IBM's Acquisition of Sun on the Horizon

by Kristin Shoemaker - Apr. 03, 2009Comments (0)

According to the New York Times and Bloomberg, IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems is imminent. The official announcement and terms of the acquisition will most likely be made public on Monday, but a late in the day announcement hasn't been ruled out. It's estimated that the purchase will cost IBM nearly $7 billion.

There's been much speculation and discussion both here at OStatic and elsewhere about what this means for Sun and its open source projects.

Is this acquisition good news for MySQL? For OpenOffice? OpenSolaris? It could very well be -- the New York Times speculates on how significantly this acquisition might affect Oracle's database sales. Good or bad, this is an undeniably new direction for Sun, and considering the news that Sun has been shopping itself around to potential buyers for some time, those at the helm felt some sort of new beginning was necessary.