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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."
Everyone is talking about how "great" this is, since Sun now has the capability to possibly disprove a number of SCO's theories in the IBM case. These people forget the $50 million cash infusion Sun made early on into SCO/Caldera, and the continuing war of words Schwartz continues to wage on Linux.
And while I'm not putting on any tin-foil hats just yet, I would not be surprised to find Sun leveraging it's psoition as a predecessor-in-interest to SCO/Caldera (having just purchased another predecessor-in-interest, SCO/Tarentella) as a way to throw a monkey-wrench into IBM's (apparent) plans to dominate the UNIX market with Linux.
OO.o is an incredible gesture, but I just can't seem to get to trust Sun just yet.
I know this is slashdot, but has anyone considered the possibility that Sun actually needed a UNIX licence for Solaris and couldn't be bothered with the 2-3 year embarrasment that IBM has created?
Tarantella has done a great job of moving people to Citrix Metaframe for Unix. It's no wonder their product never grew.
- Server upgrades that made obsolete client connection software flashed into thin clients. We had thousands of dollars of thin clients stop working because they changed the way their server piece worked. The ICA protocol is backwards compatible.
- "Deploy In Any Browser", well unless that browser wasn't Internet Explorer running with a certain version of Java. Other browsers and browsers on other operating systems never worked correctly and would lock up all the time.
No loss that this company was absorbed.
Amen. It amazes me how so many people see conspiracies when there is a simple explanation right there in the open. Sun needed to ensure that they were in the clear with their Solaris-Unix license.
As for the Tantella acquisition, that's clearly to get Tarantella's Citrix like software in a bid to drive down the cost of delivering legacy windows applications on the SunRay platform. No conspiracy here. Just a good business decision with no hidden agendas.
They bought perpetual rights to Unix from SCO/Caldera, but did not buy the company.
And if you thing that OO.o is the only Open Source activity that Sun funds, open your eyes. GNOME, SunSITEs, just to name the most prominent. That Schwarz is a jerk when it comes to GPL is no argument for an anti-OSS gesture, many BSD folks are likewise. It's not that we haven't our own heated flamewars on licenses and how free they are. If you don't believe me, subscribe to debian-legal...
And, in case my `prejudice' matters: I'm no Sun employee. I neither use OO.o nor GNOME; LaTeX and fvwm is just fine for me. I do use Solaris systems, but only in mission-critical HA environments. OSS is not of much interest there, yet, sadly.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Sun didn't give money to SCO to fight linux. Sun gave money to SCO for rights to allow the open sourcing of Solaris.
They bought some assets from oldSCO (Santa Cruz Operation). What was left of oldSCO became Tarentella.
Later, the newSCO was created (the SCO Group).
Those naming machinations are obviously working on confusing the general public (ie, future jurors).
Just imagine how confused a juror could be if SUN buys the newSCO.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Your hypothesis about Sun wanting to get into the IBM/SCO struggle on the side of SCO with that buy-in, is not even sensible with a tin-foil hat.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]