[BlueOnyx:27340] Re: Celebrating 25 Years Since Cobalt Networks' IPO

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Taco,

> Let’s celebrate not just 25 years since the IPO, but also the vibrant 
> community and projects that continue to carry the Cobalt torch forward. 
> Here’s to the past, present, and future of Cobalt’s remarkable legacy!

Hear hear! A toast to that! o7

Man, it's been 25 years already? Seems like yesterday.

I recall getting my first (rented) Cobalt RaQ3 in December 1996 and 
kinda fell in love with it. I already had been dabbling with Linux for a 
few years, so I felt right at home. And the web based GUI interface? 
That was something else - at least for that time and age.

 From a purely technical point of view I'm still in awe with some of the 
design aspects that went into the Sausalito architecture early on, which 
got finalized with the late Qube models and the RaQ550's.

Sure, in some parts you could see that things had been rushed a little 
and there were the beginnings of some more advanced concepts and 
functionality that never made it into the final products.

But the security concept and the general architecture was rock solid, 
contained a lot of foresight and a modularity that made it easy to 
expand on it and to keep it current.

Some parts of the code are THAT solid that they still remain in usage 25 
years later with next to no or miniscule changes. Some of that is still 
in the backend of the GUI and some of that original code is still in the 
build environment with which we build RPMs and PKGs. You just go to the 
respective level of the code tree and run "make rpm" or "make pkg" and 
it spits out RPMs or PKGs that are ready to be distributed.

That this still works decades later is an incredibly testimony to the 
skills of the original designers. I raise my glass to them for a job 
well done.

 > However, as history shows, the motivations behind Sun's acquisition
 > went beyond mere competition.

Indeed. As chance would have it I worked at the Langen office of Sun 
Microsystems in Germany at the time leading up to and during the buy-out 
of Cobalt. I was moonshining Solarspeed.net during the nights and by day 
I was a support engineer for the traditional "big iron" servers of Sun.

The corporate culture of Sun Microsystems was somewhat special and the 
weekly company wide Scott McNealy emails to all employees were a thing. 
I do recall him frequently dissing Linux, even though one would not need 
a perfect hindsight to predict that it eventually might become a serious 
competition to what Sun had on offer. And it was also clear that the 
company was not well positioned to reap any benefits in that area.

Eventually that realization must have sunk in with Scott McNealy as 
well. Probably because of a first (abortive) move that Microsoft had 
made in that direction, too. So out of the blue a weekly Scott McNealy 
email announced not only the acquisition of Cobalt Networks, but also 
that the company was now fully embracing Linux. The intent certainly 
being to capitalize on the Linux experience and market penetration that 
Cobalt Networks already had established.

I do recall another funny email a few days later, straight from 
corporate HQ in the US. It went along the lines of: "Please stop 
pestering the Cobalt guys with inquiries! Sun has 35k employees and 
Cobalt has around 200. They get nothing done if everyone continues to 
bother them with requests for information!"

But in the end even the acquisition of Cobalt Networks couldn't save 
Sun. The burst of the dotcom-bubble contributed to it, but also that 
their marketing was ill suited to reap any meaningful benefits from the 
Cobalt Networks merger.

A marketing department that was used to deal with banks and government 
departments was accustomed to sales moving at glacial speeds at best. 
Finalizing the sale of a E16800 flagship "big iron" server back then 
might easily have taken two to three years from start to finish. Getting 
calls from ISPs that each wanted a truckload of RaQ550s by tomorrow? 
That just didn't work so well as nothing at Sun (but the rumor mill) 
could move *that* fast.

Without the burst of the dotcom-bubble it *might* eventually have worked 
out (I have my doubts), but as it was: It didn't.

