I'd thought that after all this time he was finally wising up and accepting what everyone else you agree with was saying.
There, fixed that for ya.
That's been exactly de Icaza's problem. He's kept rewriting that exact statement over and over - up until now when he's repeated what just about everyone else has been saying for years.
Whatever way you cut it, this is an admission of defeat and it has been exactly what everyone has complained about regarding.Net and the nonsense surrounding Mono for years. De Icaza has sought to paint over it at every single turn until now. Maybe the penny seems to have finally dropped:
"The most important part is that Microsoft has shot the.NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant thread of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem. Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java virtual machine implementations, the.NET world has suffered by this meme spread by Ballmer that they would come after people that do not license patents from them.
Sun on the other hand said from day one: we will not sue you over patent infringement if you implement your own Java. Google does something similar with their APIs and Google's Wave: they are giving everyone access to their stuff.
As the only implementor of the ECMA standards outside of Microsoft, I sure would have hoped that they had given rights to everyone to implement. They would still be the #1 stack, but it would have encouraged an ecosystem that would have innovated extensively around their platform.
Instead, people went and innovated on Java or other platforms that might not have been as advanced as.NET, but at least they were not under Microsoft threat."
It's very clear. The part in bold I find most damning. This indicates that he knew all along that you couldn't create an open source implementation of even the CLR without permission from Microsoft. There is a lot in here, but people like Bruce Byfield obviously havent read it properly. He's tried top backtrack and cover up a bit by saying that it's all nothing, but it most certainly is something.
SSL certificates only provide the ability to encrypt communication between a browser and a server. That's all it's for. Alas, many people have have tried to build in some level of 'trust' to SSL as well, and the money racket that has grown up around issuing SSL certificates on an ad-hoc basis just so someone's browser doesn't complain needs to go the journey. Those root certificates in your browser are just money for old rope. We definitely need something better.
It wasn't really just the Tories. It was the civil servants under both the Tories and Labour who ran it into the ground. They didn't think it was 'viable', and by that time we had become totally Americanised - and then the burgeoning commercial satellite business took off.........
So, 20% of the world's population doesn't affect the other 80%?
Over 90% of that 20% are still out in rice fields. The notion that China is some El Dorado with untold riches and untapped markets is total crap. The Chinese work on the principle that you can invest but they want it all for themselves. If Microsoft think they're going to get Bing anywhere there then they're badly mistaken, but then, they have to try anything with Bing right now.
I was actually surprised to see that Novell's "Open Platform Solutions" account for about 21% of their positive operating income
Let's be honest, it is ridiculously easy to redefine what the 'Open Platform Solutions' division is in order to make the figures look better.
Novell still posted a $206M operating loss for the year (SuSE profit was $87.355M). The only time Novell has ever made a yearly profit in the last five years were in 2005 and 2006, thanks only to agreements with Microsoft and lawsuit settlements from Microsoft.
It's rather pointless pointing out a profit for Suse when the overall loss is so much bigger. The point is that Novell's losses are increasing and revenue is decreasing at a rate that any gains from Suse cannot make up. They're still getting payments from Microsoft for Suse coupons, which makes the situation even worse.
The link doesn't work (all you have to do is copy and paste for fuck's sake), which doesn't aid your credibility nor does the AC.
It was prior to the novell deal as I said, it was in 2001 when SuSE laid off a quarter of its employees and was dying, not just having difficulties to break even.
You'll have to qualify that with some facts, like I said. If it was dying it would have died. It had pretty much the whole Linux market in Europe to itself, and like I said, while I don't doubt they had difficulties as all those companies have done it certainly isn't what you're painting it as. Novell wasn't some white saviour. It was an IBM/Novell initiated deal.
I was being a bit sarcastic, you could even tell it was big irony.
No, you couldn't. It's irony where there was no logical need for irony. I suppose it is ironic, but not in the way you think.
That going after Red Hat or Debian market share is a waste of time. They had to create a new road.
As a Linux distributor Red Hat was primarily what they were competing against. In Europe, they certainly succeeded. The new road was as a replacement for Netware and competitor to Windows Server, and Novell ballsed that up clearly.
