Alex Hudson

So, probably as I was posting my little blog piece yesterday on IBM taking over Sun, it seems that the IBM and Sun deal was falling apart – seemingly a quabble over the pricing, but I suspect a little more must have been to it than that.

Again, I’m reminded somewhat of Microsoft – when Yahoo! refused their take-over offer, which at $31 represented an extremely generous premium over their then ticker-price of about 62%, with a total deal worth $44.6 billions. Such a rich deal that even Microsoft would have been forced into debt (though doubtless they’re thanking themselves for walking away now – the timing would have been awful). When we look today, it’s around $13 and has been as low as $9. Shareholders were rightly steaming.

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If we’re to believe what we’re told in the press, sometime tomorrow – or perhaps later in the week – IBM and Sun will announce some kind of merger. I’m not sure anyone is under any illusion that this would effectively mean the end of Sun in time, being absorbed into IBM, although there is a lot of speculation over what would happen to various projects. Some, like NetBeans, seem pretty certainly done for, and the amount of life left in the SPARC architecture post-merger seems limited.

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When Fedora 10 was released, one of the first things I did was enable nouveau as my graphics driver – nv was horribly slow on my Dell, and I didn’t want the pain of the proprietary drivers. Needless to say, it didn’t immediately work: it didn’t want to play with my 1920×1050 panel and I got big black bars on either side of the screen. It took someone on #nouveau all of about five minutes to give me a patch to fix the problem, and a hop-skip-jump later I’d recompiled the driver and the display was great.

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This weekend saw the arrival of a new computer – woo! – a long-needed desktop upgrade which brought me the usual technological wtfs (“since when did CPUs come without pins?!” etc.). As part of this, I’ve been trying to upgrade my Fedora 11 Alpha to a more current rawhide.

Clearly I missed something, because even after a number of attempts in different ways I failed. rpm complaining about md5 mismatches or something, for example, which I kind of knew might be an issue from following devel but didn’t really anticipate. The worst of my attempts ended badly with rpm attempting to upgrade glibc, the pre-script failing (I think with some python error) and rpm bailing, leaving me with a completely horked system.

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Just the other day, the UK Government published a new paper entitled “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan” (amusingly, they’re also tracking the tag #ukgovOSS to get responses – so there we go!).

I’ve had experience with the previous consultations: the various versions of the “open source policy” which, at best, were statements of non-discrimination and said very little positive, and the various explorations into default routes for exploitation which as far as I can tell resulted in very little. There was also the abortive “Open Source Academy” whose page is still online but I dare not link for fear people might think it relevant.

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When the new “MailCo” (as it was at the time) was announced, the first thing they did was poll people on what changes they should be looking to make to Thunderbird as kick-ass as possible – you can see from the initial launch blog post that integrated calendaring was item #1 on a list of new features.

Now, only one year on, the word is that calendaring won’t be integrated or bundled at all – in fact, it gets worse, because the calendar developers have also announced that a number of full-time developers have been lost. Doesn’t say why, but I’m assuming you can blame the Global Downturn™.

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Over the past couple of days I got added to the packagers group in FAS and uploaded my first approved RPM – it has been a very interesting process, particularly going through the various policy pages on the wiki (which, while informative, are pretty badly laid out in my opinion – but that’s something I can help fix). Trying cvs again for the first time in years has been an odd experience.

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The awful News of the World managed to shut up about it, although they did give it away to anyone with half an eye, but the Daily Mail can’t – they’ve felt it necessary to spoil the worst-kept secret in TV and name Ben Collins as “The Stig”.

Personally, I hope they keep Collins. I don’t think anyone actually cares who the Stig is; except newspapers it seems.

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Someone asked me my opinion on the licensing of Qt a couple of days ago; not that my opinion is worth that much but this is a relatively interesting change. On the face of it, moving to LGPL isn’t a major difference – obviously, it enables proprietary software to use the library without paying a commercial license, but the market for third-party applications on GNU/Linux is pretty slim. The relaxing/opening of the development process is much more important, assuming that it actually happens, although I imagine that won’t sink in for a little while yet either.

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The news of the world “newspaper” did a “reveal” of Top Gear’s “The Stig” character – so many quotes, but Stig is just a name, they didn’t actually reveal who it was, and I’m not sure they’re really a newspaper 😉

At least. They say that they didn’t reveal who it was, but if you go to the story you’ll see they have a picture of “the Stig” showing just his eyes – apparently giving a clue to the readers. If you don’t want to know who they think the Stig is, don’t click “More”.

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