Apple/Sun agreement?

shadygshadyg
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Buyout rumors are a dime a dozen, but what about a simple cross-licensing deal between Apple and Sun? I've been looking for OSX-based server hardware for a while, and by that I mean real heavy-duty enterprise servers with hot-swap drives, redundant power supplies, RAID5, 16x processors, backup, etc.



It would be pretty hype-worthy if Apple ported OSX to Sparc and worked out a deal with Sun to sell Mac (and portable UNIX) software on Sparc enterprise servers. I doubt it would eat at all into Apple hardware sales since enterprises are not exactly snapping up the PowerMacs. And Sun would likely not suffer since they're making money on the sales anyway.



Not sure if the figures would work out for both companies, but there might be room to move here.



-- ShadyG

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    eat@meeat@me Posts: 321member
    I was the former NEXTSTEP PM for Sun in 94-96 and we ported it to SUN/SPARC and Sun/x86 architectures. It took a couple of years but the financial and intelligence community as well as scientific, all big sun markets, loved NeXT Development, now called Cocoa. I posted something similar before. If Apple wants to get into enterprise market again, this is a good opportunity. Sun on the server side and Apple OS X on the client running Cocoa apps.



    We called this partnership "Snapple".



    We'll see if this happens again. Sun, Oracle and Apple are all in the "alternative" camp to Micro$oft.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    eat@meeat@me Posts: 321member
    [quote]Originally posted by Talibabble:

    <strong>I was the former NEXTSTEP PM for Sun in 94-96 and we ported it to SUN/SPARC and Sun/x86 architectures. It took a couple of years but the financial and intelligence community as well as scientific, all big sun markets, loved NeXT Development, now called Cocoa. I posted something similar before. If Apple wants to get into enterprise market again, this is a good opportunity. Sun on the server side and Apple OS X on the client running Cocoa apps.



    We called this partnership "Snapple".



    We'll see if this happens again. Sun, Oracle and Apple are all in the "alternative" camp to Micro$oft.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    I should say we ported (and sold) NEXTSTEP on SPARC workstations as well as OpenStep which followed. Steve Jobs wanted the port to happen faster but the windowing system in Mac OSX differed from Sun's and it added lots of extra porting problems and complexity. In the end, Java was coming out, which we also marketed and it was far more successful than OpenStep so we focused all our efforts on Java for client and server side and OpenStep was End of Lifed after some time. But, now 5-6 years later, it is ripe again. we'll see.
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