ShadowRAM: April 9, 2007

Last Monday, Google had to clarify that the great escape, which happened over the weekend, was no April Fool's prank (the company is famous for them).

That morning, employees got a memo apprising them that the snake's owner, an exterminator and Google security were all on the job.

An engineer described the atmo on Google's blog: "Monday morning in the office, we react. Some laugh, some debate whether it is actually a joke, and some stand away from walls and corners. At least one considers buying rubber snakes en masse. The bathrooms have slightly fewer occupants than usual."

Kaiser was found safe and sound later that day and is back with his owner.

Still In The Game
• JBoss founder Marc Fleury may be "retired," but he isn't going to let a little thing like lack of a day job stop him from throwing rocks. Since leaving Red Hat, Fleury has blogged prolifically, firing off sound bites about IBM's open-source strategies ("Give it a rest! You lost!"); desktop Linux ("This mess hasn't evolved much in 10 years!"); and Apple's Mac OS X ("I think it sucks. My mother also thinks it sucks.").

Fleury also opines on Oracle, which kicked JBoss's tires but passed. He writes that Oracle's Unbreakable Linux support—like invading Russia—is futile. "Unlike Russia, however, RHT can be bought," Fleury writes. "So just buy the freaking company, already. You get two leaders, RHEL and JBoss. Everything else is a plan B. Do it before the improbable happens and SUNW wakes up from its Solaris/assfish meth addiction and buys them first."

Seen And Heard
• Former Microsoft ¼berblogger Robert Scoble, now an indie, finished up his one-week strike in solidarity with Web designer Kathy Sierra who received some vile death threats on the Web. Sierra even skipped her appearance at an O'Reilly conference two weeks ago.

Wrote Scoble: "We're putting ourselves out there in ways very few people do. We should be safe from death threats and other sexual attacks and stuff, epecially from other bloggers. So, since she doen't feel safe, I'm going to stop blogging in support of Kathy"

That was posted March 26, but Scoble was back by March 31, which, by most mortals' math, is not a week. Worse: He broke his blog-fast to post a lame April Fool's saga.

Some weighed in to say that online threats date back at least to the Clinton administration. Political bloggers mocked Scoble, once considered an A-list tech blogger, for waiting so long to weigh in on the threat-o-sphere. Some wondered if Scoble used this as an exuse for a little spring break. Other bloggers, like "Fake Steve Jobs," just wished Scoble would make his break permanent.

• We think IBM Software chief Steve Mills, the beneficiary of a rosy—some would say puffy—piece in the Wall Street Journal last week doth protest too much.

Asked for his reaction to the Free Software Foundation's GPL 3 draft, which contains wording that could put patent cross-licensing deals beyond the pale, Mills discounted the FSF and the GPL.

"At some point, you become so shrill and beyond what's required that you lose the audience and the audience moves on to something else," Mills said.

He also said IBM is no big fan of the GPL—it prefers Apache or other license mechanisms. Funny, if you Google "Free Software Foundation" and "IBM" and "member," you get back tons of references about IBM lawyers working with FSF's Eben Moglen on this project or that project. Sure seems that IBM and FSF got along famously—at least till now.