[67211] in Cypherpunks
Re: Did Sun get a sweetheart deal?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Murray)
Thu Oct 3 21:38:41 1996
From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
To: hua@chromatic.com (Ernest Hua)
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 18:09:20 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com, hua@ohio.chromatic.com
In-Reply-To: <199610040001.RAA15595@ohio.chromatic.com> from "Ernest Hua" at Oct 3, 96 05:01:26 pm
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
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