Weekly news wrap-up: Questioning Sun’s commitment to Linux

There are still lingering questions about Sun Microsystems’ commitment to Linux, after the company announced in early February a bunch of new Linux initiatives and one Sun executive declared the move was part of a “war on Microsoft.”

ITdirector.com called Sun “a little late to the party” during what should be a good year for Linux. NewsForge business columnist Jack Bryar suggested Sun didn’t have much choice but to move into the Linux camp, with customers defecting Sun’s Solaris Unix OS for Linux. And NewsForge’s Robin “Roblimo” Miller published a memo from an IT guy inside a company considering Solaris or Linux. The government employee gave seven reasons to pick Linux.

Microsoft vs. the holdout states

This past week offered a couple of noteworthy items in the ever continuing Microsoft antitrust case. The U.S. Department of Justice sifted through 30,000 public comments on the proposed Microsoft settlement and found only 47 it considered “major” enough to publish. However, at least two of those come from the Open Source and Free Software camps, from the KDE League and the Free Software Foundation’s Eben Moglen, and only five of the 47 actually favored the settlement.

On Friday, federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that Microsoft must show its source code to the states holding out on settling. Those nine states have argued that they need to see the Windows source code in order to verify Microsoft’s claim it could not offer a simpler version of Windows.

Meanwhile, reports this week showed that the money Microsoft spends on lobbying exceeds that of failed energy company Enron, which is facing questions about its campaign contributions. Gee, and people in the federal government wonder why there’s suspicions that the Microsoft settlement was rigged.

Wither Corel?

At least from the former Linux company’s last flirtation with Linux and Open Source software. DebianPlanet.org noted that Corel plans to close its Open Source Web site March 1.

In other news …

There’s still much talk of Rob Landley’s proposal to create the position of “Patch Penguin” to help Linux creator Linus Torvalds get patches into the Linux kernel code quicker. Joe Barr of LinuxWorld.com wrote an interesting piece wondering if Landley’s idea was “evolution or revolution.” Is either of those outcomes a bad thing?

KDE’s 3.0 release is near, noted C|Net, with the beta 2 release of 3.0 released this week.

In a bit of people-type news, Slashdot founder Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda asked his long-time girlfriend to marry him, using the popular news and discussion site as his forum, on Valentine’s Day, no less. She said yes. Awwwwww.

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