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Sun Microsystems IT

Sun to Acquire Tarantella 115

Posted by samzenpus from the buy-it-all dept.
SunFan writes "Sun announced that they will acquire Tarantella Inc., who were the original SCO before selling their operating system to Caldera. Another write-up with more historical detail is at SunHELP. Apparently, Sun is after the Secure Global Desktop products, which might fit into their SunRay strategy."
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Sun to Acquire Tarantella More

Sun to Acquire Tarantella

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  • SCO is always up to something (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Evets ( 629327 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @08:16AM (#12507951) Homepage Journal
    You have to imagine that they are after intellectual property beyond what is on the surface. Could it be that Caldera didn't get all of the rights that SCO thought they did?

    • If I remember correctly, Caldera bought out the UNIX part of SCO, but there was a line called Non-Stop which became Tarentella.

      I seem to remember Compaq pushing Non-stop for data centers. It was reputed to be good for failover/redundancy (Think Vinca, no Legato, no EMC Co-standby server for windows) on Alpha/UNIX.

      And when they said NON-STOP, They meant it! We are talking about true five-nines uptime. (I remember some surveys where this was reported, although I doubted that so many actually used the prod

      • Re:Non-Stop (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You are thinking of 'Non-stop Cluster' This had nothing to do with Tarantella, although I know of one case where Tarantella was deployed with NSC....
      • Are you thinking of Non-Stop/Unix? IIRC, that's the SVR4 Unix variant that was originally out of Tandem. Compaq purchased them in the late 90's, before they committed hari-kiri by buying DEC. They've subsequently broadened the Non-Stop line, taking advantage of Tandem's design experience (and brand names). I'm not familiar with anything from the Non-Stop family going over to Tarentella; perhaps you're thinking of Non-Stops running Tarentella's products?
    • Everyone is talking about how "great" this is, since Sun now has the capability to possibly disprove a number of SCO's theories in the IBM case. These people forget the $50 million cash infusion Sun made early on into SCO/Caldera, and the continuing war of words Schwartz continues to wage on Linux.

      And while I'm not putting on any tin-foil hats just yet, I would not be surprised to find Sun leveraging it's psoition as a predecessor-in-interest to SCO/Caldera (having just purchased another predecessor-in-int
      • I think you meant "successor-in-interest", not "predecessor-in-interest". Or is our time machine working again? In which case I will have already seen you at next year's meet-up.
      • You have to, I think, see these things from the point of view of senior management, which is basically along the lines of "who can we screw before they screw us and for how much".

        Sun basically survive - or hope to survive - by holding the balance of power between IBM and Microsoft. They use OOo to extract funds from Microsoft. They variously threaten to open Java completely (to threaten Microsoft), and to try to rein it in (to threaten IBM).

        In the long run, Sun is dead unless they find a good way to jum
      • Can you please explain how Sun is a "predecessor-in-interest to SCO/Caldera"?

        They bought perpetual rights to Unix from SCO/Caldera, but did not buy the company.

        And if you thing that OO.o is the only Open Source activity that Sun funds, open your eyes. GNOME, SunSITEs, just to name the most prominent. That Schwarz is a jerk when it comes to GPL is no argument for an anti-OSS gesture, many BSD folks are likewise. It's not that we haven't our own heated flamewars on licenses and how free they are. If you don't believe me, subscribe to debian-legal...

        And, in case my `prejudice' matters: I'm no Sun employee. I neither use OO.o nor GNOME; LaTeX and fvwm is just fine for me. I do use Solaris systems, but only in mission-critical HA environments. OSS is not of much interest there, yet, sadly.

        • Can you please explain how Sun is a "predecessor-in-interest to SCO/Caldera"? They bought perpetual rights to Unix from SCO/Caldera, but did not buy the company.

          SCO/Tarentella used to own the rights. Sun bought that company. That also means they bought all rights and responsibilities of SCO/Tarentella, including the contract conveying copyrights to SCO/Caldera. For all legal intents and purposes, they are SCO/Tarentella now.

          • This is the same kind of ignorance that perpetuates the notion that you can only get AIDS from gay men.

            Wake up! Or shut up.

          • Which "contract conveying copyrights to SCO/Caldera"? Novell still owns these copyrights; that SCO/Caldera says otherwise in its PR notwithstanding.

            Your hypothesis about Sun wanting to get into the IBM/SCO struggle on the side of SCO with that buy-in, is not even sensible with a tin-foil hat.

            • Which "contract conveying copyrights to SCO/Caldera"?

              The one SCO/Taratella gave SCO/Caldera.

              Novell still owns these copyrights

              I know that. I said nothing of the legitimacy of the aforementioned contract. SCO/Caldera bought all the copyrights SCO/Tarantella had, probably without realizing that that wasn't a whole lot.

