What if Oracle hadn't bought Sun ?

doul

doul

What if Oracle hadn't bought Sun ? What would happen if IBM bought Sun ? Or the third option : Sun was back to business by themselves only ?

Yes I know, I'm too nostalgic, but hey ! Let's dream together for a short time ... And imagine what the world could be with Sun Microsystems nowadays. Or do you think Sun couldn't have continued anyway ?
 
IBM wouldn't let all the Sun stuff compete with AIX and POWER.

Left alone I think we would have seen a log of innovation since Sun would have to build things the competition doesn't have. These days probably in the security space.

That might have been a bad thing if they protected all that stuff with patents and the Linux crowd wouldn't be allowed to invent parts of it, too.
 
What if Compaq didn't bought DEC? Or what if they did, resold it to HPE and HPE decided to further develop Alpha instead of using that Itanum potato?
Questions, questions ...
 
Don't get me dreaming. I love PowerPC, MIPS and sparc. What if all that had been allowed to continue, on a level playing field? Sparc laptop with something like the T2 as CPU? ZFS being light years ahead of what we have now?
 
Maybe it just woulda went broke. Why did they sell to Oracle in the first place?

The wider question is probably: where is the wider money, and how can it be focused in on the nicer engineering?

The deeper money, I don't mean the scammy money that went from cryptocurrencies to LLMs.

This might be one direction, I believe this is the dtrace guy from Sun?

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Crivens said:
Don't get me dreaming. I love PowerPC, MIPS and sparc. What if all that had been allowed to continue, on a level playing field? Sparc laptop with something like the T2 as CPU? ZFS being light years ahead of what we have now?
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Both MIPS and Sparc architectures are still being developed; MIPS as Loongson in China and Sparc as Elbrus in Russia. Giving recent Chinese breakthroughs in EUVL, maybe they both will have a future?
 
cracauer@ said:
That might have been a bad thing if they protected all that stuff with patents and the Linux crowd wouldn't be allowed to invent parts of it, too.
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Sun people were open minded about open source, maybe they weren't locked everything like IBM or Oracle do.
 
lost_in_c said:
Maybe it just woulda went broke. Why did they sell to Oracle in the first place?
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Because they ran into some financial troubles, first of the dot com bubble, last subprime crisis, between the exceptional growth of x86 PCs, look at the top 500 CPU chart form Wikipedia and the stock value form companiesmarketcap:
Screenshot 2025-09-07 at 21-38-07 Sun Microsystems (JAVA) - Stock price history.png
Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg.png
 
Motorola 6800 vs Intel x86, Sparc vs Intel vs AMD vs whomever. The space has always been about competing tech.The "winner" is not always the best, but often the "best funded"
As Crivens points out above, "what if...". Heck look at the original Mac: specs were below a flip phone, but look at what it could do.
 
mer said:
Motorola 6800 vs Intel x86, Sparc vs Intel vs AMD vs whomever. The space has always been about competing tech.The "winner" is not always the best, but often the "best funded"
As Crivens points out above, "what if...". Heck look at the original Mac: specs were below a flip phone, but look at what it could do.
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You missed one zero there - 6800 vs Z80 vs 6502... and 68000 vs x86 ;)
 
doul said:
Because they ran into some financial troubles, first of the dot com bubble, last subprime crisis, between the exceptional growth of x86 PCs, look at the top 500 CPU chart form Wikipedia and the stock value form companiesmarketcap:View attachment 23588View attachment 23589
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Yes, but on the other hand, when headwinds come, it's usually the business models that do no or no longer address current realities that fall first. Like the cryptocurrency collapse. When things are MAGAin and booming, all sorts of things are viable. Then when you shut the world down for a few years and everybody goes broke, money prioritizes.

The analyses I find tend to suggest that Sun was stuck in a place between open source and closed source, without being able to compete with either. One of those paradoxes, maybe Torvalds had a better sense for sales than is usually granted.

Even though, by the way, that place probably is part of what made such great engineering come out of it.
 
vmisev said:
You missed one zero there - 6800 vs Z80 vs 6502... and 68000 vs x86 ;)
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Effin zeros. You have too many or not enough. But my point still stands: hardware in the past vs hardware today and "ability to do work". Seems like in the past did more work with less resource than happens today.
 
mer said:
Effin zeros. You have too many or not enough. But my point still stands: hardware in the past vs hardware today and "ability to do work". Seems like in the past did more work with less resource than happens today.
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It does seem that way; with my Atari ST (68K/8MHz, 4M RAM, one 1.44 FDD, no HDD) I was able to do a lot of type setting (Calamus on GEM, PageMaker on Mac System 6 with Spectre emulator) and make decent $ with it; also net surfing (okay, pre www) and my late dad was using it for Cubase and Notator (and bunch of other music software that I can't remember). Oh, and I also learned MS-DOS on it, it had built it VT terminal so great for connecting to VMS, etc.
 
doul said:
What if Oracle hadn't bought Sun ?
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Then Sun would have died by itself. The corporate culture was broken, the decision making (what to invest it, what to build, what to try selling) was disfunctional. The CEO was an complete nut case (sort of the prototype of what Elon Musk became later), the senior technical decision makers (in particular Bechtolsheim) had RDFs (reality distortion fields) appropriate in size for Steve Jobs, but unlike Jobs, they didn't have the genius to make their distortions into products. The relatively small dot com bubble took that leaking ship and made it capsize. When a lot of senior architects and employees with 2-digit employee serial numbers started quitting in the early 2000s, I knew it was over.

doul said:
What would happen if IBM bought Sun ?
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First, as Cracauer already said, they wouldn't have, nor couldn't have. Second, IBM is very good at ruining companies it buys. Or morphing them into something completely different. RedHat is probably the first major IBM acquisition that hasn't completely failed.