I'm not saying they were particularly successfull, my point was that saying that SuSE did succeed before Novell was factually wrong, (see the link above), and therefore blaming Novell for spoiling everything after was factually wrong also.
Your link doesn't work, no Suse succeeding before Novell's takeover is not factually wrong as I've explained and no you can't not blame Novell for mucking things up - even if the former was true.
Another point wich is just wrong is the community side, the community side of SuSE is much better than it used to be prior to Novell.
It may or may not be, depending on your definition of 'community', but before the Novell takeover Suse still employed a lot of people to work on open source software and they had more software available like OpenXchange which went by the wayside for Groupwise. The 'community' still has nothing to do with Novell being able to make money from Suse.
If you aren't familiar with Jeffe Jaffe, just read his Novell blogs. They're full of the most buzzword-laden bullshit I've ever seen from a CTO who is supposed to know what things are about technically. He certanly wasn't fit to fill Alan Nugent's shoes. While I didn't get the impression from what I'd read that he was a Microsoft apologist (although I certainly wouldn't be surprised), it wouldn't be so bad if I had actually seen him write (or even type) two words of sense together.
I can't fathom how people like that get jobs like this, what on Earth he is going to do (conversations with Tim Berners-Lee are likely to be cut rather short) and why this is deemed to be news. It's just another nail in the coffin of the W3C to have an idiot CEO like this.
I pretty much agree with every point you make here except this "Then it bought Suse, and screwed that up too." I don't understand why so many people repeat this.
Probably because it's true.
If I recall correctly SuSE was failing as a commercial Linux company when Novell acquired them.
Well, Suse as part of Novell is still failing if you think it was before, and it's only recently that through some creative accounting they have allegedly broke even.
They were on their way to Mandrake-ville.
It's not unusual for companies like Suse to take several years to turn some solid revenue and then profit. Suse certainly wasn't failing. Mandrake went through the same process and they are very much still around. Red Hat took some time to hit their stride.
Where I work we have hundreds of SLES servers in production today and they are rock solid. Fast, reliable, super easy to manage.
That'll be as a result of the work that Suse put in before and after they were bought by Novell.
...and SLED is a great windows replacement for a significant portion of our end users who don't require the few remaining windows client-servers apps we have left.
Hmmmm, this is the part where I smell some astroturf. SLED is so far away from being a Windows desktop replacement it is unreal and it is very, very, very, very seldom used. God knows how small a part of Novell's Linux revenue it is. Suse's own desktop offerings before Novell's takeover probably made more. To mention SLED is, frankly, a joke and backs up Red Hat's decision to largely leave the desktop behind. As it is, it isn't viable.
If you look at the numbers, the Linux division of Novell is profitable. The problem is the boat-anchor of closed source legacy BS they are still supporting is dragging down the whole company.
The Linux division has broke even, thanks to Microsoft's coupons, but the point is it is still a drop in the ocean when compared to the total revenue from Netware and other software - even if it is declining. They just haven't worked out what to do with that older proprietary software and haven't worked out what business model they want.
Back in the days, SuSE was in the red for $50 000 000 and survived because IBM injected them cash.
Not particularly accurate. It's not unusual for such companies to take some time to break even, and the same was true of Red Hat. The $50 million injection was purely as part of the Novell deal and no they weren't in the red to that figure. There wasn't a second payment that I'm aware of. Novell have also only just about, with some creative accounting, managed to make their Suse Linux business break-even. Would Suse have done better by themselves? It's a matter of some debate.
Apart from that, they alienated every (popular) community gathering around them long before the novell buy out by not freeing YaST, their management tool. The thing is, they tried to get some money from the people using their distro before you could download it. Which didnt work either, which leds to the $50M loss. (Others tried to not get money from their users, and it did work).
You're going to have to qualify that statement and set of assumptions with some facts I'm afraid. Trying not to make money from something to get money is a contradiction in itself. Many open source companies around Linux have tried it and they've burned their VC money and went to the wall. It's a stretch to assume that because Suse didn't open YaST it was in trouble, but it would have probably had to have happened eventually. They didn't open it purely because they had some competitive advantage at the time. It was hardly a reason for people not giving Suse money for the distro, which is ultimately what counts.
