Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
This was a VERY good troll, kudos to you! :-)
My only subjective statement about Linux, was that the Linux kernel is pretty good.
You disagree, I respect that, but plenty of people do agree.
What is your definition of pretty good anyway? Does something have to be the absolutely best to be considered "pretty good"?
The 2.2-kernel has a pretty _good_ reputation for stability, at least right now. 2.4 is in some areas less stable, in some areas more stable.
You even manage to totally miss the point. My answer was to a troll about Windows XP, which is a CLIENT-system. That is, my reply was for client-systems.
Btw. The Linux-kernel works perfectly fine for lots and lots of servers around the world.
That's not that bad, but it's no better than Windows 2000. Seriously, the Linux kernel development has not focused on real stability issues, and seems to have little intention to do so. One area that has caused me considerable problems, but will no doubt be fixed, is VM issues. If some rogue program takes up all my virtual memory my computer becomes unusable. I can't even telnet it and kill the offending program most of the time, the system is so sluggish.
The other real problem is one that Linus has decided to, basically, never fix: X. X is really part of the operating system. It does an operating system job -- provides the "safe" interface between software and hardware. Of course, it's not safe. X can bring down your system. Or, even more easily, the X-based interfaces can become unavailable (keyboard lock, some weird focus issue, etc), and there's no way to kill the offending program (unless you have close access to a computer to telnet in).
Linus has decided that graphics are Too Hard, and he's not willing to deal with it. Which is, if you ask me, totally lame. It's like saying virtual memory is Too Hard, and people should just make sure they have enough RAM. Linux is DOS-level when it comes to graphics.
And, yeah, X is complicated. Because it does a lot of non-OS stuff too. But that's what caused programmers of yore to create concepts like abstraction and interfaces -- concepts which seemed to have escaped X designers.
The annoying part is that people really wanted to fix this situation: GGI/KGI (KGI being the kernel level stuff). But, at least from what I understand, they've been put off by Linus and can't get into the kernel. As a result the development has been extremely slow, because the motivation has been understandably low. Looking at the website, though, there's been some activity in the last few months, which is good.