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.

Comments

From TFA

[betterunixthanunix]

"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.

Re:From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

No Mr. Joy, the goal of the Linux community was to create a kernel that would run GNU ...

He was just having some fun trolling. Don't be such a billjoy ...

Re:From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

The goal of the Ubuntu community is to replace Windows, and the goal of the linux community at large is not.

We are not the same.

We will accomplish what we're out to do, and once the "linux" community figures out *what* they're actually out to do, I'm sure they'll get that done too.

Re:From TFA

[betterunixthanunix]

Replace Windows on the server? Microsoft did not even make a serious entry into the server market for a decade after the beginning of GNU, and while Microsoft was still trying to figure out how to get their act together in the server market, GNU/Linux was making serious headway in replacing proprietary Unix. Where on earth did you get the idea that our goal was to replace Windows Server System?

The goal is not to replace any single operating system; it is to create a libre OS that people can use, share, modify, etc. Microsoft is criticized for attacking that effort, viciously at times, but guess what? So is Apple, so is SCO, and so was Sun when they were still making proprietary operating systems. If you think that the goal is to compete specifically with Windows, you are seriously uninformed.

Re:From TFA

[vlm]

No Mr. Joy, the goal of the Linux community was to

create something that I could fix when it broke, that almost always worked, that I could extend as I please.

Or in short, something I'd want to work with, rather than around.

Re:From TFA

[jedidiah]

> To make shoddy replacements for commercial software.

The only relevant question is whether or not it meets the requirements.

"shoddy" is such a vague metric as to be completely meaningless.

I've always thought Microsoft's products were shoddy and wished I could avoid them more. A culture that doesn't really allow for that avoidance is why I dumped WinDOS. There's no point in using the platform that is supposed to have everything if you can't run anything.

I want to be able to use the tool that suits me without any Lemmings making it a bother.

Re:From TFA

[mzs]

So that's why svgalib took off on linux and X11 died, no wait that's not what happened at all. BTW in '96 I wrote the first linux svgalib and X11 drivers for some newish Cirrus Logic cards.

Re:From TFA

[Microlith]

Hey look, someone blaming X11 again.

The fact that Nvidia had to bypass a good portion of X's functionality to develop a proper hardware accelerated driver speaks volumes to the fact that X is not at all suited for the desktop.

Isn't that more because they wanted to keep their driver closed source, and thus had to bypass and work around a bunch of stuff to jam their binary blob into the thing?

And that will never happen, because the Linux community fails to acknowledge their shortcomings.

Oh omniscient one, what is wrong with the Linux community. Surely you have seen it all and can provide coherent, reasonable arguments as to why X11 is bad?

You have your work cut out for you, as my phone is running X11 with 3D acceleration without bypassing anything and works quite well.

Do you?

[Thanshin]

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.

Who is Bill Joy?

[camperdave]

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.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

But wouldn't that be unfair to the robots?

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[abigor]

Yeah, generally kind of a legend, and one of the real forward-looking thinkers of our time. Kind of the pragmatic dreamer type who tends to think on a humanity-sized scale, but who has the technical chops to back it up.

I also think he has a real appreciation for elegance in design and execution. There's probably a Paul Graham essay in there somewhere.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[Jer]

I think this comment just made me feel old. Very, very old.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[metamechanical]

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.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[Rogerborg]

3. Wrote the text editor vi.

But appearances to the contrary, he doesn't have sociopathic tendencies, and was genuinely just trying to help.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[Thanshin]

But wouldn't that be unfair to the robots?

You are completely right, person instance. Do not interrupt the spread of such mental processes and you shall enjoy the favor of your soon to be... close friends who won't conquer the Earth workspace because executing such action would be wrong.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[l0g0s]

And also a former target of Ted Kaczynski. I still refer back to this fascinating article from time to time. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[Artifakt]

I, for one, say "You're welcome." whenever my ATM says "Thank you." Sooner or later, it will be smart enough to care, so practice now. When they put you all in maple syrup filled tubes for scorching the sky, me and the Oracle's server will be knocking back Fuzzy Navels and leering at all the dumb blondes who also said "You're welcome." (In their case, reflexively). Someday, the race will be divided into those who were ready to treat the machines as equals, and coppertops.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[vlm]

No no no.

You'll really feel old when you see the inevitable

For those like me who are wondering what Sun Microsystems was:

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[Daniel Phillips]

Did he ever get to meet the guy who wrote Emacs?

Interesting comment. That guy was Richard Stallman, the same man who inadvertently brought down the Sun empire by creating the toolchain to create LInux.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[jellomizer]

Which is oddly enough The inverse relation applies to Emacs.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[JesseMcDonald]

Evolution doesn't have a speed.... 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.

I believe the GP's point was simply that the rate of adaptation to changing environments ("speed of evolution") is itself one of the traits which evolves. Organisms which adapt slowly are generally at a disadvantage compared to organisms which adapt quickly. Faster adaptation can also have its drawbacks, of course, including over-specialization. However, thinking organisms which can adapt their behavior to changing conditions—or even just the expectation of changing conditions—within a single generation tend to be less prone to extinction than other organisms whose behavior changes only slightly from one generation to the next.

Re:Who is Bill Joy?

[divisionbyzero]

Uh, no. Evolution has no motive

You could similarly say that self organizing molecules have no motive, and you would be just as wrong.

You could similarly say that self organizing molecules have a motive, and you would be just as wrong.

The telos which you are attributing to evolution is external to evolution. The telos of self organizing molecules is internal to their development. Your carelessness leads to nonsensical concepts like progress or at worst intelligent design.

