Borland buys Together, who bought WebGain (Fri, Dec 27, 2002)

Too busy with work, I missed the news that Borland purchased TogetherSoft, and that TogetherSoft had earlier purchased WebGain. Doing a little simple math, this seems to mean that Borland now owns the rights to their own product, JBuilder, as well as their former competitor, VisualCafe. While this means little to the rest of the world, I find it amusing, in that I officially started my Java career writing for two Ziff-Davis publications, Inside JBuilder and Inside VisualCafe. At the time VisualCafe was in many ways a superior product, with the one exception being the markers they put inside of the code they generated.

This news also means that WebGain now has the most pitiful-looking web site on the Internet. And if it can help bring the cost of TogetherJ down by a factor of 10, there may be something here.

Hopefully the other rumors of The Monopolist buying Borland are not true (The Register, ZDNet). That would be a sad day in the world, but hopefully the government will be able to search around a little, find their balls, and stop this from happening.

On a totally different subject, I wanted to save this link as the fastest URL I know to run a "whois" lookup: whois at internic. I do this a lot from the command line, but as URLs and browsers go, this is the quickest link I'm aware of ... the rest are very slowwwww...