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Progeny Debian Halts The NOW Project
nicedream writes "Debian Planet is reporting that Progeny is killing the NOW project. " A reader also submitted the actual e-mail from Ian Murdock ? . It appears that the current economic climate has had an adverse effect on Progeny - which is not surprising. Ian's also got some musings on the state of computing/networking, which outline some of the thoughts behind the NOW project.
NOW has been going downhill since Patricia Ireland resigned late last year.
It's a shame really...someone needs to continue their good work.
Good job.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Windows XP has little to do with Linux 2.6. Linux is just a kernel, and a pretty good one.
You must be talking about the total package of Linux + tools + X + Gnome/KDE versus Windows XP.
Your trolling is a bit too obvious though.. Make some of your statements into questions, and you might be getting there.
The perfect troll-posting is the one that makes people feel like you have a point, and then just take it a tiny bit further.
The market can't really stand the development of yet another OS right now. It's got some interesting design ideas, but it's all pretty much smoke and mirrors until we can see an actual working design. *shrug* I guess we'll just have to wait...
"Project has been renamed 'LATER'"
I really didn't even know what NOW was, until... well, now. But I think Progeny offers plenty of value even without something that ambitious on the horizon.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
from the pressrelease:
:). but looks like the distro isn't quitting at least.
>Most new hires came in to work on projects that had the potential to bring in revenue sooner than NOW,[...]
awesome... progeny may have a time machine.
too bad though.. I just installed progeny debian, and it works like a charm
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Interesting. I have never heard of this "NOW" thing, but wish i had.
/. discussion take is this: So, what came out of NOW? How far did they get, and is it far enough that there's something interesting there for the hobbyist faction to take up and continue work on as a volunteer project? Is there any code written, are there any design documents that have been released..? Does Progeny's withdrawal from this project mean it is dead, or simply that work will not be continuing at the same sustained rate? If there are design docs out there, are they complete enough that semiprofessional volunteers could finish the project from here without buggering it up horribly?
The direction i would like to see this
Just curious.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
IMHO, one reason why Progeny halted NOW is because NOW is pretty revolutionary (a.k.a. a real inovation), and the market isn't used to this.
The market is used to Microsoft style inovations, meaning repackaging old ideas and selling that at inflated prices.
Lets hope that the market will change in the next few years, so that something like this will become feasable.
Until then, we could start an open source project with the same goal.
With Progeny halting NOW and the failure of Corel Linux, has any commercial product based on Debian ever been succesfull ?
Progeny may have terminated their NOW project, but Progeny was not the first, and will not be the last to build NOW clusters.
Please, when refering to this, call it the Progeny NOW project, to distinguish it from the NOW project.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Who do these people think they are? Killing the National Organization of Women! The Progeny of white, middle-class, men, that's who. Rise up, my sisters, and fight the system!
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
Who needs a debian system for money when you can get it form your local mirror ?
Not very smart, so it's not a surprise that
Progeny is dying !
I know this is (slightly) off-topic, but maybe of interest anyway...
recently I've been looking for an alternative to Mandrake (now running 8.0 with kde2.2), so I've been checking out the web-sites of Suse, Debian and now also Progeny Debian...
One thing both debian and mandrake have in common is a convenient way to get security updates. With suse and progeny, the process of getting updates and security fixes isn't very clear from the website. (they may have a similar tool/service like MandrakeUpdate or dselect, but I don't know if they check mirrors and security sites...)
So I guess the createria for selecting a distro, for me are:
Of course Mandrakeforum is very interesting and useful for news and tips. I think more distros should have them!
Anyway, I was in the libraries and surprised that they had some linux books. But I noticed that most of the CD's were missing. So Recently, whenever I find a book on programming or on linux I'll burn some ISO and put them in the Back of the Books. The librarians I've talked to acutally understand what I am doing and are fot it.
So, if you can burn CD, I would recommend Linux Progeny as the newbie Distribution of choice and put it into as many libraries as you can.
Anyway thanks for reading
Sigs are dangerous coy things
I think we need more volunteerism, now more than ever.
Just as the Railway centric market had a monkey wrench thrown in it by the mass production of cars and trucks, so is the PC centric market having a monkey wrench thrown in it, by the embedded computing/commodity software industry.