doul said:
And imagine what the world could be with Sun Microsystems nowadays.
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Today, everyone in the open source world loves to hate Sun, for being closed source, licenses, and patenting. But we also have to remember how much they contributed to open source. For example NFS.

vmisev said:
What if Compaq didn't bought DEC?
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Digital was dying even worse than Sun was. Again, corporate culture, broken CEO, lack of technical direction. Remember, having technically good products isn't all that's required for being a good technical product company. Matter-of-fact, some of the best high-tech companies (those that have lived for a long time, made a lot of money, and served their customers well) usually had mediocre products. Sure, things like the PDP11, VMS or Alpha were genius. But customers don't need genius; they need affordable and productive systems, with great support, which are designed to fit the needs of the customers. And the need of the customer is not "a super fast CPU" or "an OS with the greatest command line parser", but something that makes the customer's business work well.

And that is why IBM is still there. It is still very large (second only to the FAANGs in the number of engineers doing computers), has been there for 125 years, its stock doubled in the last 5 years, and the few of my old colleagues who haven't retired yet are quite happy there and enjoying their jobs. Very few have been laid off.
 
Becoming an open source company was too early at that stage, world hasn't seen it yet - so there were still too many advocating against it (OpenSolaris, ZFS, Java, ..). Back then, leaders were partially perceived as insane. Today, we see success for many.

The open source drive was essential to break free from the hardware losing edge IMHO, so become more like IBM or RedHat etc. If they would have survived, we might would talk about something FreeBSD/Solaris here ;-)
The killer surely was Oracle, many fled the boat to safe their projects, disregarding their paycheck - me included. The takeover blocked all open source efforts at least temporarily and almost all communication lines to the world were cut.

What if IBM would have taken over? Now that is a great question. At least back then, IBM was considered sane and a great service company w/o too much or any politics. But I am not up to date with all that :)

The evaporation of Sun was probably the single most important milestone and boost for the open source world. FreeBSD became the number one OS in regards of ZFS etc (now having OpenZFS w/ Linux too).
 
jaubits said:
Becoming an open source company was too early at that stage, world hasn't seen it yet - so there were still too many advocating against it (OpenSolaris, ZFS, Java, ..). Back then, leaders were partially perceived as insane. Today, we see success for many.

The open source drive was essential to break free from the hardware losing edge IMHO, so become more like IBM or RedHat etc.
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AFAIR Sun even released Verilog for UltraSparc T1/T2 in 2006/07 under GPL ?
 
Sun were already done when oracle bought them up. Linux and X86 were already killing the unix workstation market, which was Sun's original thing, so Sun diversified into servers, where again they were competing against the odds against Intel. The cost of developing your own CPUs versus the X86 cross-industry behemoth was and is prohibitive, only the deepest of pockets can afford to do that. The only way for them to have survived would have been to bring in a visionary leader like Steve Jobs to turn the company around in the way Jobs did with Apple, but Sun didn't have that type of leadership. Sun did well in the dot com boom then got crushed in the bust and the predators pounced and stripped the assets.
 
If IBM bought Sun, it would only be to strip the assets and close them down as a competitor, IMHO. And IBM had already grabbed the only piece of technology that Sun had that IBM actually wanted, namely Java, for its cross-platform development capability, to extend the life of the mainframe. The only other thing might have been ZFS, but IBM already had/has lots of their own midrange and high-end storage software and systems that do basically the same thing.

If Sun tried going back into business with Sparc-based systems now, they would face all the same problems as before. It is extremely costly and difficult to develop, market and then maintain a non-standard CPU architecture, against a strongly entrenched market standard. IBM got nowhere with POWER, once Apple dropped it, for example; they still sell it to some specialised niche markets, but not the mass market. Many have tried - DEC (alpha), SGI (MIPS), Intel themselves (i860, itanium), Motorola (68K), National (32000), HP (PA-RISC), Transmeta... to name just a few. Furthermore there have been many attempts to put ARM variants into both desktop PC's/laptops and servers, the only company that has really succeeded in doing that in my opinion has been Apple, because they have total control of their ecosystem, but most of the others have been also-rans (so far, anyway). As a rule, X86 still rules in the server space and on the desktop and laptops, apart from Apple. As a final thought... it's hard to remember the last time a company tried to market a new non-ARM, non-X86 CPU architecture targetted at PC's and servers, at least in the west; who knows what the Chinese are doing for their own market, even the Longsoon was a MIPS derivative of some type.
 
Looks lile it's the T1 and T2, at least I have archives for them both. I can't tell what is in them, they are huge and I currently don't have the disc space.
 
vmisev said:
AFAIR Sun even released Verilog for UltraSparc T1/T2 in 2006/07 under GPL ?
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Which is sort of funny. The first 64-bit SPARC to be released didn't even come from Sun, it came from their coopetitor (no, that's not a spelling error!) HaL, also known as "Andy Heller's circus". Lots of our family's friends are from Sun and HAL. While HAL was very successful technically, it suffered since its inception from a culture clash, between the completely insane and unmanageable Andy Heller, and the source of funding, first Bernie Lacroute of Kleiner-Perkins (who is the L at the end of HAL), and then Fujitsu.
 
MCST made / make the russian Elbrus line of sparc chips... not sure how easy it is to buy a development board with one of these chips on it nowadays!

en.wikipedia.org

Elbrus-8S - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

There was some press buzz a couple of years ago that China was going to have a big push to use Risc/V, I wonder what has happened. I know they licensed POWER, and they also made some X86 compatible chips that were only a generation or two behind amd and intel's current stuff. And then they have their own stuff, the longsoon, and the huawei stuff, and probably others I haven't heard of.
 
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