              Your hypothesis about Sun wanting to get into the IBM/SCO struggle on the side of SCO with that buy-in, is not even sensible with a tin-foil hat.

              So far, this is as much of an argument
      • Sun didn't give money to SCO to fight linux. Sun gave money to SCO for rights to allow the open sourcing of Solaris.
    • A more appropriate mod for the parent would be "Amusingly Psychotic and Ill-Informed" but I guess "Interesting" is as close as the moderation system gets...

      Tarantella is the company that recognized that the entirety of the SCO IP was worth a whole lot less than Caldera was willing to pay for it, and so sold that pile of junk to fund ongoing development of a very real, very different, and very promising bit of innovative software. Software which is already a part of Sun's marketing pitch for the SunRay sys
    • History Lesson:
      Back in 1987 Doug Michaels and crew chose to build a unix variant based upon two computers. One was the Apple Lisa and the other was the IBM Intel based PC (one for two isn't bad).

      Doug was from UC Santa Cruz and many of the early coders were as well. The atmosphere was typical Santa Cruz laid back, including a hot tub for the developers. The company name of The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) made perfect sense.

      With the death (although it never really lived) of the Lisa, SCO's full focus b

  • Gratuitous Strong Bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by dsginter ( 104154 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @08:16AM (#12507952)
    Band Names [homestarrunner.com]

    Taranchula!
    • The Tarantella dance is named after the Tarantula spider.

      Unlike snakes, a spider's short fangs only allow it to inject poison into the human victim's skin. Luckily for us, this makes it possible to sweat out the poison before it gets into the blood stream.
      A hot, sweaty, energetic dance such as the Tarantella is a great way to stay alive in such a situation. Also, if it fails, at least you'll die in a sexy, dramatic way.
      • Quote from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

        There are no substantiated reports of tarantula bites proving fatal to a human. However, the effects of a tarantula bite are not well known. While the bites of many species are reported to be no worse than a wasp sting, other accounts say these bites are some of the most painful. Because other proteins may get included when a toxin is injected, some individuals may suffer severe symptoms due to allergy rather than poison.

  • The announcement and links (Score:3, Informative)

    by davecb ( 6526 ) * <davecb@spamcop.net> on Thursday May 12, 2005 @08:17AM (#12507961) Homepage Journal

    Sun announced plans to acquire Tarantella, Inc., a leading provider of secure application access software based in Santa Cruz, CA. [...] Sun plans to use Tarantella technology to provide customers with a higher level of secure mobile access to data and applications.

    As part of the agreement, Sun will acquire the Secure Global Desktop family of products, which enables organizations to access and manage information, data, and applications across virtually all devices, networks, and platforms [...]

    The software employs a flexible and secure three-tier architecture deployed on Solaris OS or Linux. Secure Global Desktop enables applications to be displayed using native protocols without the need for specialized software - a Web browser and Java technology is all that's necessary on the client device or application server.[...]

    Most importantly, the software will enable you to present a variety of applications on Sun Ray thin clients -- including those written to Microsoft Windows.

    Jonathan Schwartz comments at Acquistions Accelerate Microsoft Interoperability [sun.com]
    Tarentella is here [tarantella.com]

    • Sun plans to use Tarantella technology to provide customers with a higher level of secure mobile access to data and applications.

      Man...when I first read that I thought it said "Sun plans to sue Tarantella....

      Must have SCO-on-the-brain.

      -john

  • Slashdot to Acquire Dictionary (Score:4, Funny)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @08:17AM (#12507962) Journal
    Nuff said..

  • Its all a cunning ploy (Score:3, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @08:19AM (#12507973)
    They are going to mate with SUN and then bite its head off.

    oh wait, they are not really spider people are they.
    • No, they're going to have Tantric sex with then - but you know whatever happens, someone's gonna get screwed!

      Seriously, this is 2-day-old (or is it 3-day-old? 4-day-old?) news. Well, I guess if recycling newspapers is good, recycling bits and bytes is also good ...

  • Evil SCO and Tarantella (i.e. what was left of the old, non-evil SCO) parted ways some time ago. Tarantella was the one thing I had hoped (at that time I was sysadmin in an all OSR 5.0.4 environment) would bring SCO back into the market in strength. It was a good product back then. After all the nonsense started, I lost track. But I wish those guys all the best.

    • Old SCO was fairly evil - well, their operating systems were. Xenix was a nightmare to port to from BSD derived systems like SunOS. The only thing the SCO operating systems had going for them was that you could run them on realtively cheap PC hardware in the days before 386BSD and Linux.