Additionally, Novell has done the very thing you accuse Suse of doing - and it has cost them. They haven't opened Groupwise or any of their other archaic pieces of software and as such no one was using them. That was the real problem at the time Novell bought Suse. That's sometimes even worse than people not paying for your software! They've also retro-fitted Novell on to effectively a proprietary Suse Linux in OES which has not only alienated Linux users but has also completely alienated and failed to attract existing Netware users - who've usually gone to Windows Server. They've handled that so badly it's unreal.
Apart from that, as for the grass-roots engineering target, it is an entranched place where you find people either deeply tied to debian or to red hat. They don't give a damn about anything else, even if it's a nice piece of engineering as SuSE has always been.
I'm not entirely sure what that means, but that sounds like a problem with Novell's management and leadership.
AS FOR NOVELL, once it bought SuSE, they freed everything that wasnt already free in SuSE and then they freed some NOVELL software too.
They freed some Suse and Novell software they didn't care about, and much of the Novell software they did free like Hula fell by the wayside very quickly. The important software that they should have open sourced and found a business model around like Red Hat's to get people really using it again they didn't, and it's all been left to rot and stagnate. Novell's revenue has steadily declined since just as it did before the Suse takeover.
They hired people, they had for example 3 engineers on the ATI drivers, they have developed new distribution tools like the build system and the SuSE studio which are excellent and innovative.
What money have they made off that? Their much touted 'Enterprise Linux Desktop' is absolutely nowhere to be seen. Suse Studio is possibly the most different thing they've done, but again, they need to turn that into revenue. They just haven't made the money from Suse that they should have done.
Also there is a text online from one of SuSE founder that says that after the buyout, the 5000 NOVELL people listened to the 500 SuSE people and got along with the pro
Most developers don't realize this, but average users absolutely hate web apps. They typically aren't anywhere near as easy to use as normal desktop applications.
It's the other way on. Developers hate web applications because they're generally a pain to work with and certainly to debug, but users like them because they can use them from anywhere and they're easy to use and update without installing anything. Because of that users are generally very happy to put up with many quirks and the generally slow response in web apps.
No but they can steal if from your users' computers.
How? How would they know what client machine to attack or steal and how would they know where it was? Additionally, would you say the chances of that are less or greater than a compromise being found via a normal dictionary attack that the article is actually talking about mitigating?
It's one thing to have staff use keys when they are on your secure network but having users who are out on the web using keys when you can't control the security on their machines is only as secure as your dumbest client.
Hmmmmm, and there was me thinking that users used these insecure things called 'passwords' all the time, many of which can actually be guessed without going anywhere near their client machines.
For remote access one of the securest ways is using a security token. Every time user logs in they have to enter a different number.
Possibly, but you're going to have to point out a way for the article submitter to be able to do that today and manage it without becoming a nightmare.
All in all, I don't know where this thread is going to be honest. Given the alternative problems with passwords that the article submitter is presumably trying to mitigate then SSH keys are infinitely more preferable. Pointing out potential and theoretical weaknesses with them won't change that.
A rooted client gives the attacker access to at least one part of that.
The chances of a rooted client, that can theoretically give an attacker access to a server somewhere but which they are far less likely to know about and can't attack directly, are infinitesimally smaller than an attacker getting direct access to a server somewhere that they do know about by password guessing and dictionary attacks.
Given the context of the article this is bullshit. The theoratical arguments and weaknesses against SSH key access do not outweight the reasons for using it.
I believe it's currently being used in FreeBSD, and claims to clean up a lot of the problems with ALSA.
It's used in every other Unix-like system because everyone else just used OSS that worked and improved it themselves. For whatever reason, Linux didn't. That's why you have the bizarre situation where you cannot have/dev/dsp open by more than one application, which is a highly unusual situation for any kernel interface to be in. Nothing else is like it. You need some ridiculous userspace interface to masquerade as ALSA to make this achievable, and that's taken years, and the results have been shockingly bad.
