LWCE Wrapup

An anonymous reader writes "Extremetech.com reports that: 'Computer scientists from think tank SRI will present a novel take on distributed computing at LinuxWorld, all in a search for a little lost penguin.' For more information on Centibots, head over to the Centibots Project homepage." ReadthePaper writes "I just read a great interview with Jon "Maddog" Hall of Linux International." And finally, Hawkxor writes "Sun Microsystems VP Jonathon Schwartz demoed Sun's new desktop-oriented Linux distro 'Mad Hatter' and 3-D Desktop Environment 'Looking Glass' at LinuxWorld. Sounds pretty cool."

Comments

Typical Sun Quote

[Valar]

"The thing I worry about most with the open source community is the sentiment that open source is somehow different. It isn't," he said.
Sounds just like the typical Sun opinion about Linux (and open source) in general. They miss the point and focus on the free-as-in-beer part (and therefore focus on producing cheap solutions) instead of the free as in speech part (and cooperate with the developers a little more).

Re:Typical Sun Quote

[__past__]

Actually, they don't focus on any kind of "free-as-in-foo" part. They focus on the "good-as-in-reliably-solves-problems" part. Not the most stupid thing to base decisions on, and fortunatly some open source developers also consider that important, even if reading /. often suggests otherwise.

Re:Typical Sun Quote

[swordgeek]

Oh yeah, Sun and their skewed idea of "free." They came up with crazy ideas like Free-as-in-NFS, and free-as-in-NIS. Evil dirty proprietary bastards!

Sun wants to sell stuff (hardware and software), make money, and solve problems. They don't give a shit about the proper attitude to hold when approaching Linux--and they SHOULDN'T! There's nothing sacred about it.

Re:Typical Sun Quote

[__past__]

If you take, and use open source software for commercial gains, and ensure that the actual open source versions stay one step behind you are basically stealing.

Whoa. And I thought the RIAA was insane. It is stealing if you use software in compliance with the license the authors themselves chose to publish it under?

However, lately, they are asking more what open source can do for them than what they can do for open source. Yes, this is a perfectly natural thing for a company to do, but we should hardly praise Sun for the idea of taking Linux, adding a couple of proprietary features and then using it on their workstations and desktops, so that they can get free development.

Not to mention adding a couple of free features that Linux users (and vendors) get for free. You do realize that they contribute heavily to Gnome, for example? Of course they do it in their own interest - the first version of Solaris with pre-installed Gnome was just released a week or two ago. Still, everything that is not Solaris-specific is now part of mainstream Gnome.

OpenOffice.org isn't exactly a small contribution either. Sure, they are probably quite happy about unpaid contributors that make their proprietary StarOffice better, but I'd say that this is quite a fair deal. And there are also some smaller projects, like XMLroff, an XSL FO formatter that I personally consider very promising.

So please, take your "proper attitude" elsewhere and don't talk about things you have no idea about.

Re:Typical Sun Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

They miss the point and focus on the free-as-in-beer part (and therefore focus on producing cheap solutions) instead of the free as in speech part

*TWHAP*
What company recently spend millions to acquire a mature desktop office software suite, and then released the source code open source? What company recently bought into Netscape when it was strapped for cash, on the ropes, and looking like it was MS road kill?

I am SOOOOO sick of the slashdotters bashing Sun as somehow an evil unix corporation that just "doesn't get it". Lemme tell you. Sun is the one unix company that believe in the social importance of computing ('the network is the computer' was their slogan even before the public understood what the internet was). They give to charities, they sponsor responsible products. Let me also say, linux boy, that it will be a cold day in hell when your little toy OS even comes close to the UNREAL ability of SunOS to stay up under all kinda punishment.

So go ahead, point to your little anecdotes about Farmer Bob switching from a Sun box to a linux box his counsin put in for him. While you spray your spit about "free as in freedom", there's a company out there that, yes, is earning a profit, and YES, is socially responsible and giving back.

Disagree with me? Uninstall openoffice. Uninstall mozilla. Get the fuck outa here, leeenux SCO copycat.

Mad Hatter = Red Hat Distribution

[MikeD83]

Sun has maintained an air of mystery about what specific Linux distribution will form the basis of Mad Hatter, and yesterday Schwartz declined to name the distribution that his demonstration was based on,

Let me take the aura of mystery away- it's obviously based on Red Hat. If it wasn't I'm sure Red Hat would take serious issue in the product name.