LOGIN | REGISTER NOW | SUBSCRIBE
 
 
News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 
Download Current Issue
ISSUE 2/1/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?


 
blogs tab
Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Available Today
A Visual Studio 2010 release candidate is available on MSDN.
02/09/2010 09:45 AM EST

Is Microsoft eyeing Office subscription pricing?
Microsoft may be preparing to offer a new Office pricing option called "union," which charges the same for cloud as on-premises.
02/01/2010 09:38 AM EST

Facebook rewrites PHP runtime
Facebook is about to open source its own PHP runtime, written from scratch for speed.
01/30/2010 08:53 PM EST

 

Events calendar tab
Macworld 2010
2/9/2010 to 2/13/2010
San Francisco
IDG World Expo

SPTechCon 2010
2/10/2010 to 2/12/2010
San Francisco
BZ Media

PyCon 2010 (Python Conf.)
2/17/2010 to 2/25/2010
Atlanta
Python Software Foundation

Southern Calif. Linux Expo
2/19/2010 to 2/20/2010
Los Angeles
SCALE

IBM Pulse
2/21/2010 to 2/24/2010
Las Vegas
IBM


 
print Printable version 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Facebook brings HipHop to PHP
HipHop compiles PHP to speed up the Web layer at world's most popular social networking si...

Adobe moves LiveCycle application platform to the cloud
Release gives developers just what they need to create targeted business process-oriented ...

Syncfusion announces component suite for .NET 4
Essential Studio 2010 has business intelligence, reporting and UI controls, ready for .NET...

Digg!  Digg
Reddit  Reddit
Slashdot  Slashdot
Share on facebook  Facebook
Share on Twitter  Twitter

From the Editors: Darl McBush


By SD Times News Team
February 3, 2009 — 
As the SCO Group debacle continues to unfold, we can’t help but think that CEO Darl McBride and now former-U.S. President George W. Bush have a lot in common.

Both went to war based on bad information. For Bush, it was the never-located “weapons of mass destruction” he believed Iraq President Saddam Hussein (now executed) was harboring. For McBride, it was the never-proven “Unix source code” that he believed IBM and others harbored in their Linux distributions.

As their respective battles raged on, both tried to strong-arm support. Bush used the leverage of the American presidency to build an alliance of countries willing to send troops into the hot zones. McBride was even less subtle, foisting “SCOsource” licenses on Linux users to protect themselves from SCO’s legal missiles.

Meanwhile, both men were losing their personal wars of public opinion at home. Bush’s approval rating fell to one of the lowest of any president in history. McBride was made a pariah in the software industry. Both, though, kept pressing onward.

Now both have fallen into irrelevance, as Bush departed the White House for his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and McBride leads the auction of SCO’s only viable assets: its mobility software.

But here’s where their paths part. Bush will go back to clearing brush from his land, rarely to be seen again, but McBride still will be hanging around, as SCO holds onto its UnixWare line for as long as it takes to resolve its lawsuits against IBM, Novell and others.

With court ruling after court ruling going against SCO, you would think the company would admit defeat and try to move forward with the mobile division. That’s what it looked like it would do after a court ruling declared Unix the intellectual property of Novell, not SCO, and ordered SCO to pay Novell US$2.5 million plus a per-day penalty.

Apparently, SCO can’t make that payment and still fight the fight, so the company has decided to auction off the piece of its business that had any future.

So what’s left? A shrinking share in the shrinking Unix market; SCO’s reported earnings have declined steadily in the years since their legal fight began. That’s it.

SCO has done all the damage it could do to the Linux community and those who use it with only good intentions. Now, with depleted ammunition, McBride and the company are mere empty shells. So McBride should take his final cue from Bush and, like the former president, just go away.

Vertebra shows evolution in clouds
It's still very early going, but Engine Yard really seems to be on the path to bring cloud computing out of its formative stage. The startup company has taken on the monumental task of creating a cloud-neutral connection infrastructure for securely tying internal and external clouds together.

Vertebra is still very young, but it's already evident that this is not your father's SOA architecture. Vertebra is based on some wildly different principles. Chief among these is the use of XMPP as the primary transport protocol between clouds.

At first, this would seem silly: XMPP is primarily used to power Jabber, the instant-messaging protocol that powers Google Talk. But upon closer inspection, this is a much wiser choice than dealing with yet another server-tied bus. XMPP is XML based, has intrinsic hierarchical support, and is an open standard. What the engineers at Engine Yard are making here is the scaffolding that needs to support cloud computing, especially if your cloud is expected to be one of many other clouds.

In a year, Vertebra will likely be the only mature open-source way of connecting and managing clouds and Web services around the world as if they were all in the same room. We're anxious to see how Vertebra evolves, as it's a breath of fresh air in an area that, until now, hasn't seen as many innovative new architectures as we'd like.

The Engine Yard folks asked all the right questions when they started work on Vertebra. Perhaps the most important of those questions was, “Why are applications architected for the cloud being built in exactly the same way as normal data center applications?” The answer to that question, as we'll probably all learn in the coming years, is: they shouldn't be.


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, Vertebra, IBM, Novell, SCO


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33235
 

Comments

02/04/2009 09:29:01 AM EST

While you are qualified to have an opinion about SCO you have a child-like understanding of government. If you want to be taken seriously as a journalist don't include political opinion again unless it directly relates to what you do know about.

United StatesTyler


02/04/2009 10:45:25 AM EST

Hey "Tyler" this is stated at the top of the article as an opinion. Put on your glasses next time.

United StatesRob


02/11/2009 12:19:57 PM EST

Well, thats great. I'm disappointed to see that you couldn't resist trying to throw a shoe at the former president as he exited. You have a right to your opinion and to print whatever you see fit to print but you can stop sending me those pesky renewal notices. If I wanted to read political opinion/posturing/whatever, I have plenty of sources from which to choose. I was down to only reading Larry O'Brien's column regularly (I think his column is great!) but now your "approval ratings" in my eyes have dropped to a historical low. I won't be voting for your newspaper when the renewal notice comes around but its probably no big deal since I got it free anyway.

United StatesDan


02/20/2009 01:02:40 PM EST

Darl McBush...hilarious. Two historically failed leaders, riding off into the sunset. Like the conservative hoo hah however, I am sure Dan and Tyler have a few trillion to throw onto the "weren't the last thirty years of neoconservative christianism grand" celebratory bonfire. Failed political philosophy=dust bin of history...find something else to use to dominate others guys.

United StatesBlorf


Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
  • Preview
Loading