In the face of adversity, Red Hat tries to act natural

It's no secret that Shit for Brains thinks he owns Linux, or at least part of it. And it's also no secret that Red Hat thinks SFB is full of shit. But every couple months Stevie B. hints at an intellectual property lawsuit just to keep everybody on their toes. This time around, however, Red Hat says it isn't going to push back. They say they're just going to smile and nod and act like everything is normal. My lawyers are following the whole thing very closely. They say that Novell caving in was a good sign and that soon enough we'll be able to sue Microsoft for violating our patents. No joke. And we're talking large sums of money here, people. When you consider the fact that every computer running Windows has a little relational database inside, you'll see the scale of what I'm talking about. So we're almost ready to start entering into license negotiations with Microsoft. We think they should pay us about $10,000 per Windows installation. That's fair, right?

Who needs an education anyway?

So by now you've probably read all about how SAP's shitty software basically shut down the entire Los Angeles school district. If not, see here. Apparently the administrators aren't yet sure whether the problem started with the MySQL database or the SAP installation. Anyway, now there's anarchy on the streets. Seriously. Kids are out of the classrooms and in the skate parks. They're listening to live punk bands instead of those dreary teachers. And thousands of these kids are talking to our Oracle recruiters. That's right people. As I write this, our dedicated employees are hitting the streets to find the little turd-droppers. We're calling it the A.S.S. (Application Support Services) initiative. Goes like this. We go out and find young tech-savvy individuals who want to make a difference. If they know about Linux, we give them our A.S.S. kit. It's a box full of things like condoms, Playboy magazines, O'Reilly programming books, a couple of marijuana joints to help them concentrate on the O'Reilly programming books, and a bunch of other information about open source projects. Because here's the thing. Those kids don't want to go to school their entire lives. They want to change the world and help people and do something meaningful. And what better way to change the world than to work on an open source project like Tomcat? Or maybe Fedora. Anything we can use and/or support.

I love Linus

But sometimes the dude can be as stubborn as a pack mule walking through Siberia in the dead of winter. Kind of like last week when he said, "You security people are insane," and then reiterated that he will add Smack to the Linux kernel. And that's cool. I mean, Linux is his dog and pony show. The problem is that Smack will probably bring a bunch of security vulnerabilities along with it.

People, this is exactly why I run OpenBSD on all of my servers at home. Those suckers are locked down. I keep them off the network, and I also have all the totally crazy shit to protect them. Fingerprint identification. Retinal scanners. Man traps. I'm telling you: The NSA has nothing on Larry's servers. Some people wonder why I go to the insane lengths I've gone to. Well, I'll tell you why. The truth is that you can never be too careful with your digital black book. Women's phone numbers are very, very important.

"You're not going to believe this, but we're giving away servers now too."

Peter "you don't always have to be right" Burrows over at Business Week has hit another grand slam with his newest article about Jonathan Schwartz and Sun Microsystems. The best quote actually comes at the end of the article when Jim Zemlin at the Linux Foundation talks about Sun's recent moves: "It's like back in high school, when I'd throw these big parties and I'd think I was so cool, only no one would come." Which actually says a lot about both Jonathan and Jim when you think about it. Anyway, my question for Schwartz is this: How the fuck are you supposed to make money when you just give everything away? Peter Burrows seems to think that we're living in some new kind of economy where you don't really have to sell anything to make any money. In other words, if you keep throwing free software to the crowd and jumping and dancing around shiny servers long enough, good things are bound to happen. Um, yeah.

Pete, I want you to do something for me, bro. Just humor me, okay? Surf on over to Google and search for "google servers." Then take a good look at those pictures. See how Google is duck-taping hard drives onto motherboards? See how they're using velcro to strap the motherboards to the racks? Those are Google's servers, dude. Those are what power the world's biggest search engine. Google does that to save money and make components hot-swappable. I'm not sure, but it might have something to do with their stock price these days. So, yeah. Not sure where that leaves Sun, especially when you consider that hundreds of companies are now building servers Google-style.

How do you say boondoggle in Swahili?

Hint: The phrase starts with "$100" and ends with "laptop." Yes, you read that correctly. "$100 laptop" is the newest four letter word in places like Nigeria. And it's probably not a good time to be working for the One Laptop per Child Foundation, especially since they just jacked the price up. Sources tell me that several OLPC employees have already been pistol whipped by young African men (above) who will no longer be able to afford the portable computers that now cost $188 each.

So why the price jump? Apparently Red Hat wanted to up its support price by $5 per laptop, and then Novell caught wind of it and wanted in on the action too. So now the OLPC has a laptop that costs $10 to make and $178 to support. Makes sense right? No? Well, I don't get it either. Guess we'll have to blame it on the rising cost of free software. I just feel sorry for the third world countries that are going to have to foot the bill. Nobody should have to pay that much for a computer that runs Fedora and is full of recycled Apple IIe parts.

Our open source strategy

People love to say that Oracle is the big bad wolf of software development. They go on and on about how we blow everybody's house down and then sell software that's completely locked. In fact, burned-out open source hippies like John "Maddog" Hall even say we're like a used car dealership that sells vehicles with the hoods welded shut, and then we go and charge exorbitant fees for things like oil changes and tunes ups and taking sawdust out of the engine.

Yeah, right. Listen, if you actually believe that crock of shit, I have some land in Florida I'd like to sell you. Because nothing could be further from the truth. Oracle loves open source. Seriously. It all has to do with something I call subsidized software development. Goes like this. You find some sixth and seventh graders who know Python and C and you get them really pumped up about open source software development. You know. Feed them a line about how open source is all about the future and punk music and skateboarding and nerds and really, really, really hot women who go gaga for geeks. Then you send them on over to SourceForge and have them pick a project to work on. Preferably something we can actually use, like Tomcat. Then you unleash the little turd droppers. Send 'em a couple free O'Reilly books and a case of Mountain Dew and a short pamphlet that talks about the importance of dropping out of school.

Boom. There's your makeshift R&D team.

Then, you take all of the source code and send it to your lawyers. You tell them to sort out the licensing mess and turn it into something you can actually use. Then you pop it up on your website as a free download and tell people it's unsupported and crippled, etc. until they purchase the service package. And the service package is $500,000 per year per socket. Or whatever. Jack the price up as much as you want.

Novell and Red Hat and MySQL think we won't do it. To which Larry says, think again, buttheads. You stole our pricing model. Now we're taking your support and distribution model and perfecting it. Just wait and see.