IBM to Acquire Transitive

Good move for all.

what is IBM exactly buying? the rosetta technology won't be used anymore in the future. unless someone else does a platform switch like apple but who would that be?

what is IBM exactly buying? the rosetta technology won't be used anymore in the future. unless someone else does a platform switch like apple but who would that be?

they are buying it to get x86 linux apps to run easily on their POWER line of servers and what not.

also as far as how this will affect apple? It won't. the reason for that will become evident soon.

Maybe they will get Mac OS X Server running on a POWER...:p

they are buying it to get x86 linux apps to run easily on their POWER line of servers and what not.

Which is Rosetta exactly the other way round - does that company already have an x86 emulator that runs on Power CPUs?

And does this really make sense in the Linux world, where you actually have the SOURCE CODE for (almost) everything and can compile your software on the platform?

Anyway. IBM will have their reasons for the purchase, and I'm sure that only a fistful of us will ever see that technology anywhere in real life, unless you work in a HPC data center or a large insurance firm or bank.

Will this affect Apple's license for the technology? Of course not. Contracts don't become invalid just because a company got bought. MySQL is also still using the InnoDB engine, although that technology is now owned by Oracle.

Besides a few games, I still have two apps on my Intel Mac that require Rosetta: Office:Mac 2004 and the driver software for a TDK label printer. Neither will ever be ported to Intel, so for me Rosetta still is an essential feature of OS X.

This has Mark Papermaster written all over it.

what is IBM exactly buying? the rosetta technology won't be used anymore in the future. unless someone else does a platform switch like apple but who would that be?

Ah, how about Sun, Solaris SPARC to Solaris x86 transition? HP-UX PARISC to Intanium Transition? heck, what about the move from the IBM mainframe POWER based mainframes? Endless possibilities.

Besides a few games, I still have two apps on my Intel Mac that require Rosetta: Office:Mac 2004 and the driver software for a TDK label printer.

During the initial switch to Intel, I started color coding all my apps by what type they were: Red for PPC only, Blue for Universal, and Green for Intel only (Parallels and the like). I think I might have 3 apps that are still red: 2 games, and Quicken. Hopefully someday they will actually make the switch.

I wouldn't be surprised if Snow Leopard dropped Rosetta.

IBM is not doing this because they want some product. They are moving into a "hot" new area and need the expertise of the engineers. When all you need is a product you buy it like Apple bought Rosseta.

Running multiple virtual servers on on physical box is kind of a big deal now. In the Mac Desktop world we see just two version of this in Rosseta and Fusion/Paralles but this is actually a much bigger thing in the server world. The idea is that you can stand up (say) 12 servers all on one computer then as the demand goes up you can add more pysical computers up to 12. So you electric bill can rise and fall with demand, or you can swap out hardware on a running server. Who ever does this best will have a big advantage.

It used to be that people would just buy many cheap PCs and put them in big racks but now people are seeing the running the PCs and maintaining them cost a lot so the move is back to big, high end servers that can run many virtual servers.