It looks like IBM is in talk to acquire Sun. While I'm not very fond of Sun being swallowed by IBM, I have to say that I don't see that is a big deal now that it would have been few years ago.
The reason is not in hardware, but in software... In the past years, Sun open-sourced most of the software I care about (Java, Solaris, Glashfish, ...). So if IBM could have killed some of these if it acquired sun a while back (and there are reason to do it as they compete with their own stack of software), they can't do this today. This could even become the signal for some to begin forking Java (especially if IBM wants to get rid of the Java Community Process). It would be funny for the like of Oracle to now become a big IBM customer... But I doubt that Ellison would find it that funny (IMHO Oracle would benefit a lot more from acquiring Sun than IBM).
If this merger talk succeed, it will be interesting on how things unfold... What would IBM do with Solaris and Java (I'm pretty sure they will stop working on Glashfish). But whatever they do, both Solaris and Java are out in the open and if the community does not like IBM doing, these product will start to have a new life of their own. And I guess this would be a really good thing.
