Re: how is IBM i affected by acquisition of Sun?

Steve Richter wrote:

what with the NY Times and WSJ reporting on the proposed acquistion of Sun
by IBM, the transaction is assured. MySQL will enhance DB2, where MySQL is
the free version of DB2. The Sun Intel based servers augment the IBM X
servers. Sparc technology gets folded into future POWER chips. Sun's UNIX OS
is merged with IBM's AIX and Linux. Java could be a big winner if IBM
decides to use it to compete against .NET/C# in the framework/managed code
space. IBM i is now an even smaller part of IBM than it has been. ILE and
RPG have nothing in common with Java and the JVM. Maybe if IBM purchases
PHP, IBM i becomes a box that runs turnkey PHP/MySQL/DB2 complete solutions.

I think this is a logical move for IBM. Sun has been looking for a buyer
for a while now. Since IBM has a definite interest in either Sun's
products or business, IBM makes sense as a possible buyer. Look at what
IBM would be buying:

1) Java is obviously very important to IBM, which is probably Java's
biggest corporate booster. Java makes a lot of sense in IBM's stable.

2) Sun's Unix business. With Sun's talent, IBM could establish a clear
upgrade path for Solaris customers to move to AIX. There may be some
technology in the SPARC architecture that might be of interest to IBM,
but I doubt it.

3) OpenOffice.org is the base for Lotus Symphony, and so getting
ownership of that code will establish IBM as the major player on the ODF
arena, which is becoming more and more important as governments mandate
the use of open formats for public documents.

4) MySQL is a bit of a red herring. It's a very popular product, but not
yet a RDBMS in the league of DB2 or PostgreSQL. I'm not sure how MySQL
would fit in with IBM's overall plans. Perhaps they could sell it off to
some other company for a few million.

The real challenge for IBM will to maintain its street cred in the open
source community. There are some key people in the company who
understand F/OSS. But how will business considerations affect that?
Personally, I don't really care what IBM does with Java or MySQL. I find
the potential of OpenOffice.org more interesting. By giving OO.o more
emphasis, this could be IBM's way of really sticking it to Microsoft.

Cheers! Hans