IBM in Talks to Buy Out Sun Microsystems

According to a report this morning in the Wall Street Journal, IBM has entered into talks to buy out Sun Microsystems. But what kind of an impact would this have on the world of Java software development? History has shown us that when IBM buys out a competitor, it is to remove the competitor from the market place. Could this mean the end of everything Sun, and the forced submission of Java into an IDE specific language, or worse?

If you are a fan of Sun products, like NetBeans, Glassfish, JavaFX, or Commercial MySQL, then a buy out by IBM is probably your worst nightmare. Undoubtedly IBM would phase them out in favor of IBM’s established products, like WebSphere and DB2. However, people loyal to only Sun products are a fairly small part of the software development population. For instance. NetBeans has a pretty small share of the IDE market, being eclipsed by, well, Eclipse and IntelliJ. The real threat IMHO comes from the fact that IBM would be taking over the Java programming language. IBM already has experience in this regard. After Sun issued the End of Life Statement for Java 1.4x and earlier, IBM stepped up and began offering compatible versions of the language - for a price. It isn’t hard to envision a new business model for the popular programming model in the event of a takeover. Purchasing a development license for the currently free Java SDK makes my skin crawl.

It remains to be seen if the buy out will happen, or even if in doing so it would violate U.S. antitrust laws. But this is still something the software development community as a whole should be keeping their eye on.