Sun to Acquire Tarantella

SunFan writes "Sun announced that they will acquire Tarantella Inc., who were the original SCO before selling their operating system to Caldera. Another write-up with more historical detail is at SunHELP. Apparently, Sun is after the Secure Global Desktop products, which might fit into their SunRay strategy."

Comments

The announcement and links

[davecb]

Sun announced plans to acquire Tarantella, Inc., a leading provider of secure application access software based in Santa Cruz, CA. [...] Sun plans to use Tarantella technology to provide customers with a higher level of secure mobile access to data and applications.

As part of the agreement, Sun will acquire the Secure Global Desktop family of products, which enables organizations to access and manage information, data, and applications across virtually all devices, networks, and platforms [...]

The software employs a flexible and secure three-tier architecture deployed on Solaris OS or Linux. Secure Global Desktop enables applications to be displayed using native protocols without the need for specialized software - a Web browser and Java technology is all that's necessary on the client device or application server.[...]

Most importantly, the software will enable you to present a variety of applications on Sun Ray thin clients -- including those written to Microsoft Windows.

Jonathan Schwartz comments at Acquistions Accelerate Microsoft Interoperability
Tarentella is here

Re:Non-Stop

[Anonymous Coward]

You are thinking of 'Non-stop Cluster' This had nothing to do with Tarantella, although I know of one case where Tarantella was deployed with NSC....

Re:Sun SCO License

[tomhudson]

They already bought one from the Scumsucking Crackhead Organization: http://news.com.com/2100-1016-1024633.html

A previously secret licensee of SCO Group's Unix intellectual property has revealed its identity: Unix leader Sun Microsystems.

SCO's Unix licensing plan got a major boost of publicity in May when Microsoft announced its decision to license Unix from SCO, but Sun actually was the first company to sign on. SCO and Sun confirmed the licensing deal on Wednesday.
The pact, signed earlier this year, expanded the rights Sun acquired in 1994 to use Unix in its Solaris operating system. But there's more to the relationship: SCO also granted Sun a warrant to buy as many as 210,000 shares of SCO stock at $1.83 per share as part of the licensing deal, according to a regulatory document filed Tuesday.

Sun and Microsoft gave enough money for SCO to survive while it ramped up its own FUD campaign ... this also gave it time and enough "street cred" to arrange, with the help of a senior VP at Microsoft, for the PIPE deal that gave SCO an additional $50 million. If it weren't for these 3 deals, SCO would be a caldera (a smoking crater).

This is one of several reasons why the people who have been following the whole SCO/IBM thing are so pissed at both Sun and Microsoft.

Not the real reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun already have the necessary remote display technologies. See http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/124007Z6UVR8.xht ml

This acquisition was done because Tarantella have some number of Sun customers, and Sun had been recommending Tarantella. Tarantella would be bankrupt within a few months and that would seriously embarass Sun with those customers. This way Sun doesn't piss off or lose those customers. (While the deal is closing Sun will be paying life support to Tarantella.)

The management at Tarantella has always been pretty poor. In late 2003, a new executive team bought their way in. (Look up Frank Wilde). They specialise in flipping companies, making sure that they give themselves very generous golden parachutes (options that turn into shares on buys, change of control payments, various bonuses etc). This was no exception, except the company was about to go down the toilet. Who knows what they managed to convince Sun with, and quite why Sun is happy to be spending so much money paying off mangement I don't know.

Additionally this deal requires shareholder approval. There are many murmors of people voting no, and others of stripping the self serving management team of their very generous compensation and offering the company to others. It isn't over till the fat lady sings!

Re:Muppet

[turgid]

What if he doesn't want to run Solaris 10?

Fair enough, but judging by his rants, it doesn't look like he has much of a clue what he's trying to achieve. Why is he trying to compile OOo "64-bit"?

On a properly-designed system, the headers and libraries should all be in the normal places for 32-bit compatibility, and it should "just work."

It sounds like he's using debian, so that would explain it. But rather than figuring this out, he blames Sun, and gets away with it because it's the fashionable stance to take around here just now. Times was it was M$ that took the bashing here.

Are all 64-bit Athlons Opterons?

Effectively, yes. Athlon-64, Opteron etc. are just marketing names for the AMD64 chips. They're all pretty much the same apart from minor differences to target them to the various market segments.

Re:FIRST SUN SUCK POST

[Alioth]

I was running OpenOffice on a 64 bit SPARC system years ago. I suspect you're having other problems.