    • Oh, how soon people forget. The old SCO was quite evil. The littany is extensive; where to begin?

      The old SCO absolutely, positively despised Linux. Linux was a competitor, and the old SCO did everything they could against it. FUD, legal threats and dirty tricks were standard operating proceedure for the old SCO against any and all competitors.

      For a sample of their mindset and FUD there's this interview: http://www.computerworld.com/news/1999/story/0,112 80,35431,00.html [computerworld.com]

      Here are some excerpts from t

      • Thank you for those excellent reminders. The old SCO wasn't non-evil. IMO it was just "normal corporate evil," which is bad enough, I suppose.

        My recollections are tainted because OSR was my first Unix and I was deep into it, unaware of much else, long before I ever became aware of Linux. When Tarentalla came out, I was *really* excited. I played with it for a while on a single box. Back when Windows (NT3.51, WfW3.11) seemed to crash once an hour, that box had Unix somehow deep down there providing a s
        • You're welcome. I'm glad you found a good UNIX platform back then.

          I'd put the old SCO somewhere above "normal corporate evil", and lower than the evilness being put out by Daryl McBride. SCO was certainly at least a cut above everyone else in this way.

          If one wanted to learn these ways, all one had to do way to study from them. They were masters of dirty tricks, and took apparent joy from screwing over people; including their own employees, and especially some of the original employees.

          They even mana

  • good move (Score:5, Interesting)

    by garvald ( 547907 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @09:26AM (#12508400)
    forget all this nonsence about unix rights. Its not about that. The Secure Global Desktop system is something we've had in production at my workplace for a few years now, and its a great system, similar to VNC, but on a much higher level. I've tested it on sunrays with sun IT execs and they were througoughly impressed. The acquisition therefore comes as no surprise. SGD is also much cheaper than Citrix and is rapidly expanding. In my console, which i run on gentoo, i have very quick access to win2003, the SGD management console, Gnome, KDE, and many other apps. I think this is much more valuable than some never ending court battle creating bad PR. Sun aint after that.

  • Move Along To Metaframe For Unix (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Tarantella has done a great job of moving people to Citrix Metaframe for Unix. It's no wonder their product never grew.

    - Server upgrades that made obsolete client connection software flashed into thin clients. We had thousands of dollars of thin clients stop working because they changed the way their server piece worked. The ICA protocol is backwards compatible.

    - "Deploy In Any Browser", well unless that browser wasn't Internet Explorer running with a certain version of Java. Other browsers and browse

  • Does this mean... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jav1231 ( 539129 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @09:32AM (#12508430)
    Does this mean Sun is kickin' it old SCO?
  • I've used both extensively for years, and I'm hard-pressed to find a difference. RealVNC [realvnc.com] is a little slower, but is free-as-in-beer if you don't need the fancy bells and whistles like encryption (just use a VPN) or directory integration (I can deal with having separate VNC and OS logins)

    Anyone have any idea why one would shell out the $$$ for TTA?

    • I'm sure there is some advantage along the lines of automatic encryption of the information being streamed to the remote connection, but as I have said before [slashdot.org] (in fact, just about any time using remote desktops comes up ;) ) try out NX server by NoMachine, or the open source version, FreeNX. Free, faster than VNC (for me), and secure.
    • Tarantella is immensili more customizable, you can lunch applications from any platform in yout Tarantella desktop and you would never know they are programs running on top of different architectures.

      VNC is great but it does not have the same level of customization.
  • I thought it said the Sun (as in the bright thing in the sky) was acquiring Tarantula (as in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud.)

    I'm old. :(

    • The ownship of that is still in dispute. Darl McBride said, "since the Tarantula Nebula is nebulous and vacuous, it probably is using SCO intellectual property as a derived work. We will subpoena its builders in our lawsuit".

  • Not the real reason (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sun already have the necessary remote display technologies. See http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/124007Z6UVR8.xht ml [linuxinsider.com]

    This acquisition was done because Tarantella have some number of Sun customers, and Sun had been recommending Tarantella. Tarantella would be bankrupt within a few months and that would seriously embarass Sun with those customers. This way Sun doesn't piss off or lose those customers. (While the deal is closing Sun will be paying life support to Tarantella.)

    The management at Tarantell
  • Sorry to be a pedant, but I had to say it.
  • I think it was in about '98 or '99 when Scott McNealy was discussing a vision Sun has had for a long time. The vision being that in the future won't by pc's, they'll buy applications/services. You'll pay a monthly sum and receive a basic bit of hardware, this is where the SunRays are important, and depending on what package you're paying for you'll get access to different applications.

    For the basic home user this would be a great benefit - no more problems with broken hardware - if it breaks they'll sen

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