It's not an EOL page for OpenSolaris, it's the EOL schedule for OpenSolaris RELEASES. There IS little room for interpretation, how the fuck did you get this so twisted?
Because I read the articles and the mailing list conversation. This is an EOL without any new support subscriptions or commitments. That means nothing new will happen.
The Oracle page lays out a software support policy for OpenSolaris releases and, following the policy, specifies end-of-support dates for existing releases.
Yes it does, because they're obliged to do so to meet support obligations. That's what usually happens when a product is getting end of lifed and being wound up. They have to lay out what happens to their obligations.
Given those facts, what on the page makes you think that there won't be another OpenSolaris version? What on the page is different from the end-of-support date pages for the Oracle RDBMS?
Because this wasn't already on the cards at Sun. This is part of an Oracle review of Sun's products and software, and that's what they've decided. As the article summary says, compare that with the Sun schedule. If you also read the mailing list conversation you'll see that any mention of OpenSolaris has been yanked from the support pages, which means they will support existing versions under their obligations but there will be no new support commitments.
Even after doing that, I still had an issue with the on-board LAN chipset - had to compile a different set of drivers in order to stop it from dropping the connection every 5 minutes. OpenSolaris is a great server OS, but it's just silly to expect it to be compatible with some random laptop.
Comparable driver support with Linux, whether for laptops or for servers, is one of the things that has put Solaris on the slide over the past ten years.
Article Doesn't Quite Say it, But Not Suprised
on
The Future of OpenSolaris
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The article doesn't quite say it, and it doesn't have the smoking gun of "We're canning OpenSolaris", but that end of life page for OpenSolaris looks pretty damn final to me and there is little room for interpretation.
I wouldn't be surprised if Open Solaris went the journey. The whole point of it was to arrest the slide of Solaris in the face of Linux, in particular, and so that Sun could tell everyone that Solaris was open and just like Linux. Unfortunately, OpenSolaris has contributed little, if anything, to Solaris. There's no community of developers apart from those Sun sanctioned and things like Solaris's driver support is still a long way behind where Linux is. Development still hasn't been opened and there is no public repository development model. Sun, or Oracle now, is bankrolling it with none of the cost savings you would expect from such a project.
One can only hope that Oracle won't follow the same 'strategy' that Sun have followed for the past ten years, because it got Sun into trouble and it'll cost Oracle rather a lot of money if they get it wrong. However, they look as if they're doing swift about-turns on that and a statement of their future intent is clear when you go to www.sun.com - it redirects straight to www.oracle.com.
It's not exactly a good deed. The good deed would have been to help the existing infrastructure. I always get cynical about these disasters and the appeals that inevitably follow, because with all of that cash sloshing around it's a nice big target for unscrupulous people and organisations to walk in and start taking a chunk of the pie.
Personally, it's why I only give to local charities I know and then work outwards. That might seem harsh, but I want to know that my money has actually gone somewhere and with stuff like this I don't know if it would. I saw hotels getting rebuilt pretty quickly and ordinary people being left with nothing when it came to the tsunami in Asia. I simply see charities as businesses who get tax-free and other breaks.
I also hate the dependencies that charities seem to create in third-world countries that don't help them and destroy any local industries. Cynically, I can see it as nothing other than a ploy for charities to hang around for years collecting money without any real solution to the problem - because if there was a solution they wouldn't exist!
If this is true, and protocols are subject to the GPL, then Linus's understanding of it is flawed and userspace in a Linux based system cannot talk to Linux kernelspace in the trouble-free way he describes. A non-GPLed piece of software cannot talk to a GPLed piece of software via HTTP......... The list goes on. Obviously we know that this does happen and that the concept is bullshit. MySQL merely used it to muddy the waters, confuse people over licensing and get people to pay for licenses when perhaps they didn't really need to. Certainly, the vast majority of software for internal use doesn't require licenses from MySQL. Monty is now off into his own little world railing against that when it was what made his company money and got it sold to Sun for a stupidly overpriced amount, making him some pocket change as well I wouldn't wonder.
