After I read that IBM apparently is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems, I felt an odd sense of "oh, yeah -- why not?" coming on. It certainly fulfills one of the predictions people were throwing around about Sun -- but what will happen to some of the flagship open source projects under Sun's wing, namely OpenOffice and Solaris?

I read one bit of feedback from an industry analyst (I'm stuck for finding it right now, sorry) who thought the whole idea of anyone taking on a company as burdened, doggish, and hidebound as Sun was a waste of time. Evidently IBM hasn't accepted that as the conventional wisdom; it sees enough of value in Sun -- or at least in Sun's portfolio of products and development teams -- to have Sun become a part of its family.

And again, OpenOffice and Solaris come to the fore as two of the biggest offerings, both of them open source. I'd like to think both of them will be in good hands with IBM. In OpenOffice's case, I'm hoping it'll be in better hands than it has been with Sun, if only for the sake of the freedom of the project development. IBM's fork of OpenOffice -- its rebranded Lotus Symphony -- looks quite promising; I wouldn't be upset if future versions of OO.o came more to resemble IBM's version.

Solaris, though, is another story -- especially since IBM has a key product of its own that operates in roughly the same space -- namely, AIX. Both AIX and Solaris have ways of virtualizing processing power, but each approaches it quite differently. They each have their own installed base and are used for markedly different things, so there's no overriding reason why one would have to be eclipsed by or folded into the other.

Whatever the news may be for Sun, it's probably going to be good news for their open source work. It might well even be better news than we've had before.

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