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LWCE Reports Continue
wo1verin3 writes: "Trivia for geeks... and nerds. Or rather geeks vs nerds. Read about the contest of the people with oddly and randomly shaped heads here." This site also links to MoC chrisd's page of questions and answers.
abel wisman submitted news that GNU Bayonne and PreViking have merged into a single project, which will keep the name GNU Bayonne. Not familiar with either? Bayonne is a telephony application server, and PreViking is a telephony-switching daemon, both of which are open source. David Sugar of the Bayonne project also demonstrated an automated web-based callback system used to provide callbacks to form-based online queries. The newly combined Bayonne / PreViking teams will also be working on www.phonestreamer.com, built on top of GStreamer. The Bayonne booth at LinuxWorld offered booth visitors today free calls to anywhere in the world using these technologies.
red_gnom writes: "Linux is in the running to power the world's biggest computer, we learned this week at LinuxWorld Expo. A bid is being prepared to provide the computing power behind the US government sponsored Project Purple, which will pool a vast server farm to the three leading U.S. research labs, which is scheduled to come on stream by the end of 2004."
terrywin writes: "Apparently, the company that licensed Corel's Linux has indicated that the beta is now available. http://www.xandros.com/news.html, their home page has a link to the beta form. The last report I saw on this was back in September."
Finally, cnmill points to this story on CNET about today's announcement of version 1.1 of the Linux Standard Base. Congratulations!
Well, they are completely out of the linux biz, or so says their CEO, so no wonder they blew it off!
How bad is VA and OSDN hurting to not represent at such a big event?? -- I guess 1 look at themes.org is a good example of how fast something can go downhill. (Saw the article on the Loki timeline -- will we see a VA/OSDN timeline?)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
This was the first computer conference I've ever attended. Most of it was what I expected it would be -- a bunch of bullshit: the big companies and the little companies were hawking their wares, acting slick and SELLING SELLING SELLING.
There were a ton of proprietary software vendors, wholely clueless that Linux users may prefer Linux because of the Freedom. NuSphere, for example, was showing off their Linux port of the Windows PHP IDE product...acting like Linux was just another platform, like a port to a Mac. (The port was incomplete.) Compaq held an expensive-looking gameshow contest with questions like "Why is Compaq considered a leading expert in Linux?" and where all the answers were "all of the above." Ximian came accross as a slick, funded, bullshit corporation, selling their MS Exchange connector. I fear the future of GNOME in their hands. Best propritary software was the guy from Taiwan, selling a program that grabs all relevent Windows config files and translates them to the correct Linux equivs (Sendmail, Appache, SAMBA, etc.). He said his product was big in China.
The Hardware vendors seemed less bad -- at least they're selling a THING, not IP. Of particular note was the Sharp Linux PDA -- much better than I imagined, more like a little laptop than a PDA.
Best, though, was the small "ORG" section of the convention. The enthusiasm and lack of bullshit was palpable, and it put the salesmen to shame. It made the whole thing seem like two events, one of salesmen, and one of artists. In particular, the Linux Terminal Server guys were cool as shit. (http://www.ltsp.org/) The KDE guys (especially Ian) were also amazing. I was pleased that they all had fresh ideas, but were dedicated to the old-fashioned, core hacker concepts (client/server, language neutrality, extensibility). These guys had a VISION and were advocating, teaching, and arguing for it with great gusto and humor. The sales people, on the other hand, seemed insincere, ass-kissing, and downright dumb.
All-in-all, just what you'd expect...
I don't know if anyone here recalls the Brazil Nut theory of Economics. In a nutshell (unintentional humor), it parallels the unusual and easily reproducible fact that in a can of mixed nuts, if you shake it long enough, the brail nuts (the largest ones) rise to the top. I've seen this phenomenon in piggy banks as well. In economics, what this means is that certain companies eventually will rise to the top of the corporate world.
VA Linux^H^H^H^H^H Systems, IMHO, should've tried to duke it out a little more in the hardware market. Now it's a company basing itself on software and intellectual property (like, oh, Slashdot and other Andover.net aquisitions). Penguin is starting to feel the crunch of smaller margins in this commodity market. Oracle's probably taking a breather before Comdex, or maybe it's laying off the trade show circuit to save some $$ (after all, upholding a legally and ethically built monopoy takes a little work to hold together).
