Sun Opens Cobalt Code

Bush Kanaka writes "It looks like Sun has released the user interface and back-end custom code for the Cobalt Raq550 under a BSD-like licence. The BIOS code is also, apparently, now open source and is being maintained by Sun engineer Duncan Laurie in his own time. This has to be good news for all those Cobalt devotees who were annoyed when Sun killed off Cobalt last month, but is anybody going to actually pick up the software and start making their own Cobalt clones?"

Comments

Re:Cobalt Cube?

[AKnightCowboy]

Is it just me, or does this thing sound exactly like the Cobalt Cube from a few years back?

Umm, that's probably because it IS the same Cobalt that produced the Cube. Sun bought them several years ago (and subsequently killed them off by failing to release timely security patches or regular updates anymore). I've got several RaQ4r's and I should find out how this affects us when we keep them around to use as workgroup toy servers after we upgrade to general purpose Linux servers. They were great and I would keep using them if only Sun kept patches up to date. Oh well.

3 users?

[vasqzr]

The number of sites on Cobalt has declined since August 2002, when it reached its peak of 3.1 million hostnames and 942K active sites. Our November hosting survey found Linux-Cobalt serving 871K hostnames and 527K active sites.

Percantage of Linux Active Sites with Known Linux Distribution:

Redhat 51.7%
Cobalt 19.6%
Debian 15.4%
Suse 10.5%
Mandrake 1.9%
Gentoo 1.0%

From NetCraft

Symantec

[silconous]

Symantec will still develop it, all the Gateway Security firewalls and Raptor firewalls were built on cobalts

Cobalt Users Group

[Anonymous Coward]

http://open.cobaltqube.org/

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