Today's Wall Street Journal reports that IBM may purchase Sun Microsystems. While the focus is on Sun's very extensive collection of "servers" that power wide swaths of the Internet — and with the entry of Cisco into the server market, I expect IBM and Sun feel the pressure to combine to compete — the Journal does mention that both companies support open-source software.
Sun is the home of Java, which is not open-source but is available for free. You may not have heard of Java but it's a language used everywhere in all sorts of computers and devices, and in particular on the World Wide Web. Sun makes Java freely available; IBM supports open-source and free technologies; the world's programmers would rise up in rebellion if Java were to disappear (or they'd switch to an alternative open-source Java). Even so, if IBM acquires Sun, I would not be surprised to see IBM spin Java off into a separate company.
Topics: · business · computing
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