Fernando Cassia wrote: > I don't want to see VirtualBox, and OpenOffice, and other projects > stagnate under an Inmense Bureaucratic Mammoth > or others like Netbeans become Eclipsed... > > Please, revolt, write to that ponytail CEO of yours... > > Even under Dell or HP it'll fare better than under the weight of Big > Blue. Or better yet, take it of the stock markets and become privately > owned... >
Would this be the same IBM that the rest of us know as a strong supporter of open source software that worries you so much? The IBM of today is not the IBM of twenty years ago, you know. They are strong supporters of FOSS in general, including Linux (they like to earn money providing services for Linux, and support it on all sorts of servers and big iron), OpenOffice (they have their own office suite based on it), Eclipse (they wrote the IDE in the first place), and a huge range of important tools such as gcc. If IBM buys Sun, then some software projects will suffer - NetBeans and Solaris are two that come to mind, as they are direct competitors to existing IBM products. You can expect a certain degree of co-existence, and a certain degree of integration. But VirtualBox, OpenOffice and MySQL will continue to be supported and developed by IBM because it makes good business sense to do so. And if the worst happens, these are open source projects and can be forked - there are enough companies with commercial interest in the projects to make that succeed. IBM and Sun do have their differences in philosophy (this is the view of a complete outsider) - IBM is more business oriented, and makes their big decisions based on economics. Sun's decisions are sometimes also based on things that are nice technology without a clear economic plan, or even just on the basis that they like to irritate certain competitors. I am against mergers of large companies - it reduces competition and innovation, and the excessive size of some corporations has had a large part to play in the current economic problems. In particular, I think the technological world will lose an important and charismatic player if Sun gets swallowed. But if Sun does get bought, it could do a great deal worse than being bought by IBM. _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
