On Apr 22, 2005, at 7:34 PM, justin flavin wrote:
> Why they agreed to sell out to a past-their-sell-by-date company like
> Novell, is beyond me - they should have sold out to IBM instead - but
> that's just my personal opinion on it.
IBM wouldn't have bought them.
While Sun was having meetings where they wrote Linux off, IBM decided
to bet the company on it, to the extent that they were willing to slip
the knife into AIX. (Their AIX customer base appears to have put the
kaibosh on that idea.)
Owning a Linux vendor would probably have strangled it's acceptance as
it would be seen as just another pawn of IBM. Besides, IBM now pulls in
mountains of money from their services division, so why bother
maintaining the development of an OS when you can sell hardware for it,
sell apps to run on top of it and sell services to manage it? They also
get to look at Microsoft with a straight face and say, "It's not us".
Mark.
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