[rbanffy]

Apart from seeing the beautiful elegant hardware running a second-rate port of a second-rate OS and the patents Sun owns ending up on being auctioned to patent trolls so they could have a field day destroying every competition for Windows without implying Microsoft, nothing.

Apart from that, it would be a good thing.

[rbanffy]

Guys... Even if you disagree (and you don't want to debate the issue and prefer to down-vote the comment) with Windows being a second-rate OS and that a SPARC port would not be a priority for Microsoft, you you have to agree that having all those shiny patents covering all kinds of stuff being auctioned off to trolls would impact everybody.

Not me, at least directly, because I live in Brazil and we have no such software patent nonsense, but tech business would be quite impossible where they are valid.

[rfrey]

I doubt people are down-voting because of your views of the relative merits of this or that OS, but rather because the expression of those views is long on slogans and short on insight.

[anamax]

I tend to downvote posts if the author complains about being downvoted.

Also, not only were you "long on slogans and short on insight" but your argument doesn't fly. (IBM usually keeps the patents of the companies that it buys.)

[rbanffy]

I was speculating on what would happen if Microsoft bought Sun and decided to port Windows to SPARC.

IBM would want to keep the patents for itself, but Microsoft would probably wrap them in a do-not-hit-us term and sell them to trolls. This way they could undermine the competition while staying completely out of it.

[anamax]

> Microsoft would probably wrap them in a do-not-hit-us term and sell them to trolls.

Oh really? How about some supporting evidence?

The best evidence would include examples. After all, Microsoft buys companies all the time. If this is something that Microsoft will "probably" do, surely they've done it several times before.