There's no way Ballmer survives Yahoo! disaster scenario

Bring your hookah to the open source cloud

Radio Reg Microsoft is buying Yahoo! to . . . oh, that's right no one from Redmond has really explained that one yet. Most of the pundits think Redmond has an ad play in mind. Well, the Open Season crew sees it differently.

In Episode 15, Matt Asay, Dave Rosenberg and I dig into the real motives behind Microsoft's lust for Yahoo!, including its desire to use Yahoo! as a nice software delivery mechanism that works around those pesky PC bundling restrictions. But, even with such craftiness on its side, it's hard for Microsoft to justify this deal, since we don't think it will work. And what the hell gives with Microsoft's idea of opening Apple-like Microsoft stores? Come on, guys. Zune brown walls. Even Wal-Mart can beat that.

Away from Microhoo, we hit on the cloud's rise this week through a number of announcements, including Google's new software as a service push and Sun's GPL v2-happy Project Caroline. We also look at the list of top Linux contributors, Red Hat's position in the open source realm and a nifty hand-sized Linux server. There's some bits and bobs on Adobe's strengths and its many, many weaknesses.

Oh yeah, and Levanta is toast.

All in all, a cracker of a show.

Those of you who hear Asay breathing into the microphone should ignore it because Matt claims that he does not breathe when recording these programs.

Oh, I'll also be in London next week and am willing to accept the best drinking offers. Something near SoHo preferred because I'm lazy.

Anyway, on we go.

Open Season - Episode 15

The faithful can grab the Ogg Vorbis file here, those plagued by low-bandwidth can catch a smaller, crappier quality show here and those of you with macho-sized bandwidth can get the big daddy here.

You can subscribe to the show on iTunes here or grab the Arse feed here.

Show notes

• Microsoft goes nuts for white trash data centers. Pass me a Pabst
• IBM beefs up cloud gear too
• Google's AppEngine is a pile because it only runs Python
• You can't get any complexity without a real programming language, says Dave
• Sun details Project Caroline
• The Bungee Labs Flowgasm is nice too
• So is Cohesive and Elastra
• Linux Foundation distributes list on contributors to Linux

Thanks for your ears. ®