[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Wed, 5 May 2010, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

> On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 09:44:52AM -0500, Jonathan Patschke wrote:
>> It's curious how people seem to be surprised that Oracle's purchase of Sun
>> has not prevented Oracle from continuing to act like Oracle.  For the
>> purposes of the Sun community at large, IBM would've been a much better
>> host body for the ghost of Sun Microsystems.
>
> Why? IBM already has competing products in all of the lines that SUN had,
> except the X86 which they sold off.

IBM didn't sell off x86; they sold off desktop/notebook PCs.  "System x"
is alive and well.  IBM also has tremendous development and consulting
interests in technologies that Sun owned (Java being the largest).

> You don't see them selling or giving away Open/AIX, the last MVS that had
> source code available was 3.8 (I know I used to read it, 30 years ago) and
> VM has mostly migrated to hardware where there is no such thing as source 
> code.

No, but IBM's previous acquisitions (Rational Machines and Tivoli System
come to mind) illustrate that IBM understand that different
customer/vendor ecosystems have different feels to them.  Integrating them
into The IBM Way is a very slow process.  They bought Rational, what, 7
years ago?  Rational products and support still feel more like Rational
than IBM.  Tivoli integrated so tightly because so many Tivoli products
ran exclusively on IBM platforms, anyhow.

A hypothetical IBM acquisition of Sun would've seen some belt-tightening,
but it would've likely fallen along the lines of changes brought about
with future product introductions.  They wouldn't have alienated
nearly as many customers because they've been here and done this for
longer than Oracle's existed.

> I think the whole point of Oracle buying Sun is that no other US company
> was interested and the US government did not want it to go overseas.

You've forgotten that IBM actually attempted to buy Sun before Sun shut
the deal down?  IBM's offer was 95% as high as what Oracle ended up
paying, so it's not that IBM had low-balled them.

> I'm not going to mention whom on a publicly archived list, but if the US
> were to suddenly ban imports of technology from a certain country whose
> relations are now at a long time low, you all would be scrambling to
> learn Red Dragon Linux.

That sounds like it's based more in speculation than fact.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |