The title of this is a little bit misleading; ultimately, the reallyimportant thing about Oracle's Solaris decisions is not what those decisions are, it isabout how they were implemented. I don't like the decisions, but thereal problem is their abrupt, no-warning implementation.

Let me be completely clear here: by making these decisions, Oraclescrewed people. By implementing them with no advance warning, Oraclescrewed people harder.

The consequence of this is that Oracle has lost my trust. I

The University of Toronto's Internet link went down recently (well,became really slow and lossy, so we may just be being DDoS'd orsomething). I'm at home, so when I noticed the link problems I shruggedand carried on; it's not as if my home machine depends on stuff fromwork, so I didn't expect anything beyond the annoyance of not being ableto get to work networks.

(Although the network being unreachable was going to be somewhatinconvenient,

A long time ago, I wrote about the power that grant funding givespeople at universities . But there's a flip side togrant funding, and it is that people with grant funding often don'treally have money as the business world thinks of it.

From the outside, it looks like people with grant funding are rolling incash; they get hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even million dollargrants. From the inside, though, that money is almost entirely tied downfor very specific things.