Saturday, November 04, 2006
11/5 SNR
I still haven't made up my mind about the Novell-MS thing. Given past history, it's reasonable to assume that MS is eating Novell for breakfast, and Novell won't realize it until it's far too late. But at this point that would just be an assumption. I tend to take a rather cynical view of the industry, and the world as a whole; my goal, as always, is to do that without verging into the realm of conspiracy theories. If you start dismissing actual evidence in favor of unproven things you'd prefer to believe, you may have gone over the line. It can be a very thin line, but it's an crucial one.
So here are a variety of opinions about the deal:
In other news:
So here are a variety of opinions about the deal:
- Eric Lai @ Computerworld has a reasonably positive take on the deal, which is unusual.
- Red Hat says the deal is no big deal.
- Matt Asay @ InfoWorld is a definite cynic about the deal, and he seems to have gone sour on open-source vendors in general.
- Marc Wagner @ ZDNet is also skeptical, but then he goes and ruins his whole piece with some ignorant speculation about a "possible" buyout of SCO.
- Our old buddy "Paul Murphy" has a piece about the deal, sort of. As always, he can't stick to a single thesis for more than a couple of paragraphs, and digresses off to sing the praises of Oracle on Solaris. It always comes back around to Solaris for this guy.
- The same is true of Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, although he at least has very good rea$on$ to believe that. Apparently the Oracle and MS things indicate how important it is to have your own OS. Um, I hate to be the one to break it to Schwartz, but MS does have its own OS. Turns out they've had one for decades, even. Who knew?
- Enderle knows better, of course; for him, it's all about Vista, Vista, Vista. Apparently this time around MS customers shouldn't wait for Service Pack 1. Rob suggests that's a naive course of action, not a prudent one. Who could have suspected?
- David Sugar @ Free Software Magazine has some unkind words for Novell over the deal.
- Dana Gardner @ ZDNet says the real battle is for the rest of the middleware stack, which seems like a reasonable assumption to me. SCO gets a brief mention here.
- Antone Gonsalves @ InformationWeek suggests that in any case MS is unlikely to actually sue anyone over patents.
- LinuxDevices speculates about how the deal might affect the embedded Linux world.
In other news:
- Red Hat's now doing the indemnification thing. You'd think Didio would be dancing in the streets, but I haven't heard a peep out of her about it. As an "analyst", her job is to bark Redmond-certified talking points at any journalist within earshot. If anyone actually does what she says they ought to do, the talking point loses its value, and it's time to move on to something else, and pretend the last episode never happened.
- A GL piece from last Thursday about SCO filing a "stipulated" agreement with IBM that IBM didn't actually agree to. They always say not to attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity. But in this case I think it's malice carefully crafted to look like stupidity, so if the trick doesnt't work SCO can claim it was just an innocent mistake.
- Jonathan Cohen's TICC outfit recently invested in the lucrative home/landscape design software sector.
- In further BS&F political news, David Boies is a big Joe Lieberman donor.
- Also, a piece about a NY congressional race in which the Democratic challenger is a BS&F partner.
By brx0 @ 1:35 AM 
