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Bill Joy On Sun, Microsoft, Open Source, and Creativity
maitas writes "In this interview, Bill Joy talks about green energy and technology. His main point is: 'I'm all for sharing, but I recognize the truly great things may not come from that environment.'" The interview really runs the spectrum from the iPad to Microsoft, and from green tech to nanotech.
"What was the goal of the Linux community--to replace Windows?"
No Mr. Joy, the goal of the Linux community was to create a kernel that would run GNU, and ultimately lead to a libre operating system that was suitable for day to day use. In fact, part of the reason Sun had such a hard time staying in business was competition from GNU/Linux in the server room, which displaced Solaris.
Palm trees and 8
How much of your time is spent looking at green stuff?
He was clearly asking about orc porn.
Such a great question, so sadly misunderstood.
It's his not he's.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The interview really runs the spectrum from the iPad to Microsoft, and from Green tech to Nano tech.
Call me when he discusses the Microsoft iPad that runs on Green Nano tech.
I was using Sun workstations for a long time. Their hardware was decent and cheap. As for the software, the best thing about it was that you could remove most of the Sun crap and replace it with GNU software. And when the Linux kernel was reasonably stable and we got cheap PC hardware, it was time to ditch the Sun hardware too. That's the history of Sun and Sun software R&D in a nutshell (except for Java, which is another sad story).
Take me to the cleaners if it's open to the street
Something's got to pay off, something's got to break
Someone's got a fortune that they're begging me to take..
No Mr. Joy, the goal of the Linux community was to create a kernel that would run GNU, and ultimately lead to a libre operating system that was suitable for day to day use. In fact, part of the reason Sun had such a hard time staying in business was competition from GNU/Linux in the server room, which displaced Solaris.
Anything for free usually can replace a paid product - almost any product. When things are free, adoption increases, and if quality is 'enough' then adoption keeps increasing.
So rather than saying GNU/Linux - the honest thing to say is a free gnu/linux.
The second thing about GNU/Linux - was the ease with which things could be copied. There are very few things innovative about linux other than the way it was created. Open Source is innovative way of creating software but the created software for example - linux, is much less so.
So I think Joy is right - open source will not be the place to look for innovation in solar/bio/green technology. Of course once innovated, stuff can be handed over to open source to make it cheaply available, or for the community to help finish the product.
Really? The musings of the author of the Ugly Betty text editor (don't get me wrong- I am a fan of vi), and one time co-founder/chief scientist of a company that had the ball but dropped it due to to failing to grasp the dynamics of the very market they once reigned over is newsworthy? Does his scaredy-cat stance regarding future tech fail to astonish anyone else?
He's main point is
It's "His main point is".
I think if you wound the clock back, I'd like to think that we invented stuff in engineering that could have been marketed better. I'm happy to be working on something else. I worked on it for a very long time.
Sun had some really great stuff in their research divisions, and only ever commercialised a small fraction of it. During the .com years, they didn't need to - there was such a huge market for Sun hardware that every other part of their business could get away with making a loss and the company would still have been profitable. Afterwards, they failed to shift back to bringing products out of research.
Microsoft would do well to pay attention to this. For the last two decades, Windows and Office have kept the company afloat. MS Research produces a lot of cool stuff, but very little of it is made into products. There's a lot of stuff that Microsoft could commercialise, but with Windows and Office subsidising everything there's little incentive for them to bother.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't think the open-source community focused on this stuff in the same way. In some sense, you only hit what you aim at. What was the goal of the Linux community--to replace Windows? One can imagine higher aspirations. I think the thing is that open source has been great for hobbyists to get involved, and hobbyists in the sense of the word as somebody who really loves it. That's not a negative thing at all. It's just not clear how it organizes a sustained and creative activity. Google is using this approach with Android. It's open source, but the money comes from someplace else. More broadly, how do people make a living and do something really creative? I think they have to organize it as a business. I'm all for sharing, but I recognize the truly great things may not come from that environment.
Open source generally means the developers need to work somewhere else for a living, and therefore the free project needs more developers than a funded project. Only a few are hired by companies and in the end they produce most of the code. (No news here, for example: Linux).
