3 ms·
Sources at the time told me IBM were planning on buying Sun (for the hardware/Telco business) and avoiding anti-trust problems by spinning software off to Red H
by rodgerd 10y ago
Sources at the time told me IBM were planning on buying Sun (for the hardware/Telco business) and avoiding anti-trust problems by spinning software off to Red Hat (Java, ZFS, Solaris, etc). They got cold feet over the spectre of bribery investigations against Sun.
I weep for the parallel universe in which Red Hat had been in a position to open all of Sun's technologies properly.
- byuu 10y agoRedHat? I don't. Had that happened, Java, ZFS, MySQL, VirtualBox, etc would now likely all be required components of systemd. (Yes, I'm being a little facetious, but I really believe RedHat has some sinister ulterier motives. They've been absolutely horrible with systemd, Gnome, GTK3, etc.) What happened to Sun was an outright catastrophe, but we've mostly recovered with OpenZFS, MariaDB, Jenkins, LibreOffice, etc. The major piece we're missing is a clean fork of VirtualBox. Android's also not in a good state to replace desktop Java, but it could conceivably be one day at least.
- pjmlp 10y agoExcept Google is not that good in language design.
- kagamine 10y agoTo be fair, I use VB every day and it is getting frequent updates and hasn't crashed in 2 years, it used to crash quite often when Sun developed it. Maybe it could be something better, or amazing and different, but it's still free and very stable, so I'm quite happy.
- cookiecaper 10y agoMy understanding is that Schwartz et al declined IBM's bid and chose to proceed with Oracle's, under the assumption that Oracle's superior business record would mean more stability for Sun employees.