Ernest Hua writes:
So why did Sun cave in?
I'm not sure they did. I've seen two quotes from Sun- one pro-GAK one from Eric Schmidt, one from someone else I have never heard of who's head of government relation or something like that, which was pretty anti-GAK. Schmidt is regarded as somewhat clueless by a large number of Sun employees. In addition, I had lunch today with the people I used to work with/for at Sun, who're probably the most likely to be asked to implement such a thing. They haven't heard anything about it and were quite dismayed at the whole idea. Oh, and government contracts (especially NASA ones) take a shitload of time to set up. The only coercion that a TLA could do with it would be to threaten to scotch the deal for "national security reasons". The fact that some deal went through doesn't prove anything. I think it much more likely that the Govt would use carrots like possible additional sales or a leg up on competitors. Hey, it worked on IBM didn't it? -- Eric Murray ericm@lne.com ericm@motorcycle.com http://www.lne.com/ericm PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03 92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF