I’ve received several notes or IMs over the past few days from parties interested to learn why I haven’t commented publicly on either the announcement that IBM intends to OEM Solaris on its x86 line of servers or the news that OpenJDK has a TCK/JCK license. A few even speculated that I might have been “silenced” by a series of nefarious – and increasingly improbable – schemes.
While I’m always game for a good conspiracy theory or two (nothing gets my brother more wound up than when I argue that we never actually landed on the moon), and I appreciate the compliment implicit in the assumption that my voice is somehow important enough to try and “silence,” the truth is regrettably ordinary in this case: I’ve been quite busy. A wedding in Iowa, a few trips to Boston, and – oh yeah – my identity was stolen. Good times. When you don’t hear from me for a while after tomorrow, you’ll know it’s because I won a few hundred mill in Powerball and am on an overlong siesta.
Anyhow, I actually have commented on both – publicly. We tackled these subjects and more on last week’s Monkcast – a joint production between us and ZDNet and Mass Events Labs’ own David Berlind.
As the resident open source “expert” – using that term very loosely – I was asked to comment on all of the above during the 30 minutes or so we were on the phone. If you’re interested, then, in any or all of the following topics – Solaris, Linux, Dtrace DTrace, SystemTap, ZFS, OpenJDK, TCK/JCK, Apache, or open source licensing – I invite you to give it a listen.
I don’t like the Pluggd player the ZDNet folks use for their media front end any more than you do. Probably less, actually, given that the download function doesn’t appear to work on Linux. But not to worry, there are ways to get direct access to the media. Maybe, for example, you could browse Berlind’s feed and grab it directly? Just a thought.
One last comment: as always, if you have questions on any of the above that weren’t answered or addressed, feel free to ask them. You never know – they might end up as an Ask RedMonk…