Burning through cash like mad Sun had to swing the axe and restructure. 
The first victims were most if not all the new acquisitions. Even that 
couldn't save the company from having become not only complacent, but 
also arrogant towards peers and clients. A few years later Oracle bought 
the scraps - lock, stock and barrel. One of the last vestiges of the 
company is the corporate sign in front of the Facebook US headquarters, 
whose backside still carries the original Sun Microsystems writing that 
once was facing outwards instead.


Closing thoughts:
==================

I never found out who was behind the move that lead to Sun Microsystems 
open sourcing the Sausalito code. Whoever that benefactor was: Without 
that move we would not be where we are today and neither BlueOnyx nor 
BlueQuartz or TLAS would have existed in first place. And tens of 
thousands of former Cobalt users would have been left stranded in 
"vendor lock-in" without a clear migration path onto other platforms.

So in all this I want to take a special moment to thank your unknown 
benefactor with sincere gratitude and admiration. Thank you!

In the early years of the release of the Cobalt sources there were quite 
a few competing projects which tried to "make it work" and only our 
friend Hisao Shibuya really had the expertise and the tremendous 
tenacity to make it work and to be able to build not one, but two 
success stories out of that: TLAS for his then employer and the open 
source BlueQuartz as his own personal project.

This work was made extraordinarily difficult by there not being a 
documentation for the inner workings about the heart and soul of 
Sausalito: CCEd, CODB, CCEWrap and how these interfaced with PHP, Perl 
and even Python (although Python wasn't used in any meaningful way).

There were also two competing standards for writing GUI pages: The more 
modern UIFC and a legacy method that had been used prior and was (for 
quite some time) still used in some older pages like the DNS management.

As it was: There was only sparse original documentation that had been 
scrounged together over the years. But that wasn't always helpful, as 
some of that clearly had not been written by engineers involved in the 
development, but perhaps been done by interns or marketing guys.

Any early adopter who sought to benefit from the open sourced code had 
to start with a profound knowledge of the original Cobalt interface and 
had to reverse engineer and analyze the code to piece together the 
understanding of the "big picture". Hisao did that and managed to gain a 
profound comprehension of the inner workings of the architecture that 
allowed him to succeed where others didn't.

Therefore: My heartfelt thanks to Hisao Shibuya, who carried the torch 
for many years and allowed us to kickstart BlueOnyx from the legacy that 
he had preserved and expanded.

Lastly: We wouldn't be still around if it were not for each and any of 
you: May that be the old timers from the Cobalt days that stuck around, 
or the many others who discovered us since then and stayed with us 
through all those years. Many thanks for your support and your 
confidence in BlueOnyx!


Where do we go from here?
==========================

As you all know, BlueOnyx is constantly evolving and new features are 
getting added. Not too long ago we integrated Radicale CalDAV/CardDAV 
and web based FTP access is now (again) built straight into the BlueOnyx 
GUI. We ditched the clunky Cobalt Migration Utility and released both 
Easy-Migrate and Easy-Backup to make migrations and backups easier and 
more reliable.

Over the years a long list of features has been added to BlueOnyx - way 
beyond what was included into the original Cobalt RaQs. And that list 
will grow even further as time moves on:

See: https://www.blueonyx.it/features

This year also saw the release of Aventurin{e} 6110R, which is the 
newest release of our Container and VM virtualization platform. It is 
also based on BlueOnyx and can be used to virtualize not only BlueOnyx 
instances, but also a large selection of other Linux distributions.

See: https://www.aventurin.net/

Finally: RedHat yesterday announced the release of RHEL 10 Beta, so we 
can expect to see a RHEL10 and (of course) also an AlmaLinux 10 and 
RockyLinux 10 sometime in the 2nd Quarter of 2025.

The release of the EL 10 based BlueOnyx 5212R is targeted for the summer 
of 2025, but this depends on the general availability of AlmaLinux 10 / 
RockyLinux 10 and how fast we can port our code to those. Some 
preliminary work on that has already started and will continue on a 
moderate pace in the coming months.

With that: Many thanks to you all and have a great weekend!

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber