Quite possibly. Especially for the products Cobalt designed and produced
before Sun bought the company in 2000 and moved the product line from using
MIPS CPU's (sensible choice) to x86's (bad choice).

I wouldn't expect Sun to drop the more recent 'Cobalt' badged products just
yet, but Raq 1/2 and Qube 1/2 product are the ones which'll definitely go
EOSL. That's ok though since there is plenty of alternative OS support
available for those machines. Take a look at NetBSD for example.

Regards,

Craig.
--
Craig Dewick ----- Founder and maintainer of the SunShack at www.sunshack.org
APANA Sydney Regional Co-Ordinator -- check www.sydney.apana.org.au for info.
Operator of Jedi ---- an APANA Sydney PoP --- www.jedi.apana.org.au for info.
Lover of SpamAssassin - high quality open-source spam killing for the masses!

Don't know why. Cobalt's web-based admin interface is *excellent*. Sun's got
nothing like it in their native software products.

I run a Raq2i here as a web server for the non-profit networking
organisation I'm involved with, and it's running the standard Cobalt OS
package with all the available patches from SunSolve.

Sure there has been no OS development or patches for the last 2 years, but
the machine runs without missing a beat and only stops when the power goes
down or I deliberately turn it off to clean out dust, etc. during the annual
major system clean I do to every machine which I have running 24/7
(currently 6 systems, all various Sun Sparc/UltraSparc models except for the
Raq2i).

It was deliberate IMHO. Sun are like other companies in this respect in that
they buy up something which they claim can 'complement' their business, then
get rid of it. Microsoft does it too with all their purchases of innovative
hardware and software technology companies. Sun did it with StarDivision but
at least they haven't dumped StarOffice (aka OpenOffice) since it's a major
challenger to MegaSloth Office.

Sun bought Cobalt with, perhaps, good intentions but because Cobalt's
products don't fit into Sun's product portfolio very well, Sun was never
able to do with them what Cobalt achieved pre-2000. And of course Sun were
not interested in supporting Linux on them because of Sun's decision to
start shipping Linux-based Opteron systems (another bad move IMHO, but it
depends on your views on where the market is going).

Regards,

Craig.
--
Craig Dewick ----- Founder and maintainer of the SunShack at www.sunshack.org
APANA Sydney Regional Co-Ordinator -- check www.sydney.apana.org.au for info.
Operator of Jedi ---- an APANA Sydney PoP --- www.jedi.apana.org.au for info.
Lover of SpamAssassin - high quality open-source spam killing for the masses!