That was also my first thought. One programmer? Come on!

Anyone knows if Linux client will be free software, so I can built it fo x86_64 (assuming it'll not be available for x86_64 since beginning)?

PS: Just yesterday tried new ioquake3 with VOIP and it's just great, wondering if people will switch to Quake Live anyway...

And the sad thing is that both DTrace and ZFS are amazing products. ZFS with it's snapshots and other features would work great not only in data centres, but also in cheap home backup boxes - an alternative to apple TimeMachine thing. DTrace is like a candy, amazing, powerful tracing framework that I'd love to see more widely used.

Sun apparently didn't do their job *to the very end* at various points.

1. x86 - they entered the market, but not quite (no desktops, no laptops, no low-cost servers, only big machines). You can run Solaris on x86 but not quite. You can even run it on a laptop and have NVidia accelerator running, but for most people it's still a dream, urban legend as they can't do it at home with their own hardware. Maybe they shouldn't enter x86 at all?

2. Java cross-platform myth. Write once - run anywhere... not quite. It's very very popular as "enterprise" solution, but most people don't use any Java desktop apps, applets were disaster and JavaFX... later about that!

3. Open source and their products. We all know Java is open source now (finally, and obviously with large amount of work done by RedHat!), but Solaris? Binary blobs must be included in any build to make it work. Incompatible with GPL libenses, and also not a BSD model - what was that all about? It was like: "yeah we want to be part of open source movement. but you can't fork our code too much".

4. Failure on building community. This IS a big deal. Linux has got great large community of users/developers/fans. Apple has got it's army of zombie fanboys. Sun tried to build community around OpenSolaris and failed. "Project Kenai", "Zembly" look like half-finished sites. Just compare it with Github (I know it's a bit different usage but hey). The only successful one is Netbeans.org IMHO, but still - could be more successful if they didn't require signing agreement before submitting patches. Hell, I love Netbeans but I won't send them my code so they can use it in closed-source Sun Studio.

5. Not allowing interested users to use their innovative products. I am a software developer. I write software using Linux. I wanted to try out JavaFX... and you know what? It doesn't run on Linux. I wanted to write widgets on desktop using cutting-edge JVM drag-from-firefox-to-desktop feature, and expected my browser not to crash. I finally wanted x64 Java plugin for years, and once it got here - most people already use OpenJDK.

6. Desktop Java. Swing could be most popular GUI toolkit today if it integrated nicely with Gnome desktop for years now, if Java could be distributed easily with Debian, and people wrote software for it. No, let's keep Java close till it becomes obsolete on desktop and release it then. Crazy.

7. Trying to be service provider. OK, sun's hardware is great. Service providers buy Sun's hardware, say data centers. Now, one day, Sun becomes services provider, direct competitor of people who buy hardware from this company. Isn't there a conflict of interests?

8. No one mainline software. Yeah, sun has Solaris. But also had Linux distro. Bought MySQL, but also had flirted with PostgreSQL, Apache derby. It obviously confuses people, and look at IBM: "Go run Linux and DB2 on our servers".

9. Bunch of outdated, obsolete software that no one use. Some basic software like shells that come with Solaris were totally out of date till recently. And they still run "innovative" projects that failed many years ago: Project Looking Glass as best example.

10. Sparc failure. Maybe not exactly a failure. I know it's really great processor family. It has got potential. It's fast, multi-core, modern. Probably made them loose lots of money recently. What went wrong here? Maybe they should license chips for third-parties? Maybe they should build and push desktop/mobile versions? Maybe they should abandon it for PowerPC to provide better compatibility with IBM? I really don't know, but they did something wrong, and giving it's own customers alternative as AMD servers didn't help.

They did too much things wrong, and maybe too much things in general at the same time rather than concentrate on what brings them profit - their hardware.

Well, I AM using openjdk for commercial development with Java... it's 99% free software. Sound already works, GUI/3d works, web start... well, with 50% chance ;). No JavaFX yet but I'm sure they'll discontinue it anyway. The point is that Java (OpenJDK) is usable environment for developing and running GUI and web apps. Despite some missing bits it fullfills my needs in 100% without any closed-source blobs. It is not like with OpenSolaris (I feared that they'll go this way), where you can't use it without kernel binaries - here you can just grab a copy, compile and use.

Just wondering how big this number is... I am into web applications business for quite some time now, but can't remember of any company using Glassfish for deployment of Java apps. People use JBoss for Java, Passenger for Rails, and ASP for .net stuff, but I didn't came across a single Glassfish production environment...

Yup. Manager with highly developed narcism is worst thing that could possibly happen to developers.

Sorry, but which screenshot are you asking for? IE8 displaying elements not valid way, or that guy who posted original comment, doing activity with title of his post.

I am just wondering who paid money to close this case and avoid precedence. Google? Yahoo? Slashdot? ;D

You've got outdated info. 10. Firefox already has Qt frontent by Nokia. 9. Konqueror can use WebKit (or they can use FF+Qt) 8. Well yes. Krita? 7. I don't complain - works for me. 6. What?! Can't disagree more - Kopete is great piece of software. 5. True (gtk-engines-qt?) 4. True (gtk-engines-qt?) 3. True (Qt licensing issue caused this, let's observe now) 2. True 1. And they *DO* like Qt.

OK, Qt isn't even close to Gnome in terms of being a desktop environment. In fact, it isn't a desktop environment at all - so it can't be alternative to Gnome. It can be alternative to GTK, which is underlying library for Gnome. What I guess is the case - Ubuntu might look for KDE as an alternative to Gnome desktop, or create something new based on QT that'll fit more on small screens.

OK, so Microsoft will need to remove IE from Windows - right... But does it also mean they need to remove IE's rendering engine? I am not a Windows software developer, but at least Qt windowing toolkit or Aqua include HTML rendering engine - I guess it's the same situation with Windows. And I guess it's used in many places in Windows apps like Explorer. So, they cannot just remove it - whole system will crash.

Yeah, this is technical issue - I won't complain about my data present there but I care about security of it.

They have started issuing biometrical passports already - quietly, so that no one had chance to say no... However, I don't see this as threat to my privacy / human rights. The only thing that concerns me are technical issues - and it seems to be quite poorly protected.

Well, Ferret is not a "common service" anymore. Most of people already switched to Sphinx. I had horrible experience with Ferret myself, and I wouldn't say it's reliable. It's not even developed anymore. The thing that you mention Ferret in this context just confirms that you don't have much experience with Rails. It's not a standard Rails feature, it's a 3rd party addon. You don't judge framework by quality of addons, just like you don't judge operating system by quality of programs written to it.

No way, seriously this sentence made me laugh aloud. You can hardly find more closed-minded nation in the world when it comes to choosing OS. It's either Mac OS or Vista, ordinary people don't bother to see more options. I'm a Mac or a PC, no third way. A year ago it was impossible to buy laptop with Linux pre-installed in whole area of Tottenham Court Road - now you can find plenty of UMPCs with Linux there, but it doesn't mean Brits care - it just means UMPCs are selling good there, and they happened to come with Linux by vendors choice.