Rubénerd!

I'll be honest, I want an empty one of these to use as a bookshelf. Don't suppose I can just buy the rack, can I?

As I mentioned on Twitter, I'm so glad Oracle largely kept the designs of the Sun server hardware. They're to servers what Apple are to consumer tech, in my opinion.

I read this last week but forgot to mention it! Wayne Rash writing for Fierce Mobile IT:

HP is launching an enterprise mobility platform that will let wireless carriers provide app stores tailored for enterprise users. [..]

The Enterprise Mobility Platform includes the Enterprise Mobile App Store that lets enterprises create, certify, distribute and manage mobile versions of company apps. The apps would be hosted at the carrier site and the HP app store would provide a portal for employee use.

Sounds like a great idea for simplifying distribution and updating clients, as many of their competitors have realised. Frankly I'm surprised it took them this long!

Showing my support running OpenSolaris in VirtualBox on my Mac :-)

Well it's official, Sun Microsystems found a suitor not in IBM, Apple or Microsoft, but with Oracle. I must say on the whole I'm cautiously relieved, though there are some things that worry me. What an ambiguous sentence. Well you know what they say, certainty is hobgoblin of the fool... right? Wait, that's not how it goes.

Firstly, Java and Solaris absolutely make sense for Oracle; I believe I read somewhere that (paraphrasing) Larry Ellison claimed Solaris was the most effective Unix system out there for use with Oracle infrastructure. I haven't played with OpenSolaris (or Linux for that matter) to the extent I've used FreeBSD but I was really impressed by it's completeness and quality. I'm also interested in licencing; as a BSD guy the CDDL that has prevented Linux users from adopting ZFS and Dtrace hasn't bothered me but Oracle's work with Linux may see it change to the GPL... maybe.

What I'm also interested in is Sun's free and open source acquisitions and assets, namely NetBeans, VirtualBox, OpenOffice.org and MySQL. If they keep them and continue to support them I don't see any problem, and one could argue that said projects would benefit from being part of a larger company in the same vein as Linux at IBM. Some brainstorming on each:

• NetBeans would compliment their Java acquisition, but Oracle is a signed member of the Eclipse foundation. Will Oracle attempt to merge it, ditch it or continue to develop it and instead ditch Eclipse?

• VirtualBox at Oracle is a fascinating combination. Could Oracle somehow leverage VirtualBox's virtualisation technology to more efficently deploy servers with Oracle's database? They could do it with Solaris too!

• OpenOffice.org is a real wildcard. One could potentially see Oracle leverage OOo against Microsoft, or perhaps they could pull a Novell and instead fork it into an independent stream and an Oracle branded product that could use groupware Oracle develops. The possibilities are extremely intriguing.

• MySQL for me is a major concern. Oracle's databases and MySQL are light years apart in features and from what I've heard scalability, but the gap is much narrower than it was even a few years ago. Is it conceivable Oracle would intentionally cripple MySQL or keep it with only a subset of features so as to not cannibalise their bread and butter? If they do, might we see MySQL forks or even a general move to PostgreSQL?

I've done work for Oracle in the past but I still don't know the inner workings of the company or the details regarding merged product lines (ala PeopleSoft and Siebel). Whatever the outcome, I'll be watching closely.

As I've said here before I have huge respect for Sun and have always wanted a pimped out Sun Workstation to really get stuck into Solaris. In fact if I were offered a Mac Pro or a similarly high end Sun Workstation I'd take the latter just because I've used them at university but ave never had one of my own before!

The biggest question I still have though is: what will happen to one of my top technology idols Jonathan Schwartz? Will he get a position in Oracle? Will he continue to blog from there? Or perhaps a more pertinent question would be: will he be allowed to blog from there?

I wish Sun the best in this transition period.

The best CNET blog you may or may not be reading

Given I've been unabashedly brown nosing and sucking up to tech writers of late, I figure doing it again won't sink me any further. Besides, talking about interesting people in a positive way is such a refreshing thing to do after sadly discussing all the nonsense going on around the world right now. I could get used to doing this!

I am well and truly addicted to a ton of CNET News and ZDNet Australia material; I am subscribed to no less than 12 of their feeds. The real gems aren't in their general homepage feeds though, but rather in the individual feeds of some of their writers, some of which I hope to talk about more in the future.

My favourite CNET writer by far though is Gordon Haff who writes the Pervasive Datacenter blog, buried an unceremonious 32 links down on CNET's News and Tech Blogs page. He discusses enterprise systems as well as free and open source software on the desktop and server, alongside some well thought out opinion pieces and some general how-tos he's picked up (in other words, the exact material I'd be talking about right here on my blog if I stayed focused rather than deviating into an assortment of other topics all the time!).

If you have a feed reader set up and ready to go, you can subscribe to his RSS feed here. He's also provided links for Google Reader and My Yahoo!.

Some of my favourite articles of his in the last few weeks where he's hit the issues right on the head:

• Simplify Creative Commons, don't tweak it (yes!)
• Are netbooks real? (funny how we arrive at different conclusions)
• The more global Fujitsu and the followup One NEC: It's a start
• The license wars are over
• Will Linux ever be a mainstream desktop play?
• The identity 2.0 conundrum (I can really relate!)