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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
I think this comment just made me feel old. Very, very old.
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.
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.
A thought had by countless others about thousands of past technologies. If history has taught us anything, avoiding an arms race only guarantees that your enemies become your conquerors. The nations that abstain from these four fields will simply become the first slaves to the nations that pursue them.
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
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
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
Tagging onto my own reply... sixty five million years ago I am T Rex and I feel that I am pretty much the best nature has to offer or ever will have to offer, so I unilaterally declare an end to evolution. Sadly, nature fails to agree with me. Or, evolution recognizes me as an obstacle and routes around me.
The current state of the game is, evolution has found a faster way to evolve by leveraging human ingenuity. Evolution has never been random since the most primitive self organizing molecules, rather evolution proceeds in a methodical way by mechanisms which themselves evolve. Evolution always accelerates. So, having evolved the human brain, evolution will just naturally use it to achieve its next phase of acceleration.
Of course I would never dream of suggesting a connection between vi and dinosaurs.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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
...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.
Evolution always accelerates. So, having evolved the human brain, evolution will just naturally use it to achieve its next phase of acceleration.
Um, no. Evolution doesn't have a speed. It doesn't even have a direction. It's not a race.
Evolution, at its core, is really a very simple principle: if the environment changes, some will be an advantage, and those will... well, have an advantage.
It's just as fundamental as, say, Newton's third law. And it makes just as much sense to turn it into some sort of race or game, or anthropomorphize it, as it does to do the same to Newton's third law.
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.
IMO your comment is an example of how the word "innovative" has become so debased as to lose all meaning. Linux is my desktop and server OS of choice, but it's certainly not innovative. Linux is a monkey copy of Unix. Running on top of linux we have the Gnu userspace stack, which is a monkey copy of the Unix userspace. KDE is just another window manager. There's no significant innovation in it compared to its predecessors like the original Mac GUI, or the mouse-and-icons systems that predated the Mac. Firefox is not particularly innovative. NCSA Mosaic was innovative -- and had a proprietary license, although the source code was available.
Innovation is rare in the proprietary software world, and it's equally rare in the open-source world. If you want a good example of an innovative open-source project, probably one of the best is Apache. It wasn't the first web server, but it rapidly established itself as the dominant web server in the early days of the web.
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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.
I'm a bit suspicious when someone says that open source is "about" something or another, because open source isn't an essay or a single individual. You're right that a lot of people (including myself) work on open source out of their own generosity.
But from a non-programmers point of view, or society's point of view, an important question is whether there is enough open source software as there should be. For instance, before there was a welfare system could you say that feeding the hungry was about altruism and rich people showing off. That's true, but what if it turned out that that there simply weren't enough generous people to clothe and feed everyone?
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.
Well since Limewire just lost a big court case over piracy that is a good reason why Sun didn't push it.
There is a lot of good Java software. Eclipse.org and Netbeans are both all Java.
But the issue is "How do you make money giving stuff away" and that is the problem.
Lets be honest Intel/AMD combined with Linux have pushed down the cost of entry into a Unix like server a lot.
Sun is used to playing in a high margin market. They do not have the skills to fight it out with Dell and HP in that market.
Just think how cheap a quad-core Linux box is today.
That left Sun the High End server market to fight it out with IBM and HP.
The Workstation market is dead. Simple as that. A workstation today is an Intel/AMD PC with a good graphics card.
If you want to push it you and an nvidia GPU based accelerator card.
Sun was left to reinvent it's self
Java while a great tool IMHO just wasn't going to be a money maker. J2ME should have been a nice source of income but it's day is passing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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