While I think that it makes good sense for Oracle to sell off the hardware business that they acquired from Sun, I find it hard to imagine H-P as a potential buyer. I'd be much more likely to believe the story if the buyer were Fujitsu, who has been involved with Sun and SPARC since the 1980's.

Here's why I think that H-P is unlikely to do this:

• They are trying to focus more on their services business, having recently spent $14 Billion acquiring EDS

• The SPARC line and the Solaris operating system would go head-to-head with HP's high-end servers (Itanium-based) and HP-UX operating system. While it would take a strong competitor off the table, it would also create uncertainty with the large SPARC installed base, especially in the financial community.

• H-P's acquisition of COMPAQ wasn't exactly a roaring success. The only good thing that came of it was that it led to the downfall of Her Worship, La Fiorina, who viewed the acquistion as her crowning achievement, even though it led to firing 30000 people. Today the COMPAQ brand is fading away and mostly is used for inexpensive PCs.

• Mark Hurd is extremely cost-conscious and very focused on quarter-to-quarter results for Wall Street. A big acquisition like this would be very disruptive and require some significant writeoffs and future earnings impairments.

I would not be at all surprised to learn of talks between Oracle and HP, but I would really be shocked if this deal happened.

I agree that support is a key issue for many commercial and government users even as many of us use the frequently evolving versions of open source products.

There are hundreds of commercial open source vendors that offer open source products with a traditional support/subscription model. These include SugarCRM, Jaspersoft, Zenoss, Groundwork, and many more. (Apologies to the 200+ I have omitted.) The issue here might be more about the vendor than about the support, though the key point may be that the potential buyer doesn't even know that these companies and products exist.

Think about Drupal vs. Acquia. One is a community-based project that is open to everyone at no cost using a forum-based model for support. Acquia was created as a commercial business to provide a supported distribution of Drupal. If you need or want product support, then you can buy that from Acquia; if not, then you can use the community version of Drupal forever.

In the case of MySQL, well over 99% of downloads are unsupported. But they built a successful business by selling commercial licenses and support to companies and governments that wanted that support.

The last example is Ubuntu, where Canonical has released LTS (long-term support) versions as part of their twice-a-year release program. Customers wanting support can install the LTS version and be assured of Canonical support for that version over several years.

Going back to Open Source for America, a key goal there is to get open source considered for adoption in the myriad acquisitions of the thousands of federal agencies. So a big part of the effort is educational -- letting them know where there are high quality open source projects and products that should be considered alongside traditional commercial (proprietary) software.

COBOL is actually 50 years old. Commander Grace Hopper was the principal inventor of the language, starting in 1959. More on Grace Hopper at http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/hopper.htm

The discussion thread pretty much looks like moral support for your to move toward management responsibilities. Make sure that you make yourself worth your salary every day, especially if you are in the US. It's hard to find a new job in the US after 40, and you have to worry about getting health insurance.

It's tricky to be a first time manager. You have to learn how to review, hire, and dismiss employees. You have to avoid micro-managing and delegate responsibilities to your team. You have to improve your communication skills so that you can work effectively with your managers, your peers, and your [new] subordinates. It will be useful to find a manager you respect and get some mentoring. All of these activities take away from "techie" time, so it's a real challenge to be a good manager and retain your technical skills. My suggestion is that you begin to look at technology from a strategic perspective, focusing on those issues that are most important for the long-term success of the product(s) and the company. That approach should help senior management to recognize that you are successfully moving into a management role.

Good luck!

Ratboy666: the examples that you cited are mostly infrastructure (MySQL) or enabling technology (Java, Flash, Moonlight). Only Adobe Reader and OpenOffice.org are end-user applications. Of course, OpenOffice.org is part of every major Linux distro, so I'm not sure how many people will pay the $35 for StarOffice.

I still contend that we don't have a selection of consumer-oriented desktop applications for Linux, and little indication that the situation is likely to change in the foreseeable future. We agree that the retail store possibilities are very unlikely.

We could easily construct a wishlist or consumer apps for Linux. My list would include Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, as well as their professional graphics products (Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop). I'd also add Intuit's Quicken and TurboTax, Roxio Creator or Toast, a Linux equivalent of WinDVD or CyberDVD, drawing programs like Visio and CorelDraw, a painting program, a website creation program like RapidWeaver or Freeway Express, and much more. There's also a very long list of educational titles and game titles that are almost entirely absent from Linux.

I don't see that level of development as happening anytime soon, so I have backed away from the notion of Linux on the desktop for all but the small percentage of people (including many /. readers) who are capable of managing their own systems and working with the available applications. Linux is an excellent platform, but it's hard to see the business opportunity for consumer apps on Linux, without which Linux will not attain significant desktop market share.

