PJ at Groklaw notes today that Microsoft is lining up to nibble on the remains of SCO as one of its largest creditors. But Microsoft is not alone in wanting to gnaw on a chunk of parasite flesh. As a list of SCO's top creditors shows [PDF], Sun, Veritas, Intel, Unisys, and others are smacking their lips for SCO's remains.
The world is not always fair. Sometimes, however, it's not fair enough. Too many SCO people made far too much money on its scam.
Gene Simmons, who raised a generation to believe that "If it's too loud, you're too old" (and to whose Creatures of the Night album I used to jam on an air guitar in fourth grade), apparently thinks that if you're responsible for destroying the music industry, you're too young. As noted by Reuters, the long-tongued bassist is now on a rampage about them pesky kids:
The record industry is in such a mess. I called for what it was when college kids first started download music for free -- that they were crooks. I told every record label I spoke with that they just lit the fuse to their own bomb that was going to explode from under them and put them on the street.
There is nothing in me that wants to go in there and do new music. How are you going to deliver it? How are you going to get paid for it if people can just get it for free?...
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Whatever happened to open-source projects being released according to development readiness, rather than an arbitrary release schedule?
Mozilla seems to have forgotten this, with The New York Times reporting that the upcoming Firefox 3.0 set to ship with only 20 percent of its remaining 700 "blocker" (serious enough to justify postponing a release) bugs resolved before it ships.
Of course, Mozilla has already fixed over 11,000 bugs, according to Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler. Even so, that doesn't answer the apparent fact that the Firefox development community is planning to ship a product before a wide range of known blocker bugs are resolved. (Firefox 3 meeting notes can be perused here.)
For now, the mountain to climb appears quite high, as The New York Times notes:
As Mozilla pushes to post Beta 1 of Firefox 3.0, it has asked developers to prioritize already-identified bugs so that the most important can be fixed. But according to notes of yesterday's Firefox 3.0 status meeting, that will leave about eight in 10 bugs untouched.
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The thing about open source is that if you give it an inch, it will take a mile. Take Java, for instance. Apple has not stepped up to enable its iPhone to run Java, but that's OK. The community appears to have plans to do Apple's work for it:
Apple has not made Java capable of running on the [iPhone]. But Sun's Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for Java ME (Micro Edition), believes Apple's plans to release a software developer's kit for iPhone in early 2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone.
"It is quite likely that people will start porting phoneME to the iPhone to provide Java that way. I expect that to happen as a community effort," Barr said.
Open source will find a way. Have developer kit, will hack.
Network Appliance's latest earnings report is fascinating. Dan Warmenhoven, NetApp's CEO, reported that enterprise spending is on the wane, with the financial services industry allegedly battening down the hatches and sitting out a soft economy.
If true, I suppose this is bad news for NetApp and many other enterprise IT companies (though it doesn't seem to have made a dent in Microsoft or Oracle). For open-source companies? It's manna from heaven. $1 saved on proprietary, pricey IT may well convert into $.50 spent on open-source software...which goes a long way for the new breed of open-source vendors.
But first, Mr. Warmenhoven's commentary:
(The enterprise spending weakness) is led by the financial services sector as you might imagine and they're quite substantial. But other companies are still as well....It was a challenge this year.
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So close, and yet so far away. Scott Guthrie, General Manager within the Microsoft Developer Division, announced on his blog that Microsoft will be releasing the source code for its .NET Framework libraries with the .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 release in late 2007.
This isn't open source as the Microsoft Reference License which will govern the code release is a "look but don't modify or distribute" license. Still, baby steps for Microsoft. Guthrie writes:
One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them.
Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.
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My CTO just received word of a bug that had been found by an important customer of ours and resolved earlier today...via Facebook. Another business partner looked up my profile (in Facebook) to figure out how best to interact with me in a contract negotiation. (He stopped short of humming The Smiths but that might have helped his cause.) :-) Also today, an old friend from my master's program sent me a message (on Facebook) to ask about my company's content management solution for his organization.
Perhaps this is why Forrester's Kyle McNabb writes:
Face it, without an ability to dictate what technology their employees use to get their jobs done, organizations have to shift their ECM (enterprise content management) focus from repositories to figuring out how to extend the security and management of content beyond the repository, and onto the content asset. You'll soon have to work on answering questions of 'How do we make sure our people can work in Facebook, but not take contracts in there that may put us at risk?' ... Read more
I noted 22 days ago that I was dumping my Vonage service. Unfortunately, I tried to have my Vonage number ported to another service (Comcast's Digital Voice) and three separate attempts to move my number to Comcast failed miserably.
The first two times Vonage told Comcast that the name Comcast was using ("Matt Asay") did not match the name on my Vonage account ("Matt Asay"). Yesterday, Comcast called to inform me that now Vonage was saying it had no record of my account (which is surprising since Vonage happily takes $60+ every month from my credit card).
So today I just canceled my Vonage number, but Vonage didn't make it easy:
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I heard through the grapevine this morning that Rob Bearden, one of the core JBoss executives and the man responsible for driving JBoss' impressive operations, is leaving OpenSpan. I assumed Rob was leaving to relax and to spend some of his hard-earned JBoss dollars.
Nope.
I called Rob to confirm the rumor and to ask what he's planning to do, and found out that he's looking for his next open-source play (probably starting his own thing). VCs, time to get on the plane and visit Atlanta, where Rob currently resides. He'll be staying with OpenSpan long enough to finish up some critical projects and then leaving by the end of the year.
In the meantime, he's willing to consult for other open-source companies to advise them on how to tune their operations. I've talked with him a few times over the past few weeks on this very topic, and believe that Rob is one of the sharpest tools in the open-source shed, as it were. Anyone fortunate to retain his services will score a major coup.
Larry Ellison made it clear in his closing keynote that he has Red Hat in his sights. What he didn't make clear is why.
Oracle did over $17 billion in revenue in 2007. Red Hat? $400 million (up from $278 million in 2006). Mr. Ellison alleges that Oracle "growing a lot faster than Red Hat" (presumably he means its Linux business, which isn't saying much given the lower base from which it's growing). But this, as I've noted before, is like declaring himself the sexiest nun in the convent. Red Hat's revenue, while significant, is peanuts compared to Oracle's. Why can't he rid himself of a fetish for hounding Red Hat? The operating system simply isn't that critical to Oracle's story.
I think because he recognizes something in Red Hat that drives him batty: he can't truly own it.
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