Android is a very bad example: they forked linux and made their own cathedral. He can't generalize with it. Linux, KDE, and Firefox, are innovative and "truly great".
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
This explains, of course, why RHEL is so popular in server rooms and why so many for Solaris shops switched over to RHEL, and why they paid so much for Red Hat support contracts.
As for innovation, that tends to come out of research labs, and I would not argue that one (especially since I am a PhD student).
Palm trees and 8
I can hear a lot of Slashdotters complaining that open source has succeeded and there's nothing wrong with today's system, but Bill Joy has a point. Sure some people have managed to make a living at open source, but how much quality open source is produced compared to how much should be produced by society? Unless you're the RIAA, it's hard to complain about what might have been.
The idea that the system is working fine is barely believable if you're an open source programmer, but I'm sure the failure is on a totally different level if you're working in alternative energy. Anyone with a computer can code in their spare time, but I'm sure it takes millions to even experiment with some of these green technologies.
I'm all for sharing, but I recognize the truly great things may not come from that environment.
Yes, imagine the disaster that our civilization would have been today if scientists, for example, had shared their ideas...oh, wait, never mind...
Ezekiel 23:20
The support contracts are a drop in the bucket compared to windows licensing fees which are per-server per-core and per-seat. The bigger a company you have, the cheaper RHEL gets. Not quite with Windows, although they have a bulk pricing, the costs for each CAL still adds up.
You could have 100k employees and still be around the $20grand support costs of RHEL. This on MS would be in the hundreds of thousands range.
Plus, you don't anything for RHEL server. If you want to DIY with in-house trained RHEL developers, do it.
That all sounds like advantages of libre software, which was my original point. It is not "no cost," but the costs do tend to be lower when the license is not designed to undermine you ability to use the software. It is hard to make a case for a proprietary licensing arrangement when there is libre licensed software that fits the same purpose as the proprietary software, which is precisely why Sun lost ground with Solaris.
Palm trees and 8
Well - the problem with this model is - the software engineers do need a job. So the reason for linux to exist is cos the developers at Sun/Oracle/SGI etc. had someone paying their salary - so this was a hobby.
Now if most companies that pay software engineers came up with restrictive covenants saying Linux is a competitor and if you work with it - you cannot work with our company.. then all free software would soon dry up.
...is bleak. Its a dot-com bubble. Why?
Simple- the currently energy dilemmas that startups are getting attention for are centered around energy availability, delivery, and management. But a single battery technology or fuel cell technology, or even small nuclear generators can make all of the hype around energy management go away in one fell swoop. And those technologies are waiting in the wings and maturing to the point that we should see them well within our lifetimes- perhaps as early as another 5-10 years.
When energy shifts from a central distribution model to a local point-of-use generation and the grid is reduced, the consumption issues, scheduling- all those things that seem to be important to solve now- go away. We're left with a bunch of legacy technology that is targeted at an old system that becomes more and more irrelevant.
The reason this might not happen is because energy companies want to keep their stranglehold on the consumer. But as soon as they learn that they can buy into new technology and put a small battery of fuel cells in a neighborhood to power it and charge for it, theyll fall into line. Energy companies are very low-tech. They don't spend on innovations. They wait for innovations to occur, then adopt them.
So if you're an investor to make short term money- the green energy move is perfect. If you're the rest of us and can't handle another market crash when the whole thing deflates, then sorry. My advice is, don't work in that industry unless you're an owner.
Yes, that's what he did in the past. It's sad and ironic that in the article he's just another being used to market the pyramid scam Microsoft.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
"His main point is"
not
"He is main point is"
The business model is the same for software developers. Someone needs software, they pay a developer to write it. The difference between an open source and a proprietary model is that open source omits the middle layer - the people who need the software pay for it to be written, rather than hoping that someone else will pay for someone to write it then try to recoup their investment by selling copies. This model shouldn't be too difficult to understand, because most software is written in this model already (although most of it isn't very widely distributed).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So you are proposing a company will a payroll on the order of $5 billion and you propose they are basing their purchasing decisions on a few hundred thousand dollars of costs?