Intriguing thought. Do you think that more vendors of proprietary software will eventually create versions of their products to run on a Linux platform? You said that there were many proprietary applications available for the Linux desktop. Can you enlighten me?

To the best of my knowledge, none of the major commercial vendors of consumer-oriented desktop software for MacOS X or Windows also build products for Linux. I don't mean vendors of development tools or enterprise apps like Oracle or SAP, but rather vendors like Microsoft, Apple, Intuit, Adobe, Pinnacle, and Corel that sell to the individual user.

It would certainly make Linux on the desktop much more competitive if I could go into a store (like Fry's or MicroCenter) or onto the web and choose from a selection of proprietary packaged products that would run on my Linux desktop. I don't yet see such a market developing, and the Linux community would probably have to address the multiple installation format issue (rpm vs. deb, etc.) first.

Your note gave me an idea for some other measures that we could use to evaluate the success of desktop Linux. One is the number of vendors who make Linux their primary platform. Another is the revenue generated from license sales of independent software vendors for the Linux platform. When do you think that we will have an application software vendor who can sell $25M of their desktop products for Linux?

Several years ago, at the last Linux Desktop Summit, I said that my measure for success of "Linux on the desktop" was to be able to do 100% of my desktop computing on a machine that ran only open source software. Although I have advanced degrees in computer science and was (am) willing to do command-line customizations and installations, I took the perspective of the average non-professional user seeking a home desktop solution that is roughly comparable to MacOS X and various Windows implementations.

At the time, I estimated that we were around the 50% mark toward that goal (lots of missing device drivers, buggy OpenOffice, no high-quality equivalent tools for photo editing, page layout, video editing, and much more). In short, anyone using a Linux desktop would need to have another machine to accomplish these other tasks.

In recent weeks, I have installed SLED 11, openSuse 11.1, Fedora 10, and Ubuntu 9.04 on several netbooks, notebooks, and boxes. My goal (once again) was to make one of these systems my everyday workhorse machine, one that I could recommend to friends and family for all of their computing tasks. While the situation is much improved from three years ago, we are still quite a way from reaching that elusive 100% goal. For myself and my family, I would guess that we are in the 80's, but gamers would give a much lower score.

Installation and setup is vastly improved. The desktop layouts, particularly GNOME, are reasonably familiar to users of other platforms. Individual applications, notably OpenOffice and Firefox, have come a long way. The usability of system update mechanisms ranges from the smooth (Ubuntu) to the challenging (SuSE). (Development tools are outstanding, but that isn't the issue here.)

However, I had to install restricted drivers to make wireless work, had to install commercially licensed Flash to be able to view many websites, and still found myself without programs for video editing, page layout, and photo editing that compared well with their commercial counterparts (e.g., Scribus vs. MS Publisher or Pages). Watching commercial DVDs occasionally required the use of terminal commands to download and install software, not to mention the associated legal issues. Webcams and microphones were unreliable at best, making it impossible to do video chat or broadcasting (e.g. uStream) with web-based applications.

So I renew the challenge to make it possible for average computer users to do 100% of their work using open source software. That means moving development efforts up from the operating system and infrastructure level to concentrate on creating high quality, easily used applications. That also rules out using WINE or VirtualBox to run proprietary apps.

Let's create personas and scenarios for different types of users, identify their needs, and build the needed applications and drivers. Let's also continue to push device makers to supply Linux drivers. Let's find a workable solution for Flash and SWF-based web content. (Gnash isn't quite there.) In that way, we can make some progress toward that magic 100% number that would allow people to do all of their computing on a Linux desktop.

It sounds as if Megacorp didn't make you an offer that you "can't refuse". If the offer was big enough, then we wouldn't be having this discussion, since you probably wouldn't pass up the opportunity to be set for life, no matter what your feelings about the loss of your "baby" to Megacorp. Ten million dollars in your bank account can safely generate $400K or more each year from taxfree bonds, without affecting the principal. You shouldn't walk away from a cash offer of that size, especially because things can go wrong later.

I have some friends who were prepared to sell their very new startup to a high-tech megacorp that approached them. They decided to accept the offer rather than to raise a VC round, but the megacorp dragged out the negotiations, the founders ran out of money, and the VCs decided not to invest. End of company.

You should also beware of accepting stock with sales restrictions. I have a colleague who sold his company at the end of the dot-com boom for stock that was worth $19M to him personally, but he was restricted from selling it for a year. By the time he was free to sell, the value of the stock had dropped to $200K.

You can take steps to partially protect you and your teammates. One of these steps is employment contracts for you and your team, assuring salary and benefits for a couple of years no matter what. You can also ask for a "change of control" clause that gives you additional options should Megacorp itself be acquired or change its CEO.

