ex tempore

It’s really sad that SUN Microsystems, who produces such great hardware is systematically unable to grab to its own ranks someone as gifted to manage and oversight the software side as Andy Bechtolsheim is in their hardware side. Some time ago, in the beginning of April, i wrote here that if Sun wanted to really have a chance with the ‘opening’ of Solaris they needed to think really different. Well, yesterday, Ian Murdock sort of responded. At a first glimpse it may seem that he have finally seen the obvious – that it is packaging the key technology that allows a distro, an operating system to truly differentiate from the crowd. A second, more careful, re-reading, shows that Murdock seems to have inherited all of SUN’s past sins – after all, now that there is a problem, because they – Sun – identified them, that will mean a SUN specific solution. So much for openness. There were so much things they could do, and yet it seems that SUN management will try to reinvent the wheel yet again, delaying their global efforts for another year at least. Meanwhile conary is ready, alive and kicking. It’s a shame when self proclaimed innovators just play on the defensive – Microsoft like – just because they are afraid of new approaches and paradigms. Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, Sun, just like Microsoft before them, may have (had) some success delaying the future, a decentralized one, but have no chance of avoiding it…