For something like that, $1 million is close enough to free that they are looking much closer at other factors.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
...and Steve Jobs is the guy who could sell that guy an iPad and iPhone.
"Joy: I'm enjoying using my iPad. "
You know, people say "So what if Apple doesn't allow this, allow that? Just don't buy it.", the people leading the industry are buying it and they think a closed environment, the most closed environment since ENIAC (!) is a good thing. Bill Joy isn't some average rich billionaire either, he has his own way of thinking and expressing his views down to get blamed to be "anti technology" guy. Steve Jobs can sell iPad to that guy, be afraid really...
The problem is really when software is widely distributed. The economics of open source software work fine when only one party benefits. But suppose for example that 1M people would each benefit $3 from some open source project. In theory that's $3M of benefit, easily enough to get a couple of developers full-time for a couple of years to get it done. But in reality that project would never get off the ground, or it would take one guy 15 years in his spare time (donating his own time) to pull it off.
"scientist of a company that had the ball but dropped it due to to failing to grasp the dynamics of the very market they once reigned "
He is well aware of those mistakes, if you have read the scoop of the article. Also he tips that Microsoft could be going the same way if it keeps insanely trying failed attempts not learning from their mistakes. Sun failed because they weren't quick to make Solaris open and free, they still fail in hands of Oracle who kinda cancelled Solaris-X86.
Remember a company who dragged their entire OS to Trash, emptied it and restarted with a fresh and open source OS instead of trying to "fix" it? It is no wonder that they are being given as example several times in that interview. He says who doesn't have courage to do it are doomed to fail just like Sun.
In truth? yes. Especially if that money is in a non-core business.
Oh, you are talking about wall street.... Yeh, they just throw buckets of money at anything because, well... it's not really their money anyways....
Just cos you are a PhD student doesnt mean much. You are right now surviving on funding from Darpa or some other such agency. As a student it is great to support all things free - whether it is software/music piracy, and freebies everywhere... somehow it is seen as idealistic, whereas in reality it justs means ignorant of how bills are paid.
Once you are out of school - either you will have to go back to using Darpa funds (post doc) - or else get a job with a salary . Remember - most(almost all?) open source contributions come from people who have software jobs, quite often jobs which directly compete with the open source initiative they are contributing to.
Stuff that comes from research is usually great in terms of concepts - they rarely are products that can be adopted widely due to the work required in perfecting the software. Additionally, a lot of such research is done in corporations like Msft, SUN (r.i.p), Oracle etc.
By the way - do get out of the damn lab and get some practical knowledge of the commercial software industry. Support costs, even at large firms like Oracle, cost only around 20-25% of the license costs.
Sharing was a bad idea. Let's unplug the Internet !
BTW, I don't trust someone with that much hair and so few beard...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The second thing about GNU/Linux - was the ease with which things could be copied. There are very few things innovative about linux other than the way it was created. Open Source is innovative way of creating software but the created software for example - linux, is much less so.
So I think Joy is right - open source will not be the place to look for innovation in solar/bio/green technology.
Let me be the first to point out that GNU and Linux do not sum up the entirety of open source. Now that that's laid to rest:
I don't think it really makes sense to make a statement like, "Open source is less innovative than closed source." In many ways the two are very much orthogonal. I would buy framing it as, This particular innovation is closed source or that one is open source. Not open/closed produced this. It really has to be looked at on a much more granular level than that. Furthermore, many of the "innovations" predate the entire concept of closed/open source and are just coming back into vogue. There is also the point that closed source development outnumbers open source many times to one so of course you would expect a bit more diversity in the ideas. Do you know why some projects start out open source and some do not? If I'm a guy in a basement that discovers some new thing, do I open source it or do I take the money and run? Does this even play into the statistic of open source vs closed source innovation? I don't think so.
This is a subject that has many layers and gets very complicated very quickly. There's no way to do it justice in a web forum post and for even a luminary such as Bill Joy to just make a blanket statement of open vs closed argument in one sentence borders on nonsensical.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Oh, right, the guy who predicted we'd be all grey goo right now. Hrm, yeah, I can see why anyone cares about his opinion. Or not.
