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Ballmer and McNealy Smiling Together
cahiha writes "Sun and Microsoft are pushing a single sign-on and identity management solution, and the Sun home page has a picture of McNealy and Ballmer smiling together. Yahoo has details on the conflict between the industry giants, and there is more information on the collaboration at the Sun press release page. The press release took place Friday morning." From the article: "The technology news, though, was overshadowed by the joint appearance of McNealy and Ballmer, who until April 2004 were bitter enemies. McNealy once referred to Microsoft's executive team of Ballmer and
Bill Gates as 'Beavis and Butthead.'"
Microsoft, on the other hand, needs to look more "open" and more "willing to play nicely with competitors". What better way than to find a half-dead ex-competitor, one that won't pose any serious challenge, and start cooperating with them. Maybe this will appease those EU anti-trust people.
So in desperation, Sun is reaching for a life preserver made of cast iron.
Of course, this could be an entirely new, unworkable "a single sign-on and identity management solution," that will be just as distrusted and irrelevant as Passport was. People don't even trust Microsoft to handle their e-mail without infecting their machine, much less keeping their "identity" secure.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
This is about what Digital was doing at this point in their death spiral. The pilot hasn't told the passengers the situation... When I die, I want to die in my sleep, like my Grandfather did, and not like the 500 screaming passengers on his plane.
you know better than any of us that Microsoft is a difficult company to deal with
Yes they do. Think about it: Sun forced Microsoft to settle for $2 billion regarding Java. Sun is backing OO.org without anyone having sued them. Sun is open sourcing UNIX(TM) this summer.
Sun's lawyers and executives have balls. Even the female ones.
If anything will make Sun succeed it is this ability to deal with the Microsofts and IBMs and survive.
I shudder to say this in many ways, but some good could actually come out of this if Sun and Microsoft could get some cooperation happening on Java (or more generally a unified runtime and API). Sun may be near irrelevant but Java is in many ways the main competitor to Microsoft's broad development platform (is it still called .NET?)
Putting aside the important considerations around free/open software, it could make a lot of people's lives simpler. Its not that Java isn't already rich and cross platform, it would just be a next step in unification and perhaps make development for small devices for example easier.
But due to their contexts, I wouldn't fully trust either company, and especially both, to carry the flag for a unified development environment, just like I'm sure this latest cooperation will yield to some selling out of purely technical or ethical concerns. "Liberty Alliance" (groan) appeared to be much more important than MS' solution, with much more real third party participation, so this is a consolidation that will have repurcussions. The third party opinions and participation of interested parties like geeks is still important to prevent sneaking in designs intended purely for the benefit of MS and Sun, rather than contributing to developments that are generally useful.
.........at least not in their homepage
Software isn't so trivial. There's support staff expertise to build, there's a customer base to build, etc. It isn't like customers like seeing one company vaporize to have another one spring up and say "hey, over here, folks!"
"Free software gives the power to the software engineer."
Not really. We still live in a society where people have to make money. This means working for a company doing their software development or consulting, which usually doesn't mesh with the software engineer's own ideals.
The idealism behind the FSF is good, but it has its limits.
Oh hold on, this is not coming from the Cannes festival...
I think the divide is between free as in freedom and everyone else.
I've been using linux for a long time, since about '92. (I should be a lot better at it than I am -- I'm not claiming any kind of geek mastery over it.)
And for almost all of that time it's been about the software and not the license. I always thought the free software fanatics were, well, fanatics. Ideologues.
I don't think that any more. In the end, the only software that's perfectly alined with its users' interests is open source.
It's usually not described in these terms, but defining characteristic of open source is that the owners or creators have given away their ability to control how people use the software.
Out of the big guys in silicon valley, gates is probably one of the better ones. Personally, I'd rather hang out with him than with Jobs. I always imagine Jobs sitting in a chair with disciples gathered around his feet. Ellison must be a nightmare.
Gates is the worst only because he's the biggest and most powerful. If Jobs was the biggest and most powerful, he'd be the worst.
I used to run a business on sparc servers. I like Sun and their technology. But Sun is looking out for Sun, and they always will, and if it's in their interests to throw me under the train, they will.
Debian *can't* throw me under the train. They've signed away all the rights they'd need to be able to do it.
It's not about whether or not the guys at the top are good or bad. It's that they're in roles that simply shouldn't exist. That's the problem with google's ambitious plans. The guys who run google are great -- they probably go out on sunday's and wash the feet of the poor. But they're amassing a lot of power over information, and the mass itself isn't a good thing.
If anyone should be running business (or society in general), it should be the scientists, artists and academics.
I'd much rather see a business man in charge of a business (or society in general). It's bad enough when scientists, artists and academics run a business you've invested in, right into the ground, but that's nothing compared to the horrors of the "theocracies" they've lead. Even in spite of their intentions, a realist is usually more benign then an idealist.
They are typically not blinded by avarice in the sameway that the average businessman is.
Perhaps, but in my experience scientists, artists and academics tend to be worse than blinded, perhaps by higher ideals and are all the scarier for it. That said, corporations are truely inhuman, but that it less about businessmen and more about the laws that require them to put profit ahead of all else.
The time has come to destroy this system of control.
I agree that there are some changes that need to be made for the betterment of all mankind, but after havinbg read about "[your] struggle", I think I will be forwarding your text to the Department of Homeland Security.
Have a nice day.
That's not true, you know. Sometimes people work for companies because of lack of motivation, sometimes lack of capital, sometimes fear, sometimes a combination of these things.
And maybe there are some people who actually LIKE working for companies. Maybe they like the relative security, the human contact, the culture, the well-defined role and responsibility.
The world needs more and better entrepreneurs but lets be serious, not everyone can be, or should be, an entrepreneur.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
How the mighty have fallen, poor bastards - how I remember the sun of a decade ago, how strong, innovative and proud they once were.
For them to be reduced to to this, kissing up to the peecee monopolist, is a saddening spectacle. IMHO it's a sign that sun is not long for this world, at least not the sun that we know.
We've seen the pattern repeated in the past, with one hapless company after another lining up for the same treatment, getting in bed with microsoft, taking a wad of cash and giving up far more than they realize, fading into irrelavance shortly thereafter.
Sun, it was good to know you - although we didn't always see eye to eye, it can't be denied that you contributed a lot to the internet and the unix community.
R.I.P.