SPARC was already in trouble (well before Oracle started talking to Sun), due to two actions taken by Sun itself:

1. After a massive backlash, Sun retracts it's attempted kill-off of Solaris for x86. (Sun stated quite plainly that it felt that Solaris for x86 was a threat to their SPARC business.)

2. Sun introduces the first in a whole series of servers (and later, workstations) built around non-SPARC processors (SunFire).

Basically, SPARC has been in trouble (major trouble) for a VERY long time, primarily because of the decreasing hardware costs of commodity x86 servers, workstations, desktops, laptops, and notebooks (most of which can run Solaris or OpenSolaris today).

As commodity x86 prices continue to drop, SPARC as a hardware platform sees whatever advantages it has largely go away. Worse, Solaris (and OpenSolaris) have erased any *software* advantage SPARC may have had (is there any Solaris software that is strictly for SPARC, from anyone?).

SPARC is indeed screwed; however, the seeds of its screwing have been around for years.

I think I would rather let Oracle to have Apple, not Sun. And let IBM to have Sun instead.

As Oracle has never donate anything to the public before. And once they have Sun, all the open stanards, and all the freeware will be endangered, to either kill off, or become closed software/payware.

Of coz I agreed with you that, if M$ have Sun, then the IT would become a dark darkage...

Not just SPARC. Virtualbox, JAVA, Solaris, OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, GlassFish, Netbeans, MySQL are all doomed.

There are bigger implications in this deal than what has been expressed. You know Larry Ellison has always wanted to stick it to Microsoft. Microsoft has never had a Server OS, Database, or the ability to run on Big Server hardware like Solaris on Sun and Oracle on Sun Hardware w/ Solaris. The Oracle/Sun merger locks Microsoft and Windows out of the Enterprise Data Center equation and relegates Windows Server OS's to client server computing alone. Ellison wins the data center war, as Oracle will now not only be a big Database vendor but a Unix Data Center Server hardware/software/database vendor with end to end solutions. All Oracle needs to do now is buy Apple.

"Time to get that middle ark spaceship ready for Jack and his homeys."

Great commentary!

Various idiots think high volume proprietary stuff is the same as open standards. They probably think Coca Cola is a standard, or something.

Jack Gold is an idiot and a paid whiner.

Col got it right with OpenSPARC, let's see when Intel comes out with Open86, or IBM with OpenPOWER (wtf cares about the Itanic except HP).

To say that SPARC isn't "as open standards as possible" is so far from reality. What "open standards" are there for CPUs, Jack?

Time to get that middle ark spaceship ready for Jack and his homeys.

Dan Olds comment that Oracle will kill SPARC is misleading and wrong to say the least. If anything SPARC, and more importantly Sun CMT based SPARC systems have had a massive uptake in volume, revenue and marketshare AND a lot of those systems are running Oracles middleware products like Siebel. Oracle DB has #1 marketshare on Sun SPARC systems and especially the high end systems.

If you had read Oracles FAQs on Sun acquisition here: http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf

you'd see that Oracle plans on growing Sun's hardware business:

"Oracle plans to grow the Sun hardware business after the closing,
protecting Sun customers’ investments and ensuring the long-term
viability of Sun products. Oracle also intends to focus the server
and storage businesses on our common enterprise customers, where
we believe we bring competitive advantage, relationships, and a
track record of helping to reduce costs and complexity. Key to this
strategy will be our plans to develop software-optimized hardware
that integrates all of the enterprise components: hardware, database,
middleware, and applications. After the closing, Oracle plans to be
the only company that can engineer an integrated system where all
the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it
themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs
go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

Was not Nvidia looking for a CPU?

Its not the same as x86 or x64 or whatever but...

And opensolaris is... opensource.

Strage deal.

...but isn't SPARC open as part of openSPARC and Sun provided most, if not all the intellectual property to make this happen. With a little more help, could this not be an open standard much like x86 minus licensing fees?