[OT] IBM in talks to buy Sun

[Mark Space]

Just thought I'd mention this:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/technology/companies/19sun.html?hp>


"I.B.M. is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems in a proposed deal valued at
nearly $7 billion, a person with knowledge of the negotiations said on
Wednesday."

 

[Qu0ll]

Just thought I'd mention this:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/technology/companies/19sun.html?hp>


"I.B.M. is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems in a proposed deal valued at
nearly $7 billion, a person with knowledge of the negotiations said on
Wednesday."

Oh well, so much for Swing and NetBeans. We will live in an all SWT/Eclipse
world soon :-(

--
And loving it,

-Qu0ll (Rare, not extinct)
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[Mark Space]

Oh well, so much for Swing and NetBeans. We will live in an all
SWT/Eclipse world soon :-(

Yup that was my first thought too. Glassfish a goner too. All JBoss,
all the time.

 

[Qu0ll]

Yup that was my first thought too. Glassfish a goner too. All JBoss, all
the time.

Don't you mean WebSphere?

--
And loving it,

-Qu0ll (Rare, not extinct)
_________________________________________________
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[Qu0ll]

Yeah, I think he does. JBoss == Red Hat.

Not that it matters to me, I use Jetty.

I use GlassFish and have invested a lot of time and effort in learning it
and customising my apps for it.

I really don't want to have to learn SWT, though. I'm happy with Swing.

In spite of its critics, Swing is an awesome GUI toolkit that is unrivalled
in the computing world. Again, I have invested hundreds of hours in Swing
and my software uses it extensively. And what about applets? They have to
be Swing or at least AWT.

I am sure I am not the only one in this position so IBM would have to think
long and hard about abandoning Swing. Surely Swing and SWT can co-exist? I
imagine what would happen is that IBM's Java would continue to support Swing
but they probably won't invest very much in developing it any further.

And... I don't think a discussion of Java's primary vendor is off-topic
for
this newsgroup.

I absolutely agree. This could become an extremely crucial and significant
move for Java.

--
And loving it,

-Qu0ll (Rare, not extinct)
_________________________________________________
(e-mail address removed)
[Replace the "SixFour" with numbers to email me]

 

[lord.zoltar]

Yup that was my first thought too.  Glassfish a goner too.  All JBoss,
all the time.

I don't know about Glassfish, but I thought NetBeans was opensource...
so... not a goner?

 

[Thomas Kellerer]

Steve Sobol wrote on 18.03.2009 21:10:

SWT is less cross-platform than Swing is, in that you have to ship platform-
specific DLL's with your app to get it to work.

I could image that IBM - if they really take complete control over Java - would
package the necessary Swing DLLs and jars into the JDK so that anyone who
installs a JDK has Swing and SWT installed (wouldn't hurt that much).

I doubt that they would kill Swing because the installed base is just too big
(btw: the GUI tools for DB2 are all Swing based, not a very good implementation
of Swing, but nevertheless)

Thomas

 

[Stefan Ram]

I doubt that they would kill Swing because the installed base is just too big

»Java Swing with 47% use, has surpassed WinForms as the dominant
GUI development toolkit, an increase of 27% since fall 2004.«

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/hansmuller/archive/2005/10/official_swing.html

 

[Roedy Green]

"I.B.M. is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems in a proposed deal valued at
nearly $7 billion, a person with knowledge of the negotiations said on
Wednesday."

Capitalism only works if you have 26+ competitors. Fewer than that and
you get informal price fixing.

Such buyouts are mainly to kill competition. In most cases I think
they should be illegal.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"In the central North Pacific, plastic outweighs surface zooplankton 6 to 1."
~ Thomas M. Kostigen

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Capitalism only works if you have 26+ competitors. Fewer than that and
you get informal price fixing.

Such buyouts are mainly to kill competition.