Well, Sun is kind of a company who manages to have their own language/framework on billion devices (J2ME) and still manages to lose money and prestige over it.
Every phone, almost every cell phone you see has a working J2ME and companies who can actually code does create miracles on it. Just imagine what if MS wasn't that blind and managed to get a compact .NET on that number of devices.
Or forget devices, look at CNET Download.com top downloads which is more amazing:
http://download.cnet.com/mac/most-popular/3101-20_4-0.html?tag=rb_content;contentNav
It includes Limewire which is pure Java and it runs on one of the most hostile Java environments (both OS and userbase).
I can't understand how they CAN'T make money over it. I can't understand the patience of Java developers either... You make top of a general download sites top 10 list and you don't even get mentioned by the language vendor. They had a joke like portal (java.com) and it bugged some people at that sick company to convert it to a pure "download" page.
I mean Java is at a state where MS and Apple (with their culture) can't even dream of and they still manage to get acted like step child with weird rumors going on. I wonder if they have donated/sponsored a CENT to Limewire and Vuze, reason of 90% of Java desktop installations. If there was such a popular .NET open source application, MS would even assign some anonymous coders to that project.
If I had a huge Solaris/Server installation, I would switch to RHEL right after Oracle buyout and no actual defense coming from Oracle regarding theories of Sun Hardware, Solaris, Java, all going to be cancelled.
End users like me ended up saying "Are you crazy? Would they ever do such mistake?" on behalf of them on slashdot.
Now, I am not sure since there is absolutely no reason for Oracle/Sun not to ship "Oracle Java for OS X" having latest features for _all_ OS X out there, not just only latest OS X on latest Apple CPU. I thought after they stabilize, they would do favors like that and yet they left it to Apple with limited resources and concentration/focus these days.
Also Solaris. Why can't Apple sell enough XServe? Because it is a closed platform just like Sun hardware. Each time Solaris managed to run perfectly on generic X86 and IT managers could install it, it added to Solaris sales since it can actually run on generic X86 hardware no matter what happens to Sun hardware. Solaris X86 free version was a real sales and image booster for Sun. Of course they would select RHEL because RHEL can even run on a cheap AMD box with 512MB RAM, one way or another.
The actual project to enhance MacOS was failed so badly. It was good on paper but was horrible in reality. Amelio hired legendary Ellen Hancock to figure what the hell is actually going on, she suggested Apple to cancel project since it is going nowhere.
If it wasn't Steve Jobs, it would be another OS but not multi tasking enabled MacOS (of course, I know copland is way more than that).
Perhaps they gambled with NeXT just to get Steve Jobs but it doesn't really change that NeXT is such a amazingly future ready and multi platform by nature OS that Apple has to do childish tricks to prevent it from running on anything not Apple. If Bill Joy wasn't a billionaire and he didn't have to act like politician, he would sure have some comments about openstep and how Apple had to conspire it for future.
Lack of offsite backups.
Until we achieve that we have no good claim to superiority over an extinct dinosaur that ruled the Earth for millions of years.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Remember - most(almost all?) open source contributions come from people who have software jobs, quite often jobs which directly compete with the open source initiative they are contributing to.
Most open source contributions come from people with jobs. Jobs that are paying them to make that very contribution to open source.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
More like, "quite often jobs which make use of the open source initiative they are contributing to."
For example, a while ago I contributed some code to WebInject. It was code I got paid to write at my day job; I found WebInject, said "This would be useful to us if it had X, Y, and Z", added X, Y, and Z -- getting paid to do so, same as if I was writing our own bespoke test tool -- and contributed the code back.
I suspect that this sort of scenario is at least an order of magnitude more common than people contributing to free software projects that directly compete with their day jobs.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"As for innovation, that tends to come out of research labs"
Yeah, using all that equipment (computers, electronics, tools, facilities, materials, chemicals) created by those stupid corporate, non-innovative engineers.
View looks great from that Ivory tower...
