[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 09:44:52AM -0500, Jonathan Patschke wrote:
>It's curious how people seem to be surprised that Oracle's purchase of Sun
>has not prevented Oracle from continuing to act like Oracle.  For the
>purposes of the Sun community at large, IBM would've been a much better
>host body for the ghost of Sun Microsystems.

Why? IBM already has competing products in all of the lines that SUN had,
except the X86 which they sold off. 

You don't see them selling or giving away Open/AIX, the last MVS that had
source code available was 3.8 (I know I used to read it, 30 years ago) and
VM has mostly migrated to hardware where there is no such thing as source code. 

IBM does support Linux, but they are very careful about whom they hire and
what they let them do. They only accept developers with limited experince so
that they don't include something in their code that they saw a long time 
ago and it belongs to someone else.

>Now you get the worst of both worlds: Oracle customer relations and Sun
>product service.  If they could somehow outsource future Solaris
>development to Computer Associates, it'd be a trifecta.

I think the whole point of Oracle buying Sun is that no other US company
was interested and the US government did not want it to go overseas.

I'm not going to mention whom on a publicly archived list, but if the US
were to suddenly ban imports of technology from a certain country whose
relations are now at a long time low, you all would be scrambling to
learn Red Dragon Linux.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
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i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.