In February 1998, well before even the first prototype IA-64 chips were available, a skunkworks team at HP, with some assistance from Intel, began the work toward porting Linux to IA-64. By October 1998,around the same time that IBM, Old SCO and Sequent had finished negotiations, HP had completed the build toolchain. By January 1999, the Linux kernel was booting on an IA-64 processor simulator, months before the actual Itanium processor was available. In March 1999, at Intel, Linux was booting on the actual Intel Itanium processor.
The SCO Group (then Caldera) which had purchased the rights to sell copies of the old Unix from Novell, sued IBM because the freely available Linux competed the SCO Groups old Unix offering.
So Oracle has become the next SCO Group, quick somebody tell PJ!
Why should Google/HP sell Microsoft Windows PCs?
Just sell the hardware with Linux Distros, Chromebooks, or sell the hardware no operating system installed to organizations with corporate licences. They could even farm out the Windows drivers and support to a third company.
Makes as much sense as Google acquiring Motorola for the same platform and patents for android.
I would like to see HP/Google enterprise hosted google apps appliances hooked up to Chromebooks as a replacement for the Microsoft Quagmire.
Google desktop widgets were an annoyance but the desktop search works very well in a small business environment where the files are stored on NAS or SAMBA servers.
I really hope that Google could produce a Chrome Local Search Plugin that replicates the search functionality that was in Google Desktop.
It would be a killer app if Google was also to include two way file merge functionality ( unison or two way rsync ) with removable media, remoter servers, other desktop computers and Google doc accounts
Countdown to breeding larger insects for human consumption starts in
At some point some open source projects developers may go in a direction that the distribution vendors and end uses may disagree with. It is the licensing which allows a fork of the project to develop that sets the open source development model apart from the pure proprietary development model. Apache, X.org and even the current version of the GNU GCC compiler toolset have been all derived from an outside fork of an existing open source project. No vendor or open source software developer can block development for any substantial period of time without the risk of the development being taken over by a descendant of the same project -- it's called evolution.
Every time the leading members/developers of each of those original projects complained bitterly about the interlopers.
The longer the original team remains entrenched in their design/implementation choices, the less the original team control has over the successor project and the less original product's market share of total users.
This will remain true for all freely licensed source code that Oracle has purchased or inherited. Even for the forks of the GPL licensed Java.
In the end freely licensed source code can have no dictators, only obsoleted dickhead.
The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