Q: Who was the idi0t that started this Proprietary Software market anyway?
A: congress by allowing copyright protection for binaries, without actually releasing the works(sourcecode).
otherwise Debian won't upgrade to kernel 2.4 until 2007 and XFree86 4.0.x until 2030
When most of the developers were moved off of the project the only real code that was in a state that it was done was nullfs. The design of the rest of things had been done, and John Hartman had a rapid prototype of the token system done in tcl, but very little other coding was accomplished.
I don't think that the code that exists is interesting enough (or substantial enough) for a hobbyist to pick it up and run with it.
I'm not sure if Progeny will release the design docs...
Though I may have a negative outlook on things... I ended up being reassigned to doing Web Monkey stuff instead of working on NOW (which was the whole reason why I left my prior job and went to work at Progeny).
Yeah, I agree. Your point about michael is particularly true.
We all made fun of the Dilbertian e-commerce sites that went under because they were idiots and then blamed "the economy". And yet here we are accepting the same argument from "Progeny" and their "NOW project". And how do I know they were idiots? I've never ever heard of them. I read all the major Linux sites, and I never had them or their project catch my eye. I subscribe to the Debian Weekly News and AFAIK they've never been mentioned.
If you want somebody to care about your product, you'll have to first tell them what it is (or at least that it exists).
324006
Progeny, why not just put the source on your servers, have one person coordinating the project and see what happens ?
Also if someone can explain me the differences between NOW and beowulf clustering.
M.G.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Does anybody actually use their dist?
How is NOW different from Mosix ?? Mosix offers solutions that can take your processes across the network and process them on computers that are not busy. Making your whole network look like one giant scalable computer. How is NOW different from this?. Mosix is working and available. Maybe Progeny should have worked with the mosix team instead of reinventing the wheel. Also it would be a lovely day indeed when we'd get to have Plan 9 like namespaces into the linux kernel. Making it a truly network OS. lets hope someone bitches bout it loud enough so that sometime in the near future ( 2.5 ?? ) linus would think about it...
This revolution began on the shoulders of the
insane, people like Richard Stallman, who hold so
firmly to their points that everyone who doesn't
get the point says "oh, i get it, he's insane."
Then a whole bunch of money got thrown at us, and
everyone tried to make us insane people the
saviors of the world. Now that is collapsing, and
it's back on the shoulders of the insane folks to carry
the free software/open source revolution.
I say, welcome back. I prefer the company of
geeks who work for no money anyways.
information is immaterial
National Organization of Whiners
I'm all for Linux companies trying to focus on things that will be profitable. We all know there has been a shortage of that.
As for Prodigy, they have per-incident support (which strikes me as a doable, though not glamorous, business). And they have their pay-for-apt-get thingie (or their version of the Red Hat Network, or whatever you call it). I'm not so much opposed to that concept, it just seems that a lot of people are doing it poorly, rather than actually making the concept work (no experience with the Prodigy one in particular).
Hope they make it, in one form or another.
NOW.
They want revenue sooner than now? Wow, talk about impatient!! They want revenue Yesterday!!
And look at the moderation to you - 'offtopic.' Heh.
Yeah, there's always a conspiracy theory why Linux or Apple or whoever the zealot is preaching about hasn't taken over the world, and it's always some dirty trick that MS pulled, or some DEFECT in human nature.
Now watch them mod me down too. Idiots.
Maybe they'll do NOW later.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Its a shame that Progeny's NOW project is on hold. The project had great promise. (Progeny as a distribution is still quite nice; I have it running on several machines.)
GNU/Linux desperately needs a single-system-image infrastructure. It seems that too few Linux devlopers have experience with large networks of workstations. I have yet to see any distribution take advantage of the fact that other machines on the network are already up and running. I'd like to see an installation prompt to the effect: "I've detected a cluster of machines on the local network. Do you want me to merge as a member of this cluster?" Instead, you have to reenter all the configuration information again and spend days setting up network file systems and network authentication. Why isn't LDAP the default, out-of-the-box authentication method? NFS at least is a no-brainer, but leaves lots to be desired for clustering. NIS packages are generally primitive and require a fair amount of hand configuration (with poor documentation in my experience). LDAP is far worse. (It should be as simple as DHCP---"Ah, there's an LDAP authentication server on this network. Should I use it?")