MS Research produces a lot of cool stuff, but very little of it is made into products. There's a lot of stuff that Microsoft could commercialise, but with Windows and Office subsidising everything there's little incentive for them to bother.
It's not like they don't try. For example just give me one reason why this commercial for MS Song Smith was not effective. I'm no marketing mavin, but I, for one, find this to be sheer brilliance.
Actually, I'm not aware of any MS product thats per core, you would be thinking of Oracle. Per CPU, sure, per core, no way
Normal people worry me!
"MSFT is slowly crushed"? If raking in billions and billions of $$$ is being slowly crushed, can I pleeease be crushed too? Everywhere I go I see Windows 7, from little netbooks running W7 starter to bad ass gamer rigs. Everyone just seems to love W7, as I've been told over and over by customers it is finally the MSFT OS that "makes sense" to them. even my 67 year old dad, who is about as clueless as they come, after trying the W7 Beta to try went and had me buy enough licenses to cover his work and home PCs/laptops on launch because he says this version is finally "easy to use" and understand.
And lets not forget that it ALWAYS takes MSFT awhile to find a footing before gaining marketshare. Xbox 1 was a flop, but even with the RRoD issue the X360 has been stomping the PS3 for more months than I care to look up and has been making a profit for nearly 2 years. So if MSFT truly wants a piece of the mobile market they will eventually use their unlimited pocketbooks to bring on the right people to fix it, just as they brought the Office guys over after the Vista fail to fix what became W7. And it looks like one of those you mentioned, Apple, may be headed for some MSFT style antitrust which certainly won't help their bottom line, and Android is having troubles of its own.
So while I personally hope it ends up with a "1/3 for each" state between Apple,MSFT, and Google so healthy competition helps all of us, I wouldn't count MSFT out just yet. Their plans tend to be "learn from the competition, then make a little better widget" which we haven't seen whether or not it is gonna work yet or not in mobile. I would wait for about 2 years after W7 Mobile is released, and count share at that point rather than call them toast now. But I will agree that if W7/W8 mobile is a flop they should cut their losses and get out, just as short of a miracle I don't see Zune going anywhere market wise.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If raking in billions and billions of $$$ is being slowly crushed, can I pleeease be crushed too?
MS is a 2 trick pony. They have only ever made money on Windows and Office. Nothing else, including the XBOX (and we spent $BILLIONS and made $MILLIONS this year is not making money on Xbox) has ever done anything but lose millions. The only reason MS makes so much on Windows and Office is they have yet to have had any real competition. OSX is too expensive when you include the machine to run it on and OpenOffice doesn't have enough money behind it. Enter the iPad, Android, ChromeOS and Google Docs. All backed wholeheartedly by multi-billion dollar companies. As these offerings become more and more compelling, the value proposition for Windows and Office will be less and less. The oxygen will get cut off, where will MS make money then? People are already voting with their tablet dollars as the sales figures for the iPad are showing. As I said, slowly, MS will get crushed. It will take a little while to really get going but when it does, it will be logarithmic.
even my 67 year old dad, who is about as clueless as they come, after trying the W7 Beta to try went and had me buy enough licenses to cover his work and home PCs/laptops
That's great and I'm glad your dad has found something he likes but, as I said, Windows is half of MS's money and the competitors are determined and catching up fast. This isn't Canonical they are dealing with here, Google and Apple are the big leagues.
Their plans tend to be "learn from the competition, then make a little better widget"
No, actually their plans tend to be "learn from the competition, then bundle a half-assed widget to their OS monopoly that's just good enough to kill their otherwise superior competitors". That's not going to work this time and every time they've tried to actually compete on even ground, they've either been out-right killed like with the Zune (seen any comparisons of ZuneHD sales vs iPod Touch lately?) or they've just sunk so much ungodly amounts of money into it that they can never hope to make it back (think Bing and Xbox) which, if I were a shareholder, I would be livid.
I would wait for about 2 years after W7 Mobile is released, and count share at that point rather than call them toast now.
