IBM and Sun - is the deal over?
It seems like there is a kind of communication breakdown in the talks between IBM and SUN. And I already started to seach for my IntelliJ license as Netbeans replacement :-). Who knows whether it is good or bad and what the talks were really about.
But CISCO or Apple (thats total phantasy :-)) would be really interesting buyers (from the perspective of a Java programmer :-)).
Apple would be the very worst scenario for us java developer, because then, all Java strategies of Sun would be canceled.
Steve Jobs is known as the biggest opponent of Java and it was a strain for the community to get Java 1.6 before Websphere for Mac OS X.
And there is a big Objective C / Cocoa Community out there, that really don't want to support another language...
So luck...
Robert
Posted by Robert on April 06, 2009 at 12:27 PM CEST #
@Robert,
almost. I saw Steve Jobs and Scott McNeally at the JavaONE in the year 2000. Steve Jobs promised, that Java will be the best supported language running on Mac OS.
Some opinions seem to change over time :-).
I'm not an analyst - don't take my merge advices too seriously... I'm just hoping for JDKu10+ for mac :-)
thanks and regards,
adam
Posted by Adam Bien on April 06, 2009 at 12:43 PM CEST #
I've been thinking about this and I believe the better (best?) company to buy Sun is Google. Think about it.
1. The use highly customized version of MySQL. Java is one of the 4 internal languages at Google (C++, Java, JavaScript, Python)
2. Most of the functional, user/developer accessible parts of Android are basically Java.
3. They could potentially add Ruby (due to JRuby) to the mix of their internal languages and eventually allow Rails style development on the AppEngine.
4. Even though the Google engineers seem to prefer Eclipse, they could "own" an IDE and use it for AppEngine, Android, API, ... development both internally and publicly.
I'm sure other people can think of other reasons.
Posted by comctrl6 on April 06, 2009 at 12:46 PM CEST #
@comctrl6,
you are right - Google would be a good buyer too. Regardless who is going to buy Sun - there should be a minimal overlap and real committment to innovation.
Speculations are fun - but total waste of time,
Have to code now :-),
adam
Posted by Adam Bien on April 06, 2009 at 12:56 PM CEST #
I a not sure what to think of the current outcome... From a very straightforward, "pragmatic" point of view eventually I am still hoping for Sun to contribute at least most of its open source code / projects (most notably NetBeans and Glassfish) to some foundation (Apache? Codehaus?) before moving further - at the moment, for what I am experiencing here, the "uncertain" situation of Sun and the fact these technologies, despite being open-source, still are rather closely tied to the company itself seems to unfortunately make people stay away from it so no matter what is about to happen, as long as Sun ain't on a bright road to recovery everything will be "bad marketing" for Glassfish, NetBeans, OpenSolaris, ... no matter how enthusiastic our evangelization efforts eventually are... :(
K.
Posted by Kristian on April 06, 2009 at 02:12 PM CEST #
If you ask me - I am fine with every company buying Sun as long as its name is not Microsoft. That's the only company I could imagine, which has enough money to buy Sun while clearly endangering Java.
Posted by Carsten Schlipf on April 06, 2009 at 08:02 PM CEST #
Apple? The most monopolistic company in the industry? Using and developing a completely cross-platform technology? Apple and its high horse can go to hell.
Posted by hug on April 09, 2009 at 03:25 AM CEST #
@Hug,
you have really strong opinions. I was just pragmatic and hoped for faster JDK16u10 availability on MacOSX then:-),
regards,
adam
Posted by Adam Bien on April 10, 2009 at 02:13 AM CEST #