As I write this, on Sunday evening, April 5th, it appears that the IBM/Sun deal is dead in the water. I say ‘appears’ because this wouldn’t be the first, or last, time people threatened to walk out of a deal as a negotiating tactic. You see, I think IBM buying Sun is the best possible thing that could happen to Sun and its product lines.

I say that because Sun has been dying for years. I know it. You know it. The market, which has seen Sun’s stock drop 79% in 2008 alone, certainly knows it.

Sun has been a sick company since its dot com boom days. In the aftermath of the dot com crash, Sun first couldn’t decide if it were a hardware or a software company. Then, under CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun slowly, ever so slowly, decided it wanted to be an open-source software company instead of a closed-source business.

Sun took too long to change. The hardware business may have brought it billions in the 90s, but those days are long gone, torn down by the rise of the low-cost AMD/Intel Linux servers. Sun open-sourced Java, but it still keeps too heavy a hand over it despite the JCP (Java Community Process). Sun’s billion-dollar purchase of MySQL just last year appears to have been a billion bucks poured down a rat hole as MySQL programmers leave Sun behind to work on their own versions of the popular open-source DBMS (Database Management System).

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