There is hope. See compaq's SSI project. It may well be that the open-sourcing of proprietary cluster infrastructure is what drove Progeny to put their NOW project on hold.
"This is NOW, sir. Everything you see NOW is happening NOW."
"Go back to THEN."
"We can't."
"Why?"
"We missed it!"
"When?"
"Just NOW!"
[pause]
"When will THEN be NOW?"
"Soon."
The reasons for NOW, as mentioned by Ian, seem very much in line with what Plan9 tries to do. Wouldn't effort be better spent in developing:
a. Further documentation, especially for newbies. This would not only further Plan9's exposure, but also introduce more people to the really interesting and quite remarkable concepts on which it is based. Even further, any sort of demos or tutorials would be fantastic, since a lot of us get stuck into particular habits of computing and have trouble exploring new ways of doing things (which Plan9 seems to do all over the place). Plan9 is not targeted for a wider audience, but I feel confident that it would be possible, as well as beneficial, to achieve widespread exposure, if not acceptance, of it.
b. More apps and drivers. I'm not an expert, but from what I've seen it shouldn't be too difficult to write for the OS, since the existing source code is well documented (there's even a detailed, step-by-step walk-through of the kernel code!), and for those who might be able to write video drivers (which are especially needed), the features that need to be implemented or made available are very few. Plan9 seems really usable for those lab guys, and I bet with some more drivers and a few apps, it would be quite usable and accessible to the rest of us.
I'll admit that I have little personal experience with Plan9. I haven't had the time needed to invest in learning how to use it and how it works. But having recently read much of the available documentation (articles and man pages), I have gotten pretty darn excited about it and am planning to begin a more concerted effort in the near future.From the description that I read, the principle feature of NOW was a networked filesystem that supported disconnected operation too. Now isnt that exactly what Coda does? Why the desire to re-invent the wheel?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
I am an IT Manager in a 98/2000 shop and have been keeping an eye of the NOW project for some time. Some friends and I were planning on doing some small time consulting setting up these networks. The NOW project sure had a lot of potential to blow anything any other company was offering out of the water both administratively and from a users point of view. It would have been a pretty easy sell to a lot of small businesses (assuming the price wasn't outrageous).
Well, all I can say is I hope this project is finished one way or another. It saddens me to see something that could so easily revolutionize go away like this. Wanna talk about innovation? This is truely it (erm at least adaptation to something that really works for business).
I don't think many people realize how much this could have benefited the Linux community. Progeny NOW is needed NOW!
Never heard of NOW until now. Went over to the Progeny website to read about a dead project. Not much information there, just a bunch about how it is on indefinite hold. I had to read through a bunch of slashdot postings to finally find a description of it. Sounds good and would be a Good Thing (tm) for linux. Too bad it's sacked.
Then I see all this stuff about how great Progeny is. Took a look at the specs...kernel-2.2.18?! XFree86-4.0.3?! Sheesh. Got to go way back and get THAT! Lousy support for my video card, dusty old kernel with no connection to the modern era. OLD kde and gnome. Yep, best way to show off the good stuff in linux is to provide the OLD stuff that lacked a lot of features and capabilities.
Not wanting to be at the cutting edge of kernels and XFree is one thing, but 2.2.18? Give me a frickin' break. KDE2? Huh? Please tell me that isn't 2.0 or 2.1.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Seems like Progeny is now just another Linux Distribution. I wonder how long it will be before they start lay-offs, seeking more funding, etc. Hopefully there support business can save them but in general support has been a losing proposition for Linux companies. To me Progeny is just an expensive form of Debian. I'll take the real distro thanks...
Who needs a debian system for money when you can get it form your local mirror ?
What if you're in an area where dial-up is billed at a penny a minute (such as Europe), and nobody offers DSL or cable? Then a mirror isn't "local" unless it's on your LAN. So how do you get a mirror onto your LAN when nobody you know has the CD set? Buy a distro.
Will I retire or break 10K?
That's an amusing slip I made.
Progeny Progeny Progeny Progeny.
Progeny Progeny Progeny Progeny.
Maybe that should be the slashdot
punishment for misspellings and
such - you lose a point of karma
until you go to the "virtual blackboard"
and write the correct version 50 times.