The road-weary Kitty was finally home after living out of a suitcase during a two-week road trip of booze, schmooze and rumors of news. In a week where Microsoft couldnt decide whether to commit or get off the pot when replying to queries about its fabled Web-enabled iLoo commode, Spencer was happy to be back near his own litter box—which is already Web-enabled, of course.
As the Tip-Tabulating Tabby began to plow through the piles of accumulated e- and snail mail, he was shocked to see what looked like an amateur porn DVD sans plain brown wrapper that turned out to be a free-trial blocker of pop-up ads from EarthLink. Spencer hoped his neighbors hadnt made the same assumption when they spied the package.
By scratching the legal itch so uncontrollably, Darl McBride is about to make his company the SCOurge of the Linux industry. As one Linux partner said to the Lynx, acidly, “Someone must have been spiking the water in Lindon with LSD.” But plenty of insiders definitely were not hallucinating when they howled that SCO is doing a better job of dividing the Linux crowd than Microsoft has.
During his travels, the Tawny Tipmeister saw why the Linux community seems to be embracing a huge corporation like IBM. Big Blue has consistently heeded the advice of leading Linux luminaries like Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of The Apache Software Foundation. Folks at IBMs Linux Technology Center are also told to read “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” a book by open-source evangelist Eric S. Raymond. “While they dont have to believe everything thats written there, they have to understand it,” an IBM Linux exec told El Gato. It seems amusing to the Off-Orange Oracle of Openness that IBM could successfully court such an anti-establishment group when it has never seemed quite capable of taking a culture as moderately clashing as Lotus under its wing.
A Katt crony claims the WebSphere Portal is moving closer to Domino/Notes and away from J2EE. Better app dev capabilities in Domino could be the result. But IBM salespeople are supposedly getting bigger commissions on WebSphere and DB2 than on Domino and Notes. Spencer hears the Domino camp has complained that IBM reps have had a “blind spot” to Lotus since the days of Lou (iLou?) Gerstner.
Spencer picked up the junk mail from EarthLink again and stared at it. “A woman making out with a computer it just seems wrong.”
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