Business IT Outsourcing

As an enterprise application development team member, I have had a long history with both companies. I started in this business with IBM’s CICS and COBOL. Publishing one update every 10 years or so, COBOL could not compete with the newer languages of the time (Java). IBM only started looking at viable additions or enhancements after losing lots of business. Having seen what IBM did with their languages, the outlook is not so rosy with Java. I also came from a vendor (Silverstream), which took Java and created proprietary extensions. When Silverstream got bought out by Novell and disappeared, my focus was to convince employers that I did in fact know Java. Since then, I have had a personal dislike for non-standard "enhancements" to technology. IBM’s WebSphere falls directly into that category. Taking a perfectly usable Apache web container and adding "enhancements" so it doesn’t follow apache documentation, but needs IBM support makes me angry. Their JDK implementation leaves many things to be desired. IBM has a history of taking open source technologies and contorting them so only IBM trained personnel can use them. To most application development team guys, IBM is a huge thorn in their sides. It is management not IT that purchases big blue.
It’s not just Java, but many of my other favorite technologies that IBM may toss. Glassfish is a free, easy to use application server that uses the latest EE5 code base. WebSphere 7.0 has been recently released to use IBM’s EE5 edition. 2 years after Glassfish! I am a long time MySQL user, I don’t ever want to use DB2. I can’t imagine using DB2 for my passion projects. NetBeans has made great strides in the IDE space, and is becoming the choice of many application development team members. Whether you use all IBM or all Sun is moot; we have choice and competition, but not for long.

IBM’s lack of focus on marketing and developer mind share (anyone remember OS/2?) are important reasons why I hope this doesn’t happen. In a perfect world, Google would swoop in and buy them. Their cultures are very similar (many former Sun people work at Google), and the competition would still be there.
Yes, many of these technologies are open source. They will not just disapear; but without corporate backing, they will not see light of day in the corporate space. The reason Red Hat and SUSE are major Linux distributions is that Enterprises can have Service contracts. If IBM chooses to abandon them, I don't see widespread use, unless the technology is overwhelmingly compelling.