In the latest word in a peculiarly public interchange, Linux leader Linus Torvalds appears inclined to take up Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz on his offer for dinner.
Last weekend, Torvalds expressed some "cynical" thoughts about Sun's intentions regarding its open-source Solaris operating system, which in turn led Schwartz to invite Torvalds to dinner to demonstrate Sun's intention of being a team player in the open-source realm, not a parasite.
In an interview Wednesday, Torvalds indicated he was interested in the dinner date, even given the condition Schwartz attached.
"I'm a fervent (believer and founding member) of the Free Food Foundation, and while Sun as usual has a few gotchas ('bring wine') in their licensing, it does sound like a good offer," he said.
But Sun has some work to do establishing its bona fides in Torvalds' eyes. In particular, he was clearly unhappy with how long it took Sun to make Java into an open-source project. The server and software company moved through multiple licensing regimes before finally releasing the core Java code under the General Public License (GPL), the same license that governs the Linux kernel.
"Quite frankly, if it wasn't for Java, I'd probably not be nearly as cynical," Torvalds said. "I've absolutely detested the Java licensing situation from the get-go, and a short time of being mostly open-sourced just hasn't yet had time to flush away all the bad taste of years of just stupid license shenanigans."
But Schwartz has had luck wining and dining potential adversaries in the past. As soon as Schwartz took over as CEO in 2006, his first call was to Intel CEO Paul Otellini. At that point, Sun sold x86 servers solely with Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processors. But the two met over dinner and wine.
"It was a bottle of Barolo at Delfina," Schwartz said earlier, referring to the San Francisco restaurant. Now, just over a year later, Sun now sells Intel-based x86 servers.
Half Moon Bay, Calif.--The best wines in the world aren't at Trader Joe's, it turns out. They are in some collector's cellar.
"The better the quality of the wine, the harder it is to get," said Stephen Bachmann, CEO of Vinfolio, a wine trading/collecting site at the Think Tomorrow Today conference taking place in Half Moon Bay, California this week. "The best wines that get released end up in the cellars of collectors. Private cellars have more supplies of these wines than the trade does."
Vinfolio essentially acts like an eBay for oenophiles, who turn out to be just as crazy and compulsive as collectors in other fields. Wine owners list the contents of their cellars on the service. They can then sell, buy or trade with other collectors. If you start out as a California collector, but have switched to French wines, you can start selling the old bottles to pay for the new habit.
Vinfolio gives away its desktop software but takes a cut on transactions.
The company also provides data on estimated prices for your wines, current auctions and other information on the wine world. In other words, the dizzying array of data that makes rotisserie baseball addictive to its adherents is now part of wine collecting.
Subscribers are expected to grow to 21,000 people in 2007. Revenues will likely reach $17 million this year. The company is only three years old. In 2005, revenues came to $2.4 million. The average wine traded on the site sells for $100 to $125 with some bottles selling for several thousand.
It's a classy hobby too. When was the last time you were excited about being invited into someone's Pez cellar?
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