LinuxToday: IBM--Orca or Penguin?
I'm not going to launch into a torrent of invective on Novell. But I do feel obligated to extend an apology to Sun Microsystems. Last week, I speculated that they might be the ultimate winners in a Microsoft/Linux legal tussle because they (a) could and ( didn't have anything significant licensed under the GPL. Now, a week later, I stand corrected. While I don't think for an instant that Sun would rather sell purple boxes with Solaris on them than Linux, it is more apparent that Sun's commitment to the cause of free software is more concrete than I thought. Mrs. Proffitt's boy knows when he's wrong.
Along this same vein, doesn't anyone else find it interesting that it's Sun jumping up and defending Free Software rather than IBM, which I believe has a much bigger stake in Linux? Where is IBM, anyway? All we've heard out of them this week is a sour-grapes statement about the open source Java Harmony project when Sun announced the release of Java under the GPL. To be honest, it sounded kind of whiny. Where are the public calls of "BS" about the Microsoft patent implications?
I have three theories. IBM no longer cares at all about the future of Linux (which seems very unlikely) or IBM has gone into pre-litigious silent running mode, like they did the instant SCO served them in 2003 (which seems a bit more likely). But neither of these is as dark as my third postulate: what if IBM wants to forego a patent war and enter into a patent agreement with Microsoft on its own?
This makes some sense to me, especially when you consider the real target of Microsoft is not really Linux.
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