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Bill Joy On Sun, Microsoft, Open Source, and Creativity

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the does-his-wife-dance-with-joy dept.

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.

4 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Who is Bill Joy? by camperdave · · Score: 5, Informative
    For those like me who are wondering who Bill Joy is:
    1. Co-founder of Sun Microsystems
    2. Heavily involved in the development of BSD UNIX
    3. Wrote the text editor vi.
    4. Advocates relinquishing development of nano-tech, genetics, robotics, and AI. He feels that an arms race in any of those fields would be detrimental to human survival.
    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  2. Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar by poetmatt · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Sun software by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sun Hardware was actually quite pricy...

    Compared to PCs, yes, but not when compared to the rest of the 'real Unix' market. Back in the 90s we had servers and workstations from many Unix vendors and the Suns were generally the cheapest of the bunch and the easiest to work with.

  4. Re:Good choice actually by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

    Apple did that to bail out Jobs, when NeXt was in the tank. Apple had developed a new OS, MacOS 8 ("Copeland"), which was a reasonably good rewrite. The claim was that a warmed-over NextStep could be on the market sooner than Copeland. It wasn't, but the deal saved Jobs' personal wealth.