Thankfully, the article knows this is silly and not only says so, but blames MySQL for it. This is the way the GPL has always worked in other projects, and was known to work. MySQL simply used it as an avenue for confusion and to get people to cough up, which had the side-effect of people being more afraid of the GPL than they needed to be.
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SSL certificates do not provide authentication on any practical level, but many people think that they do. That's the point.
That's been exactly de Icaza's problem. He's kept rewriting that exact statement over and over - up until now when he's repeated what just about everyone else has been saying for years.
It's very clear. The part in bold I find most damning. This indicates that he knew all along that you couldn't create an open source implementation of even the CLR without permission from Microsoft. There is a lot in here, but people like Bruce Byfield obviously havent read it properly. He's tried top backtrack and cover up a bit by saying that it's all nothing, but it most certainly is something.
SSL certificates only provide the ability to encrypt communication between a browser and a server. That's all it's for. Alas, many people have have tried to build in some level of 'trust' to SSL as well, and the money racket that has grown up around issuing SSL certificates on an ad-hoc basis just so someone's browser doesn't complain needs to go the journey. Those root certificates in your browser are just money for old rope. We definitely need something better.
It wasn't really just the Tories. It was the civil servants under both the Tories and Labour who ran it into the ground. They didn't think it was 'viable', and by that time we had become totally Americanised - and then the burgeoning commercial satellite business took off.........
Over 90% of that 20% are still out in rice fields. The notion that China is some El Dorado with untold riches and untapped markets is total crap. The Chinese work on the principle that you can invest but they want it all for themselves. If Microsoft think they're going to get Bing anywhere there then they're badly mistaken, but then, they have to try anything with Bing right now.
Let's be honest, it is ridiculously easy to redefine what the 'Open Platform Solutions' division is in order to make the figures look better.
It's rather pointless pointing out a profit for Suse when the overall loss is so much bigger. The point is that Novell's losses are increasing and revenue is decreasing at a rate that any gains from Suse cannot make up. They're still getting payments from Microsoft for Suse coupons, which makes the situation even worse.
The link doesn't work (all you have to do is copy and paste for fuck's sake), which doesn't aid your credibility nor does the AC.
You'll have to qualify that with some facts, like I said. If it was dying it would have died. It had pretty much the whole Linux market in Europe to itself, and like I said, while I don't doubt they had difficulties as all those companies have done it certainly isn't what you're painting it as. Novell wasn't some white saviour. It was an IBM/Novell initiated deal.
No, you couldn't. It's irony where there was no logical need for irony. I suppose it is ironic, but not in the way you think.
As a Linux distributor Red Hat was primarily what they were competing against. In Europe, they certainly succeeded. The new road was as a replacement for Netware and competitor to Windows Server, and Novell ballsed that up clearly.
Your link doesn't work, no Suse succeeding before Novell's takeover is not factually wrong as I've explained and no you can't not blame Novell for mucking things up - even if the former was true.
It may or may not be, depending on your definition of 'community', but before the Novell takeover Suse still employed a lot of people to work on open source software and they had more software available like OpenXchange which went by the wayside for Groupwise. The 'community' still has nothing to do with Novell being able to make money from Suse.
If you aren't familiar with Jeffe Jaffe, just read his Novell blogs. They're full of the most buzzword-laden bullshit I've ever seen from a CTO who is supposed to know what things are about technically. He certanly wasn't fit to fill Alan Nugent's shoes. While I didn't get the impression from what I'd read that he was a Microsoft apologist (although I certainly wouldn't be surprised), it wouldn't be so bad if I had actually seen him write (or even type) two words of sense together.
I can't fathom how people like that get jobs like this, what on Earth he is going to do (conversations with Tim Berners-Lee are likely to be cut rather short) and why this is deemed to be news. It's just another nail in the coffin of the W3C to have an idiot CEO like this.
Probably because it's true.
Well, Suse as part of Novell is still failing if you think it was before, and it's only recently that through some creative accounting they have allegedly broke even.
It's not unusual for companies like Suse to take several years to turn some solid revenue and then profit. Suse certainly wasn't failing. Mandrake went through the same process and they are very much still around. Red Hat took some time to hit their stride.
