# Possible acquisition of Sun



## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Mar 28, 2009)

I guess some of you have heard the rumors about the possible acquisition of Sun by IBM.
Any opinions?
How could this influence FreeBSD, since Solaris features like ZFS and dtrace are or might become part of FreeBSD in the future.


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## vermaden (Mar 28, 2009)

Graaf_van_Vlaanderen said:
			
		

> I guess some of you have heard the rumors about the possible acquisition of Sun by IBM.
> Any opinions?
> How could this influence FreeBSD, since Solaris features like ZFS and dtrace are or might become part of FreeBSD in the future.



OpenSolaris has quite big community, it will be developed no matter if Sun is alive or not, maybe just little slower, but if IBM would buy Sun, then it will propably (and unfortunelly) want to kill both Sparc and Solaris (because place of their Power CPUs and AIX).

This does not change anything for FreeBSD, code that has been created under CDDL license remains under CDDL license.


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## fronclynne (Mar 28, 2009)

I am of several minden thisonnen:
Ein)  IBM will do for Sun what Compaq did for DEC.
Dos)  The Real Genuine OpenSource Community will just pick up the CDDL stuff and devel will continue apace.  No, really!  It could happen!
C)  Just wait till the market cap. of Sun hits 80 or 90 dollars and buy 'em outright.  (upside: should only take a couple more weeks.  downside: you'll lose 80 or 90 dollars)

It's too bad moties didn't have two gripping hands, cos I had a fourth (albeit "stripping flesh") point.  OFW


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## Djn (Mar 28, 2009)

There's a nonzero chance they'd keep solaris alive, though - it's probably a better fit than AIX on cheaper gear, it works on x86/amd64, and it has been ported to the zSeries. Having a nice modern unix they control available on most of their gear (at the moment, the gap is in the POWER servers, and that should be fixable) doesn't immediately strike me as a bad idea.


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