HPUX and NonStop maybe, but VMS is lacking any kind of love in HP and when Itanic dies VMS goes with it.

That said, I managed to generate my own license keys that are unlimited (along with the license pak generator key!) so I don't have to worry about licenses for my VAX and Alpha machines.

RHEL 6 upgrades are free for those paying support, so that's not it.

By replacing the kernel it is no longer (even close to) RHEL 5 so ISV certifications are shot. Making oracle's linux unsupported by any 3rd party software other than what oracle itself has certified.

Not a troll, but a pointing out the obvious. The "major" announcement was nothing more than 2.6.18+patches -> 2.6.32.

What doesn't get mentioned is that the oracle kernel would invalidate any ISV certifications that oracle's linux might have "inherited" from RHEL...

Opensolaris survived only because of Sun's benevolence. Once the source drops stop, that's the end of Illumos project: its either stuck permanently at whatever the last drop was (especially in light of the binary-only internationalization stuff) or becomes incompatible and then its no longer solaris.

Stick a fork in it.

They chose a proprietary platform at the beginning and now they're stuck with the lock-in. When you get on the proprietary plane that's the cost of the ticket.

They bought their tickets
they knew what they were getting into
I say let 'em crash

If i said it was closed source then I misspoke.

But, that isn't the point: the open source project isn't affected. The commercial entity which is repackaging hercules has been informed (not sued, not C&D, just informed) that if they continue with their lawsuit against IBM then IBM might consider using this list of patents against them. Again, not against the open source hercules community but the commercial entity.

I think software patents suck, but using a lawsuit to try to force someone to do something that they don't want to sucks just as much.

I think Florian's beef is that IBM's response letter mentioned patents which may be infringed by the hercules product -- and how one of them was on the 'gift to open source' list. Of course, even then he's wrong: the open source hercules project is different than the commercial product which is seeking the copyright license.

The bottom line is the commercial hercules people started this fight and they were in the wrong to assert that IBM must license its properties to anyone who comes by and asks. The patent (non-) issue doesn't have anything to do with it and its an emotional sideshow to get the OSS folks to be on the commercial hercules' side.

So if they bought 5 of these at $800,000 then they've sunk in $4,000,000. Over 9 months they've saved $100,000 which is a total of $11,111 a month. In 30 years they'll break even?

Its yet another club that MS can use against the OEMs.

Don't like what MS demands for the desktop? Oops, I guess we can't sell your laptops in the stores anymore.

Promise to ditch linux? Yeah, we can make space for your wares in the stores.

This isn't good news for vendors no matter how you slice it.

No. the 286 and 386 are very different CPUs and the linux kernel cannot be compiled for it.

well, why were you carrying a giant razor blade?

Those should have been multiplies by 160 instead of 80.

Being in C, it is easier to see what the person writing it was doing, compared to assembly.

Consider if you had to do some nasty computation such as finding what address is used for a given row and column on the screen:
(in bad assembly)

mov ax, row
mov bx, col
shl col,#1
xor dx,dx
mul ax,#80
add ax,bx
mov pos,ax

Whereas in C it is:

pos=(row*80)+(col*2);

and much more readable.