That'll be as a result of the work that Suse put in before and after they were bought by Novell.
Hmmmm, this is the part where I smell some astroturf. SLED is so far away from being a Windows desktop replacement it is unreal and it is very, very, very, very seldom used. God knows how small a part of Novell's Linux revenue it is. Suse's own desktop offerings before Novell's takeover probably made more. To mention SLED is, frankly, a joke and backs up Red Hat's decision to largely leave the desktop behind. As it is, it isn't viable.
The Linux division has broke even, thanks to Microsoft's coupons, but the point is it is still a drop in the ocean when compared to the total revenue from Netware and other software - even if it is declining. They just haven't worked out what to do with that older proprietary software and haven't worked out what business model they want.
Not particularly accurate. It's not unusual for such companies to take some time to break even, and the same was true of Red Hat. The $50 million injection was purely as part of the Novell deal and no they weren't in the red to that figure. There wasn't a second payment that I'm aware of. Novell have also only just about, with some creative accounting, managed to make their Suse Linux business break-even. Would Suse have done better by themselves? It's a matter of some debate.
You're going to have to qualify that statement and set of assumptions with some facts I'm afraid. Trying not to make money from something to get money is a contradiction in itself. Many open source companies around Linux have tried it and they've burned their VC money and went to the wall. It's a stretch to assume that because Suse didn't open YaST it was in trouble, but it would have probably had to have happened eventually. They didn't open it purely because they had some competitive advantage at the time. It was hardly a reason for people not giving Suse money for the distro, which is ultimately what counts.
Additionally, Novell has done the very thing you accuse Suse of doing - and it has cost them. They haven't opened Groupwise or any of their other archaic pieces of software and as such no one was using them. That was the real problem at the time Novell bought Suse. That's sometimes even worse than people not paying for your software! They've also retro-fitted Novell on to effectively a proprietary Suse Linux in OES which has not only alienated Linux users but has also completely alienated and failed to attract existing Netware users - who've usually gone to Windows Server. They've handled that so badly it's unreal.
I'm not entirely sure what that means, but that sounds like a problem with Novell's management and leadership.
They freed some Suse and Novell software they didn't care about, and much of the Novell software they did free like Hula fell by the wayside very quickly. The important software that they should have open sourced and found a business model around like Red Hat's to get people really using it again they didn't, and it's all been left to rot and stagnate. Novell's revenue has steadily declined since just as it did before the Suse takeover.
What money have they made off that? Their much touted 'Enterprise Linux Desktop' is absolutely nowhere to be seen. Suse Studio is possibly the most different thing they've done, but again, they need to turn that into revenue. They just haven't made the money from Suse that they should have done.
Canonical has yet to prove that it has built a viable business out of Ubuntu, as Red Hat has done with their distribution.
It's the other way on. Developers hate web applications because they're generally a pain to work with and certainly to debug, but users like them because they can use them from anywhere and they're easy to use and update without installing anything. Because of that users are generally very happy to put up with many quirks and the generally slow response in web apps.
How? How would they know what client machine to attack or steal and how would they know where it was? Additionally, would you say the chances of that are less or greater than a compromise being found via a normal dictionary attack that the article is actually talking about mitigating?
Hmmmmm, and there was me thinking that users used these insecure things called 'passwords' all the time, many of which can actually be guessed without going anywhere near their client machines.
Possibly, but you're going to have to point out a way for the article submitter to be able to do that today and manage it without becoming a nightmare.
All in all, I don't know where this thread is going to be honest. Given the alternative problems with passwords that the article submitter is presumably trying to mitigate then SSH keys are infinitely more preferable. Pointing out potential and theoretical weaknesses with them won't change that.
The chances of a rooted client, that can theoretically give an attacker access to a server somewhere but which they are far less likely to know about and can't attack directly, are infinitesimally smaller than an attacker getting direct access to a server somewhere that they do know about by password guessing and dictionary attacks.
Given the context of the article this is bullshit. The theoratical arguments and weaknesses against SSH key access do not outweight the reasons for using it.
You need to gain some practical experience as to how key-based SSH access actually works. You obviously don't have any.