That's been the story of Windows Mobile for a decade now and they have consistently failed to deliver and the competition now is 10 times stronger than it has ever been. Trust me, it's over before Windows Phone 7 even comes out.
Paying someone outside your company (aka proprietary) to write software is a hell of a lot more stupid than paying someone whom you can hire internally and keep as a developer.
Also, you know the cost of the developer, as you pay him a salary. You also know your risks, because he is employed with a contract. Costs with a proprietary third party are not as static. Lots of companies know exactly what GPL is and release their software deliberately via GPL for plenty of obvious reasons.
Linux is not the restrictive party, MS is. AS you have no guarantee that if you are a competitor to any part of their products that they won't come after you for patents.
yes, sorry, per CPU. Meanwhile, that doesn't happen with redhat.
He didn't say they didn't come from commercial research, after all, anyone in a CS-related field would know of the contributions from Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. After all, there are probably millions of CRUD apps in use, but almost none of them can be described as particularly innovative, but the underlying technology (produced in either commercial or academic research labs, largely by people with PhDs), is. Certainly there are innovations which pop up in non-research software departments, or elsewhere (the Web, for example), but there is less innovation there.
is about to begin along the Arizona - Mexizo Boarder.
The Live-Action will involve about 1200 or so "Regulars" from the Guard, on orders to kill on sight Causian United States of America Citizens.
The is a given since this boarder region is the last over-land escape route OUT of the United States of America for those with MONEY.
This is all a run-up to Obama's Martial Law Decorlation soon to come.
Already Obama has issued Executive Orders for Army and Marine Units, in "Plain Clothes" to hunt U.S. Federal Courts Judjes and Discticts Atournies, in order to be on-post for the "Kill Code".
During the chaos, Obama will issue Executive Orders to Confiscate all Bank acoounts within the United States of Americat to place himself as "Owner".
After this the killing field will emerge and Barak Hussain Obama will be crowned Emperior of North America (the governments of Canada and Mexico will be errased from the Earth as a testiment of the Love of Obama for Causasian Human Beings beholden to his Supreme Law).
'I'm all for sharing, but I recognize the truly great things may not come from that environment.'
So let's put all the creators into a vacuum and see what they will come up with.
Probably he also should suggest closing schools, colleges, universities and public libraries: they are breeding grounds for knowledge and ideas sharing.
I would admit that long time ago I had very similar opinion. But then I got job in educational software company and worked with number of talented teachers and educators who have have enlightened me. Now it simply boggles my mind that somebody can even think about restraining sharing as it is the very foundation of our society and the backbone of our civilization.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
And the theory of evolution deal only with natural selection.
All your prank theories about the human brain "evolving" into something else are frankly passe.
And all the moderators that gave you "insightful" don't deserve to pass their genes to the next generation.
You could have 100k employees and still be around the $20grand support costs of RHEL.
What ? A RHEL license will run you, on average, about $1000/yr. Are you seriously trying to say a company with 100k employees is going to only have 6-7 (spreading the cost over 3 years) RHEL servers ?
Plus, you don't anything for RHEL server. If you want to DIY with in-house trained RHEL developers, do it.
Such people are going to cost the company $100k-$200k/year to employ, each. Or, roughly the cost of 100 - 200 RHEL licenses, and zero overheads in managing the development process. Unless you had some quite unique requirements, going with the latter is a no-brainer.
yes, sorry, per CPU. Meanwhile, that doesn't happen with redhat.
RH have two licensing tiers - <2 and >2 sockets.
There are a lot of "open source tools" that were innovative and were not produced as a direct result of research dollars, or were successful BECAUSE it was "open sourced" or open architecture.
We all might be on apple's had IBM seen the value in the PC and kept it closed architecture.
ping and many other UNIX tools that made the current computing environment viable were unfunded solitary projects as opposed to research, funding, project, product lifecycle.
I have wanted to see a stable linux desktop with a standard configuration that comes setup for the average user to just dump on thier desktop and have almost no configuration...but that would come with a $100 license fee per system to pay for someone to do it. Or a project to do it.
I wanted to see a project that would put stable Linux on surplus commercial dell workstations to replace the "laptop for every child".