Re: IBM in talks to buy Sun

From:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:25:07 -0400

Message-ID:

<49c2e258$0$90268$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>

Mike Schilling wrote:

Arne Vajh?j wrote:

Mike Schilling wrote:

Arne Vajh?j wrote:

lord.zoltar@gmail.com wrote:

On Mar 18, 2:22 pm, Mark Space <marksp...@sbc.global.net> wrote:

Qu0ll wrote:

"Mark Space" <marksp...@sbc.global.net> wrote in message
news:rj9wl.26545$ZP4.12367@nlpi067.nbdc.sbc.com...

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 :-(

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?

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.

It does not need to.

Users can take over.

"Can" isn't "will". And a big complex codebase is awfully difficult to
support once the expertise goes away. Especially one that (again if things
haven't changed much in the past eight years) is barely maintainable even by
those experts.

But if you need to take over a big complex codebase, then the users
are about as good as they can get.

There are probably 300000-500000 NetBeans users out there.

And every one of them is a Java programmer.

Arne