IBM buying Sun Microsystems makes no sense, it’s a red herring

“This may even be in the form of a chop shop takeover. The only
thing holding up a hostile takeover of Sun to sell for spare parts
over the past six months was the credit crunch, and the fact that
private equity firms have had some distractions.

“By buying Sun IBM gains little other than some intellectual
property and mySQL. IBM could have bought mySQL or open sourced DB2
or a subset of DB2 any time, if it wanted to go that route. IBM has
basically already played its open source hand, which it did
masterfully at just the right time. Sun, on the other hand, played
(or forced) its open source hand poorly, and at the wrong time.
What’s the value to Sun for having “gone open source”? Zip. Owning
Java is not a business model, or not enough of one to help Sun
meaningfully.”

Complete
Story