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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."
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.