I can't help but wonder what would have been different had IBM been successful in the Sun acquisition. It would have been a strange marriage, and there were a

I can't help but wonder what would have been different had IBM been successful in the Sun acquisition. It would have been a strange marriage, and there were a lot more staffing and product redundancies that would have still hurt customers and employees. On the other hand, IBM is often aloof but never callous like Oracle is. IBM's acquisition of Sequent might be a reasonable starting place to guess. Sequent customers got a fairly abrupt EoL. There was a lot of drama with Itanium hype and even the x450/x455, then IBM fleeing that IA64 sinking ship. And of course Project Monterrey and the SCO lawsuit. But I'm not so sure how sad the world was to lose Dynix/PTX and instead Linux got RCU and a ton of general NUMA scalability know how. Anyway, hindsight being 20/20, most of us should have probably switched to OpenSolaris back in 2005 and figured out how to wrestle it out of Sun's control for their own good.