That said, if you have a dream and Megacorp isn't going to set you up for life, then you should find a couple of hardened veterans who've been down this road and ask them to serve as advisors. They'll tell you that lightning doesn't strike very often and that there is a good chance that things won't work out. However, if you are at a stage of your life where you don't have a lot of commitments in the form of mortgages, debts, and children, this is as good a time as any to take a chance on seeing your dream through to fruition.

Good luck!

My family and I put thousands of miles on our Eurailpass when we lived in Amsterdam in the late 1970s. It was one of the most enjoyable times of our lives as we got to see a huge chunk of Europe. While the Trans-Europe Expresses are gone, they have been replaced by TGVs, X2000s, and ICE trains that put anything in North America to utter and complete shame. I also remember riding the bullet train in Japan in 1975 - very cool.

We would love to join the civilized world and have high speed rail in the US. Less than 5 hours from SF to Denver, Portland, Seattle, LA, San Diego, Phoenix, Tahoe, Vegas, and Salt Lake City. Leave SF at 6 PM on overnight trains to the East Coast, too. With any luck, we wouldn't have the TSA to make us take off our shoes or leave our bottled water behind.

Today's Amtrak passenger service is only good by the standards of a developing country; even the Acela is pretty much of a joke as high speed trains go. I think of our passenger rail system as equivalent to a two lane road when advanced countries use 6 lane highways.

The 1950's needed the Interstate Highway System. Today we need to supplement that with high speed rail.

While I, too, strongly favor open source solutions for my own personal use, I recognize that introducing open source software into a large organization is a complex and time-consuming procss. To me, you should not focus primarily on displacing Microsoft or other incumbents, or about the religious issues around open source. With the lousy economy and the uncertain future, everyone is receptive to looking at solutions that can reduce costs.

With that in mind, you should focus on how to provide the highest value IT services for your University. That means building a business case around any changes that you proposed, including the upfront and ongoing costs of transition, training, and support. As many others have noted, "free" software isn't free.

Your University has thousands of users, including a broad diversity of stakeholders, including executive and administrative staff, faculty, and students. All of them expect to have systems up and running 24x7. Any lengthy downtime in a critical system must be avoided.

So what should you do?

• Recommend the formation of a University-wide task group to look at "future needs" and at potential cost-saving approaches. Make sure to include students. Bring in outsiders with expertise on open source software, including commercial open source solutions, e.g., Sun/MySQL and RedHat/JBoss. You can help to justify the need for a task force by mentioning the costs of moving everyone to Windows 7 next year.
• Make sure that one of the task force recommendations is to set up a server from which people can download various high quality open source software to try on their own mchines. That set can include many of the 25 packages that Palamida rated as enterprise-ready, along with Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
• Perform a census of existing open source software on your IT systems. You might be using a lot more open source software than anyone realizes.
• Put together a couple of demos or pilot projects. For example, you can bring up a working Drupal CMS or Mediawiki wiki within an hour, even less if you start with a preconfigured Bitnami stack. Anyone need a new web site right now?

Of course, there is no assurance that these methods will work, or that proprietary vendors won't try an end run around your efforts. But I've found these techniques to be an effective guerrilla marketing approach in the past. Good luck.

Most of the discussion here has been about the merits of Notes as an end user product, but the real question at hand is whether there is any value in opening up the source code. I would personally be very dubious about that.

We are talking here about code that ranges up to 30 years old, which has been edited by hundreds, if not thousands, of Lotus/IBM employees. It has gone through not just multiple user interface changes, but even major changes in the nature of the user interface technology. Whatever conceptual integrity the code may have had when Ray Ozzie and his team created it is long gone.

I seriously doubt that there is anyone on the planet who understands the current Notes code. As we have seen in the recent Slashdot discussion about OpenOffice.org, it's very difficult for an outsider to come into such a project and be able to make any meaningful contributions.

When Sun decided to open up Solaris, it took them several years to do so. They had to clean up the code (and comments), then make sure that they actually owned all of the code. I'm quite sure that CA had to go through a similar lengthy process with Ingres.

If IBM were to open source Notes, they would have to follow a similar process. During that time, it would be difficult for the Notes engineering team to make any significant changes to the code base, such as new functionality. The end result would be an open source product that could probably still be understood, enhanced, and maintained only by the same IBM engineering team that is working on it now.

Even though I strongly encourages adoption and use of open source software, I am hard pressed to see the value in open sourcing this antiquated and complex piece of code. I find it difficult to imagine that open source developers would flock to work on this project when there are so many other more attractive options. I think that we should leave things as they stand as long as IBM is willing to pay people to support and maintain Notes.

