[svlug] Sun's demise, Linux adoption, forking (was: Blockchain)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Karen Shaeffer (shaeffer at neuralscape.com):

> It was quite humorous to me. Ironically, the last few slides seemed to
> have a duality in meaning. Some folks might see the sinking titantic as
> symbolic of an organization suffering from group-think over confidence.
> In the titantic case it lead to hitting the iceburg. In business, it
> lead to the crash of Sun Microsystems as an example.

I _briefly_ misread this as saying Sun involvement in making of the
movie Titanic had helped cause the firm's demise, which isn't what you
were getting at.  (The movie's production did involve some huge
rendering farms using a cluster of 160 DEC Alphas mostly running Linux,
working under engineer Daryl Strauss for his startup Digital Domain,
something that had a lot of coverage in the late 1990s:
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494)  

Before I realised I'd absent-mindedly misparsed your metaphor (coffee
underflow error), while looking for coverage, I serendipitously found a
fascinating story of how some important projects (open core) got saved
from Sun's demise in part because Sun Open Source Officer and OSI Board
member Simon Phipps helped lead a project to independently fork and take
over maintenance of the open source branches of those codebases.  These
are a line of SSO / identity middleware and an enterprise service bus.
Good reading.

https://www.itworld.com/article/2752766/open-source-tools/the-immortality-of-open-source-projects.html

(As someone who wrote a briefly famous essay detailing how the right to
fork helps open source projects adapt and survive, I appreciated Brian
Profitt's piece.)

-- 
Cheers,              "I am a member of a civilization (IAAMOAC).  Step back
Rick Moen            from anger.  Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet
rick at linuxmafia.com  they struggled to get you here.  Repay them by appreciating
McQ! (4x80)          the civilization you inherited."           -- David Brin