A developer looks at VMware/Novell

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"Last week, the word broke that VMware is the most likely company to acquire Novell's SUSE unit. This makes a lot of sense from a business perspective , but I tend to see things from a developer's point of view. My title might be "CTO", but I'm really "a programmer who's forced to do management things." In my heart, I'd rather debug a million lines of Visual BASIC code than participate in a committee to organize an offsite for the purpose of developing a mission statement.

"I've been writing code since I was about 14; 36 years, if you're wondering. Boy are my fingers tired. I started on a Univac 1108 writing programs as part of a calculus class. Later, working for a medical startup, I remember how excited I was to receive one of the first Altair 8800s. It was much better than the Scelbi 8H that I'd been working with.

"Most recently, I've been writing code for our CIFS virtual appliance (a file server delivered as a virtual machine). At its core, the appliance is a CIFS/SMB protocol stack running atop a Linux OS. In addition to this, however, we provide web services and UI code to facilitate managing the device and integrating it with VMware management tools. Let me describe some of the steps involved in developing the appliance."

Complete Story

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