Agreed, but my hope is that universal broadband and a stronger FCC will provide effective competition to the current duopoly. Where I live, I have several choices for DSL service in addition to the local cable monopoly, and I hope that the number of choices will grow. Most people have fewer choices. Almost everyone has much slower bandwidth than is routinely available in other advanced countries.

In addition, many people are falling for Comcast's Triple Play package offer, which locks them into a single provider for most of their communications. If Comcast dominates, then it's only a matter of time before they control more and more of the content. That gives me visions of Big Brother, Fahrenheit 451, and Brian Roberts as Our Leader, with his image dominating the large screen in my living room.

Tech policy is very important for the country, and we should make sure that these issues do not get overlooked as we address the multitude of other issues facing us.

No one has yet mentioned University of Technology, Sydney, which has a reasonably good computer science department.

Once upon a time, when AT&T (Ma Bell) provided all of the telephone service in the US, you had to rent your telephone from AT&T for about $1 a month, which is at least $5 today. At first, phones were all black. Colors were a major innovation, and the Princess phone (see one on Mad Men) was downright revolutionary. But all phones were made by AT&T's captive subsidiary (Western Electric). You couldn't get them anywhere else, and you couldn't buy them outright.

It wasn't until the 1968 Carterfone decision that AT&T was forced to give up this monopoly and allow other devices to be connected to the Public Switched Telephone Network. RJ-11 jacks followed, as did the flood of third parties making telephones. Today you can buy a phone very cheaply. You wouldn't be very happy if AT&T were charging $5/month for each phone and had the exclusive right to rent them.

Comcast is following the old AT&T monopoly model, the only difference being that the manufacturing of the boxes is outsourced. Cable boxes are available only from them. You can't buy them, and they arbitrarily decide on the monthly rental charge. (For simplicity, we'll let Comcast represent the entire cable industry here.)

Someday, perhaps soon, we will have a Federal Trade Commission that will use its enforcement powers to declare this arrangement to be illegal. Comcast will fight it in the courts, as did AT&T, but eventually they will lose, and will be forced to separate the cable box business from the television service. We consumers will then have the right to either continue renting our boxes or to buy it, with or without a service contract.

The bigger threat to Comcast, however, is the competition for delivery of content, where they don't have a complete monopoly. (They do own some of the cable channels, though.) Today, we can legally receive programs over-the-air, by cable, satellite, and Internet. As more and more of us go to the Web for our video entertainment, Comcast and the other cable companies may become increasingly irrelevant and lose more and more of their market share. The Obama Administration is talking about universal broadband service, which would be a big blow to cable TV. When that happens, I'm guessing that HBO and Showtime will decide to sell monthly subscriptions to their shows over the web (or through the iTunes music store). If they are successful, it's not long until Game Over for the cable companies.

Other replies in this discussion thread have noted that the new CSSE conference in Wuhan, China, is not an "important" conference.

As someone who has served on lots of program committees for research-oriented conferences, I thought that it might be useful to try to explain what makes a conference important. Here goes:

• It has been around for a while - probably five years or more - and is reasonably selective in the paper selection process. For example, only about 10% of the papers submitted to the Int'l Conf. on Software Engineering are accepted for publication and presentation.
• The community around the conference - conference and program chairs, attendees, etc. - includes the leading people (esp. researchers) in the field, who view the annual conference not only as a destination to learn about the latest advances, but also as a social event to meet and catch up with colleagues. The ACM Conference on Computers and Human Interaction is an excellent example of such a conference.
• The invited and keynote speakers are well-known luminaries in the field, often affiliated with the most prestigious academic institutions.
• The selection process is based on review of submitted papers, not on a pay-to-play approach found in some commercially-oriented conferences. The intent, not always achieved, is to find the most qualified people on the program committee for each paper. (Of course, the quality of the reviewing process often leaves a lot to be desired, but that's another issue.)
• Tenure-track faculty in research universities get promoted not only on the number of publications, but also the perceived quality of where they are published. Since you don't get much credit for publishing in a new and obscure conference, there is little incentive to publish there. Furthermore, your work is less likely to be seen and cited by your peers. A faculty member only has the time and money to attend a few conferences each year, and only has the time to write a few papers.

  So the goal is to get your work published in the best journals and conferences. You send your best work to the "A" conferences, recognizing that there are "B" and "C" conferences every week of the year (with the exception of this week and next). If a lower quality conference is being held in a location that you very much want to visit, then you dash off a paper of lesser quality, knowing that even a software-generated paper is likely to be accepted. You don't even have to put it on your CV, and it's a pretty safe bet that your colleagues won't see it.