It's used in every other Unix-like system because everyone else just used OSS that worked and improved it themselves. For whatever reason, Linux didn't. That's why you have the bizarre situation where you cannot have /dev/dsp open by more than one application, which is a highly unusual situation for any kernel interface to be in. Nothing else is like it. You need some ridiculous userspace interface to masquerade as ALSA to make this achievable, and that's taken years, and the results have been shockingly bad.
Because I read the articles and the mailing list conversation. This is an EOL without any new support subscriptions or commitments. That means nothing new will happen.
Yes it does, because they're obliged to do so to meet support obligations. That's what usually happens when a product is getting end of lifed and being wound up. They have to lay out what happens to their obligations.
Because this wasn't already on the cards at Sun. This is part of an Oracle review of Sun's products and software, and that's what they've decided. As the article summary says, compare that with the Sun schedule. If you also read the mailing list conversation you'll see that any mention of OpenSolaris has been yanked from the support pages, which means they will support existing versions under their obligations but there will be no new support commitments.
When IBM decices to cut maintenance and development costs on AIX, which they're already showing signs of doing, you can add that to your list.
Errrrrr, survival and preventing Sun from going bust, just off the top of my head?
Comparable driver support with Linux, whether for laptops or for servers, is one of the things that has put Solaris on the slide over the past ten years.
The article doesn't quite say it, and it doesn't have the smoking gun of "We're canning OpenSolaris", but that end of life page for OpenSolaris looks pretty damn final to me and there is little room for interpretation.
I wouldn't be surprised if Open Solaris went the journey. The whole point of it was to arrest the slide of Solaris in the face of Linux, in particular, and so that Sun could tell everyone that Solaris was open and just like Linux. Unfortunately, OpenSolaris has contributed little, if anything, to Solaris. There's no community of developers apart from those Sun sanctioned and things like Solaris's driver support is still a long way behind where Linux is. Development still hasn't been opened and there is no public repository development model. Sun, or Oracle now, is bankrolling it with none of the cost savings you would expect from such a project.
One can only hope that Oracle won't follow the same 'strategy' that Sun have followed for the past ten years, because it got Sun into trouble and it'll cost Oracle rather a lot of money if they get it wrong. However, they look as if they're doing swift about-turns on that and a statement of their future intent is clear when you go to www.sun.com - it redirects straight to www.oracle.com.
It's not exactly a good deed. The good deed would have been to help the existing infrastructure. I always get cynical about these disasters and the appeals that inevitably follow, because with all of that cash sloshing around it's a nice big target for unscrupulous people and organisations to walk in and start taking a chunk of the pie.
Personally, it's why I only give to local charities I know and then work outwards. That might seem harsh, but I want to know that my money has actually gone somewhere and with stuff like this I don't know if it would. I saw hotels getting rebuilt pretty quickly and ordinary people being left with nothing when it came to the tsunami in Asia. I simply see charities as businesses who get tax-free and other breaks.
I also hate the dependencies that charities seem to create in third-world countries that don't help them and destroy any local industries. Cynically, I can see it as nothing other than a ploy for charities to hang around for years collecting money without any real solution to the problem - because if there was a solution they wouldn't exist!
Read the article.
If this is true, and protocols are subject to the GPL, then Linus's understanding of it is flawed and userspace in a Linux based system cannot talk to Linux kernelspace in the trouble-free way he describes. A non-GPLed piece of software cannot talk to a GPLed piece of software via HTTP......... The list goes on. Obviously we know that this does happen and that the concept is bullshit. MySQL merely used it to muddy the waters, confuse people over licensing and get people to pay for licenses when perhaps they didn't really need to. Certainly, the vast majority of software for internal use doesn't require licenses from MySQL. Monty is now off into his own little world railing against that when it was what made his company money and got it sold to Sun for a stupidly overpriced amount, making him some pocket change as well I wouldn't wonder.
Thankfully, the article knows this is silly and not only says so, but blames MySQL for it. This is the way the GPL has always worked in other projects, and was known to work. MySQL simply used it as an avenue for confusion and to get people to cough up, which had the side-effect of people being more afraid of the GPL than they needed to be.