Blah, blah, blah, blah,
Linuxworld editorial, from Slashdot...
This is an amusing, in light of Amiga scene business practices, illustration of how little you can 'get away with' these days.
That said, the complaints are fairly out-there, and open standards
are as-or-more important than open sources (if the standards are any good at all; I'm not sure you can call Java's "it is what we say it is this week" standard a standard)...
...but you can't help but get the feeling Sun
is getting propped up as an 'asset' which MS will later abuse as it sees fit. Apple's propping kept eyes off the fact that MS
was the monopoly force in the market; SCO was/is just an insane scheme that didn't work; the present Microsoft is looking a bit more codependent (they need to throw down more roots in what's left of Sun's market), but the problem is that what's good for Sun becomes also good for MS...
...and a 'healthy' MS has few qualms about convincing people to do expressly stupid things. These sort of arrangements set the stage for it, call it Stockholm Syndrome or just savvy business. (McBride had no reason
not to go on his lunatic spree, save basic ethics; for a while there, he was seeing more from Baystar than he probably ever would from the remains of Caldera's Linux business. Sun don't think they'll get in that deep, but
given the monopoly marketplace, they've at least hung themselves the albatross of IBM's PC division; potentially quite lucrative, in the near term,
but a barrier to the business they want to be in...)