I don't think the market for servers has ever been a market that
could be labeled perfect competitive.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Oh well, so much for Swing and NetBeans. We will live in an all
SWT/Eclipse world soon :-(

Swing is part of standard Java.

You can count on it continuing to exist.

Regarding NetBeans then I would expect that to continue as well.

Large user base.

Good reputation.

It will not be in IBM's interest to see a Java IDE monopoly - it
would only help Microsoft and Visual Studio.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Yup that was my first thought too. Glassfish a goner too.

Not Swing and NetBeans.

But most likely Glassfish.

It does not have much market share anyway.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

And... I don't think a discussion of Java's primary vendor is off-topic for
this newsgroup.

Strictly speaking it must be off-topic for c.l.j.p since it is not
a programming question.

But I would say that it is so close to being on-topic, because
it may have an impact on the products and tools we use that it is
not spam.

I always think we have 3 categories:
A) on topic about Java programming
B) stuff that is acceptable because it is closely related
to Java programming - which includes logical/algorithmic problems
that just happen to be implemented in Java, important news related
to major Java products etc.
C) off topic spam

This is not comp.lang.c !

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I don't know about Glassfish, but I thought NetBeans was opensource...
so... not a goner?

Both Glassfish and Netbeans are open source.

But I doubt that Glassfish can continue keeping up with the
Java EE standard if an IBM'ified SUN stopped all contribution.

Netbeans has a much larger user base and don't have to
implement a huge standard specification. So I think it would be OK.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

»Java Swing with 47% use, has surpassed WinForms as the dominant
GUI development toolkit, an increase of 27% since fall 2004.«

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/hansmuller/archive/2005/10/official_swing.html

I don't know how Evans came to that conclusion.

It is obviously wrong.

In 2004 WinForms was very new. It seems very weird that it was #1
back then.

VB6 must have been #1 back then.

And WinForms is way bigger than Swing today.

In the Java world the web / fat client gui ratio is huge.

Arne

 

[Lew]

Capitalism only works if you have 26+ competitors. Fewer than that and
you get informal price fixing.

Can you substantiate that claim, and in particular the number "26"?

That is a very interesting assertion.

 

[Mike Schilling]

SWT is less cross-platform than Swing is, in that you have to ship
platform- specific DLL's with your app to get it to work.

That's also true of Swing; the difference is that the system-specific
Swing jars come with the JRE.

 

[Mike Schilling]

Both Glassfish and Netbeans are open source.

But I doubt that Glassfish can continue keeping up with the
Java EE standard if an IBM'ified SUN stopped all contribution.

Netbeans has a much larger user base and don't have to
implement a huge standard specification. So I think it would be OK.

Unless things have change a lot in the past 8 years, Netbeans is
developed and maintained almost entirely by Sun employees. If they go
away, so does Netbeans.

 

[Nigel Wade]

Steve Sobol wrote on 18.03.2009 21:10:

I could image that IBM - if they really take complete control over Java - would
package the necessary Swing DLLs and jars into the JDK so that anyone who
installs a JDK has Swing and SWT installed (wouldn't hurt that much).

It may hurt those platforms which are not supported by the standard JRE. Sun
currently only supports Windows, Solaris and Linux (maybe IBM would extend that
to include AIX). Any other platform has to "roll-their-own" and that may not be
possible for SWT. I don't know, I don't use it, and I don't know under what
license the source is available.

I doubt that they would kill Swing because the installed base is just too big
(btw: the GUI tools for DB2 are all Swing based, not a very good implementation
of Swing, but nevertheless)

Yeah, but they could easily freeze development, and cause death by a thousand
cuts.

 

[Roedy Green]

Can you substantiate that claim, and in particular the number "26"?

read Axelrod's the Evolution of Cooperation.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/01...mp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0140124950

I expand at
http://mindprod.com/money/capitalism.html

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"In the central North Pacific, plastic outweighs surface zooplankton 6 to 1."
~ Thomas M. Kostigen