They're a tech company that makes actual technology. You're allowed to be excited. Better technology upstream has a habit of floating down the stack in some form or another, even when lawyers make it hard (ZFS was released under a GPL-incompatible license (some people will argue intentionally), yet has influenced over twenty years of filesystem design in the Linux ecosystem for things like btrfs, coincidentally also owned from an IP standpoint largely by Oracle, for example).
Who knows? In twenty years, we could see something cool come out of this, like better U-Boot tooling. Or maybe they'll be purchased by Oracle, which would if nothing else be funny this time.
That is the really cool thing about them-- they're actually making new computers and the software and firmware to go with them.
Everything else "new" seems to be a rehash of the IBM PC (my "server" has an ISA-- ahem-- "LPC" bus... >sigh<). It's so refreshing to see something actually new.
The same goes with software and firmware. Any "new" systems software the last 10 years seems to be thin management veneers over real technologies like the Linux kernel, KVM and containers, GNU userland, etc. And it all ends up running on the same cruddy BMC's, "lights-out" controllers, embedded RAID controllers, etc.
I get a little bit of excitement at ARM-based server platforms (and RISC-V, for that matter) but everything there seems to be at even less of an "enterprise" level (from a reliability, serviceability, and management perspective) than the PC-based servers I already loathe.
Strictly speaking, kernel-level namespaces are the technology. "Containers" are a pattern based on kernel-level namespaces, and "thin management veneers" help make sense of the underlying technology and implement that pattern.
> Or maybe they'll be purchased by Oracle, which would if nothing else be funny this time.
Oracle will likely be very interested in Oxide, but I suspect Bryan Cantrill would do everything in his power to prevent that happening. He's seen the lawn mower in action before and knows not to anthropomorphize it :)
Who knows? In twenty years, we could see something cool come out of this, like better U-Boot tooling. Or maybe they'll be purchased by Oracle, which would if nothing else be funny this time.