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Sun Rethinking Linux Strategy Over SCO Lawsuit
manyoso writes "Sun is waisting no time taking advantage of the SCO lawsuit against IBM. They are making statements trying to play up Solaris as a safe harbor for worried Linux and IBM users. John Loiacono, VP of Sun's operating platforms group, "For people looking at the issues at hand, we are a safe harbor. We have absolute rights to our technology ... We're changing our strategy around Linux (but) we're pausing because we're trying to figure out what the implications of this are going to be". So, this begs the questions... What are the short term implications for the new Linux based desktop we've been hearing about from our fair weather friends? How will the SCO lawsuit affect Sun's long term strategy with Linux and Open Source?"
...so I can say this: SCO are absolute motherfuckers.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Sun had no future before the lawsuit. They have no future now.
Hey Aum! Well, I have met with them here at a pretty senior level, and I would say that despite best intentions, Sun Canada at least really IS this dumb! Keeping Solaris on life support for a "few years" in as stupid as Novell not wanting to do in NetWare for the sake of UnixWare. Why acquire the license for SysV if you're not gonna use it - oh wait, that was SCO's strategy too, wasn't it. Any chance the AT&T codebase is actually cursed in some way?!? And don't even get me started on the stupidity of the Sun "keep it closely guarded so no one ever uses it" Java and ONE arguments. Open used to me something more than "for enough $$$, we will try to make it work on another platform, but you really should just buy our stuff in the first place". Hmmm, and it's a real wonder none of these companies ever really grok'ed the Internet...
-- People who think they know it all, really annoy those of us who do!
It's just fortunate that Sun supports GNOME, and not KDE. We all now know (thanks to a bit of research into the Canopy Group) that SCO is a sister company to TrollTech... the people who control the licensing of a critical part of the KDE desktop (the Qt toolkit).
Expect the screws to be turned on any company developing non-open source apps for KDE *soon* -- it already taxes anyone $3000 per developer just to write non open source software. This, gentlemen, is why KDE is widely shunned by anyone involved in Free software.
That's some scary stuff--and food for thought for those who make fun of distributions like Debian that try to remain "politically pure."