the one hand, or on
Moinak's blog on the other.
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Lurie]

> Do you have any clue how many patches Sun maintains
> for packages in onnv-gate that never go upstream?  Anyway.. they say
> love is blind so it  all seems fitting..

I am quite well aware of the patches in the on-nv gate, and they aren't as many 
as you make them sound. Plus you are being rude and aggressive, if that's how 
you want to build a new "community" then good luck with that...
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Lurie]

> Yes.. writing an entire package manager from the
> ground up is *less* work than maintaining the patches.

This is called "moving forward", IPS is based on new novel ideas, a secure 
package manager without any arbitrary post/pre-install scripts, which is fast, 
doesn't hog the system upon installation and is very easy to use, and upgrades 
the whole system at once, versus just the packages, which ensures you won't 
have any conflicts.

If everyone would do as you suggest and just "copy everything" because it's 
easier, there would be no innovations in OpenSolaris at all. And IPS *is* an 
innovation in my book. I've been using IPS since its inception, for how long 
have you been using it ?
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[C.]

Lurie wrote:

Do you have any clue how many patches Sun maintains
for packages in onnv-gate that never go upstream?  Anyway.. they say
love is blind so it  all seems fitting..



I am quite well aware of the patches in the on-nv gate, and they aren't as many as you 
make them sound. Plus you are being rude and aggressive, if that's how you want to build 
a new "community" then good luck with that...
  
rude maybe, but I hope stating the obvious isn't considered 
aggressive...  Thanks for the reminder about being a positive catalyst.. 
it's easy to get caught up in pointless discussion from time to time..

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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Moinak Ghosh]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 2:55 AM, Lurie  wrote:
>> Yes.. writing an entire package manager from the
>> ground up is *less* work than maintaining the patches.
>
> This is called "moving forward", IPS is based on new novel ideas, a secure 
> package manager without any arbitrary post/pre-install scripts, which is 
> fast, doesn't hog the system upon installation and is very easy to use, and 
> upgrades the whole system at once, versus just the packages, which ensures 
> you won't have any conflicts.

   So modern Linux package managers do not have any of these qualities ?
   Strange!! And how difficult it is to implement no-scripting limitation in an
   existing packaging system ...

>
> If everyone would do as you suggest and just "copy everything" because it's 
> easier, there would be no innovations in OpenSolaris at all. And IPS *is* an 
> innovation in my book. I've been using IPS since its inception, for how long 
> have you been using it ?

   Not really, you missed the point. There are places where there is scope
   for innovation and people know they have ideas that go a lot beyond
   the current stuff that is deserves a clean slate implementation. Like
   ZFS. The ideas expressed in ZFS are revolutionary to say the least
   and could not have been done by re-using existing stuff. However there
   should exist a balance between redo everything and re-use otherwise
   one would start re-writing every piece in the name of innovation.
   OpenSource is also about a balance between the two.

   I am forced to work with IPS day in and day out at work. I have
   submitted bugs with fixes and working on add-in modules. I am very
   familiar with the codebase and inner workings of the complex beast,
   so I know what I am talking about!

   The user side experience of IPS is no doubt very good but is no different
   from a good Linux package manager like Smart/Yum (with the exception
   of ZFS features). From a developer point of view these qualities could have
   been got by far less effort and far less code/complexity.

Regards,
Moinak.
-- 

http://www.belenix.org/
http://moinakg.wordpress.com/
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Fredrich Maney]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 2:17 AM, Anon Y Mous  wrote:
> You know... Sun should have used all the "cash" that they had lying around to 
> buy themselves instead of buying MySQL and they shouldn't have bought the 
> "Cobalt" Linux server appliance business in the 1990's either.

I disagree with you on the Cobalt purchase. The problem with that deal
was that they should have used it as a way to market Solaris x86. They
should have migrated all of the Cobalt functionality to Solaris and
then had Solaris SPARC and Solaris Cobalt.

However, they let the idiots on Wall Street force them into doing
something against their best interest with the whole "so, what is your
Linux position? This is the 90's and you simply must have a Linux
position if you are going to be a viable company." garbage.

So they shelved, tried to kill, Solaris x86 *again* and spent a bunch
of money buying a Linux outfit, then let that die on the vine.

[...]

fpsm
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Re: [osol-discuss] Possible IBM aquisition of Sun

[Lurie]

> So modern Linux package managers do not have any  of these qualities ?

Some of them ? Of course. All of them ? No. Just a few points:
1. They usually upgrade a live system (and while it's possible for some to do a 
non-live upgrade, the live upgrade is exactly how pretty much all of them 
operate by default).
2. The upgrade process is usually very slow, I've been upgrading Fedora, 
Ubuntu, OpenSuse, what they have in common ? A very slow and IO bound upgrade, 
during the "update/installation" phase which took most of the time the whole 
system slows down, to put into perspective, last time I did a nightly upgrade 
of fedora it took around 1.5 hours, while the download phase took only 10-15 
minutes.
3. The whole package content is downloaded (recently there has been a trend 
towards moving to downloading deltas only, but still the default in most is to 
get the whole content). 
5. Usually the design is not cross-platformant, IPS can even run on Windows.

> Strange!! And how difficult it is to implement no-scripting limitation in an
>  existing packaging system ...

patching something for that would be just as hard as implementing that 
particular functionality from scratch, and you would have to maintain patches 
with the upstream (unless you have an ideally de-coupled backend API, which I 
doubt would be feasible to have once you start adding more and more features), 
forced to use whatever libraries/languages the upstream uses, and so on.

> Like ZFS. The ideas expressed in ZFS are revolutionary
> to say the least and could not have been done by re-using existing
> stuff. However there should exist a balance between redo everything and
> re-use otherwise one would start re-writing every piece in the name
> of innovation.

While I agree with you about that, I still stand by my point that IPS is a good 
thing, and given Sun's need for paid-support repositories, integration with 
zones, SMF support, ZFS support, they would've ended with a lot of patches on 
their hands. 

As for the time it has taken, it's not just the development time, once you've 
written some complex piece of code in say N months, you could easily implement 
the whole thing from scratch in N/M months, it's the slow development of ideas 
that should be counted too.

Moreover, now when most of the code is in place and working, the team can 
quickly introduce new features as they are well familiar with the codebase and 
know the design well to easily extend IPS.

> The user side experience of IPS is no doubt very
> good but is no different from a good Linux package manager
> like Smart/Yum (with the exception of ZFS features).

Unfortunately, I don't find yum to be a good package manager for some of the 
reasons I listed above.

> From a developer point of view  these qualities could have been got by far 
> less effort and far less code/complexity.

In the short run ? Maybe. In the long run ? I don't think so.
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