One of the things to keep in mind about trade shows is that, oh, they are intended FOR THE TRADE. They are pitching their products and services to organizations that could potentially purchase them. So you won't see the Linux-based PDA's except as an item to be resold or maybe as a remote network monitoring tool (think a Sharp Zaurus with an 802.11b CF card).
Something that slightly itches at me like an Asian Ladybug's bite.. Is Apple there? I know some people are belligerent over the BSD vs GNU/Linux thing, but right now Apple is the world's leading supplier of Unixish systems thanks to the miracle of OS X. (My next system is going to be an iMac2 with OS X.1 and PPC SuSE dual-boot.)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
When you say, "you'll likely see a single company responsible for Linux development," what exactly do you mean? Responsible for what and to whom?
Do you mean that somehow all the people who now spend their time on the kernel and all the other software that makes linux tick will be somehow forced out of doing any linux stuff? How would that happen? Do you mean that they will just get sick of doing linux stuff? I don't really envision that. There might be some attrition, but not total abandonment. Also, do you think Linus is going to sell the rights to the Linux trademark to this one big company?
Also, when you say that the "true beneficiaries" of free programming labor are these companies (or this company), you seem to be ignoring the customers and other users. I would argue that the true beneficiaries of all this free coding are the people who use the code. If it turns out to be the case that established companies find a way to make money off of linux, I don't think that necessarily means that all the coders labored in vain. I mean, if I wanted to get rich writing code, I don't think I would have published it or allowed it to be published under the GPL or other permissive license. So the programmers haven't really lost anything as I see it. They knew the rules of the game and they played it willingly. They're just like all the other former startup employees who worked hard, but didn't quite get rich.
The investors, though, they lost something. They lost money. And I think its fair to say that they actually were trying or at least hoping to make money. I do feel a bit sorry for the investors, whoever they are.
MM
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Just watched that. How ironic the ajoining "stock ticker" table cell to the left of the video reminded me of how proud good ole' Larry A. was to aquire the LNUX symbol and carry the Linux torch high (in what seems like just a few months ago.) The new video in the window in front of me (and just to the left of the LNUX symbol) was 6 minutes of good ole' Larry stressing (in not so many words) how they are "oh so past that yucky Linux thing" now. I don't know about you all, but that makes my stomache churn a bit. (Not quite in the "selling your own mother" category -- but not far off.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
When you say, "you'll likely see a single company responsible for Linux development," what exactly do you mean? Responsible for what and to whom?
... lost money. I think its fair to say that they actually were trying or at least hoping to make money.
Good question, one that I figured would come up. I mean that one single company will do the bulk of Linux development and will be recognized as the "standard Linux". They will conduct themselves in a very business-like fashion and likely refuse patches from the wild. They will become the OpenBSD of Linux. Their revenue will come from large contracts with corporations for setup and support.
Sure, there will be hobbyists who still tinker with the OS and the OS will still be "free", but the true money to be made in gratis software is the support of it. This single company will be the only one that will emerge from the current crop of distro vendors with the money, reputation, and knowledge necessary to be the main Linux distributor in the Western Hemisphere.
Also, when you say that the "true beneficiaries" of free programming labor are these companies (or this company), you seem to be ignoring the customers and other users.
Yes, I am. Because I don't say that customers are the main beneficiaries of Windows either. Rather, it is Microsoft (and in like manner, Redhat) who makes money *off of Linux*. Other companies and people may make money *with* Linux or Windows, but discussion of the customers is peripheral to the discussion of those companies making money off of Linux.
The investors, though,
That's the way the cookie crumbles. It's a little like the stock market: It isn't the ones putting the money in that are getting rich (VCs), it's the ones brokering the sales (IBM, Compaq...)
(from the 96 page requirement document.. btw - TiB = tibibyte - 2^40 bytes or so)...
Example: For a 60 teraFLOP/s peak system, requirement 2.1.1.2 specifies that the system shall
have at least 30 TiB of memory, 1.2 PB globally addressable user disk, 6.0 TB/s intra-cluster
network aggregate link bandwidth, 3.0 TB/s intra-cluster networking bi-sectional bandwidth, 30
GB/s system sustained productive disk I/O bandwidth and 75 Gb/s external networking.