OStatic

At Zero Hour, Talks Break Down; IBM Walks Away from Sun

I can safely say when I covered the speculation that IBM and Sun were wrapping up the finer points of the acquisition Friday, I figured that if there was anything left to say come Monday, it would deal with idiosyncracies of the agreed-upon terms. Even though the "announcement is imminent" reports were not officially sanctioned by IBM or Sun, there was no reason to believe the sources were dishonest about the information they gave. It still doesn't seem there was dishonesty, or that these sources made wildly off-base assumptions about what was to come. It seemed as though IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems was set to proceed, until late Saturday evening, when IBM and Sun broke off negotiations, according to Bloomberg.

There had been much debate about how an IBM acquisition would affect Sun's open source efforts. As those questions move even further into the hypothetical realm, far more troubling questions loom about Sun's next potential buyer -- or its choice to weather the storm on its own.

Whatever Sun's next move is, and however the move eventually pans out, there's the reassuring idea that the open source projects it backs -- MySQL, OpenOffice, the community-powered OpenSolaris operating system -- are still open and generally available. While that's great news for developers and end-users alike, changing priorities at Sun (or losing Sun entirely), has the potential to unleash copious amounts of upheaval as these projects adjust to these changes and regain their footing. Very few scenarios that could play out mean certain disaster, but all have varying elements of real risk.

• mysql
• OpenOffice
• Java
• Sun Microsystems
• IBM
• OpenSolaris
• acquisition

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