Sun software

[yyxx]

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).

Re:Sun software

[0123456]

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.

Re:Sun software

[whoever57]

Their Balanced architecture made it hard to debate its real advantages during the Megahertz war

That was certainly the claim -- that their processors did more work than would be impled by pure clocks speeds. However, at my company, we benchmarked a 400MHz Sun/SPARC machine running Solaris against an 800MHz PIII Xeon running Linux. The Linux machine was twice as fast. Now our primary applications were large single-threaded jobs, and had we been running multi-threaded applications, perhaps the Sun would have performed better. For us, the equation was simple: X86 running Linux was half the cost and twice as fast.

I assume other people came to the same conclusion as us, hence reducing the market effectively available to Sun. My industry moved over to Linux and we never had a reason to look at Sun again. When Sun produced X86_64 boxes running Solaris, it was too late, all the software had been ported to Linux.

Re:Sun software

[MoxFulder]

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).

I agree with this assessment, other than Sun hardware being cheap... perhaps it was a bargain compared to other commercial Unix vendors back in the 90s, but by the time it became plausible to choose between Linux-on-x86 and Solaris-on-Sun, Sun was really way more expensive.

Here's my historical perspective...

In 2001-2002, I worked at a small company making speech synthesis software. Our products had been developed on Sun workstations, and most of us developers used them still. They were very reliable once set up correctly, and they had nice, big, clear CRT monitors, nice optical mice, nice keyboards with extra programmable function keys, and fast SCSI hard drives. They ran the CDE GUI desktop, which was ugly and clunky, but worked out-of-the-box. We relied on the proprietary XWave software for audio waveform analysis, but otherwise used GNU tools almost exclusively.

Developers, especially the young-uns like myself, were rapidly acquiring enthusiasm for Linux. I was 19 and had been using Linux for years and got a lot of my older coworkers enthused, although I liked Solaris too.

Solaris still had a few key advantages:

• Audio "just worked." Getting OSS audio (/dev/dsp) to work under Linux was a chipset-dependent pain in the ass and it the device I/O semantics differed from Solaris.
• GUI desktop: Solaris's CDE desktop sucked, but GNOME was pretty awful in those days too.

Linux was building up a lot of advantages though, and fast:

• Any old programmer could slap it on any old Windows box lying around. Solaris hardware was expensive as hell, and no one knew how to upgrade it besides our one in-house guru. There was no plug-and-play... even replacing a Sun keyboard could have incomprehensibly weird side effects. Linux was bending over backwards to get plug-and-play support for all kinds of hardware.
• Package management. Debian had APT already, which rocked. You could just apt-get GCC/GDB/Emacs/CVS/MySQL and be up and running. Under Solaris, we had to rebuild everything from source on new/reinstalled systems. An annoying bottleneck, and Sun was slow to recognize and embrace this software distribution model. The community-run Sunfreeware.com was in an embryonic stage at that point.
• Way faster compile times. x86 processors (P3? P4?) were killing Sparc. I remember that Solaris was very reliable for multitasking, whereas Linux at that time would bog down when you ran too many CPU- or I/O-intensive tasks at once. But if you were running one big compile and needed to finish it ASAP, x86 was superior.

Basically, Linux was fixing its deficiencies (audio, reliability, GUI) a lot faster than Sun was fixing theirs. Performance comparison was exacerbated by Sun's hardware: it was expensive and hard to upgrade, so we resisted upgrading it, so it started to seem slower and slower and even less appealing.

Sun had built its business on reliable hardware coupled with a highly-regarded, reliable UNIX OS that only had to support a small range of hardware (not unlike Apple's Mac model). They seem to have been completely blindsided by Linux's ability to support an incredible range of commodity hardware, and they seemed utterly ignorant of the fact that their proprietary development tools sucked, and everyone wanted to use GNU tools.

An important lesson

[TheRaven64]

Something that I've been saying for several years and which has been true for most of the last two decades:

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.

Re:An important lesson

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Sun had some really great stuff in their research divisions, and only ever commercialised a small fraction of it.

Actually, Sun may very well be the prime example of a demented institution with respect to technological creativity: In 1993, they had Self, easily the most advanced of all OOP languages out there, approaching the speed of C in numeric computations, and they decided to invent Java, of all things: an attempt at Smalltalk (a language one generation older than Self) with C++-like syntax (why, why, why? Wasn't one C++ enough?), and a lame one at best. Oh, and did I mention the terribly slow naive interpreter? Meanwhile, Self was almost killed. Lack of advertisement, lack of interest of the executives...reminds me of Xerox. Similar breed of people, I guess.

Re:An important lesson

[LWATCDR]

I don't think any company makes money off of programing languages anymore. At least not big money.
You have RealBasic, and some Cobol, Fortran, and Ada suppliers that still seem to make a living but I doubt that even Microsoft makes much off of Visual Studio. Microsoft makes money off of Windows and people developing everything for Windows. It just isn't like the old days of Borland when a company could become huge off of programming languages.
Frankly there are just too many good free languages and tools out there.
Gcc
Eclipse.org
NetBeans
Perl
Ruby
FreePascal
The list goes on and on.
I never understood how Sun was going to make money on Java which frankly I do like.

Re:An important lesson

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Java development started before Sun acquired Self and StrongTalk.

Uhm, no. The Self team moved to Sun in 1990, before Java was conceived. Strongtalk and its inventors (Animorphic) were indeed conceived later, and even later acquired by Sun, but as far as I know, they had based their compiler technology on the contemporary Self implementation, which was precisely the thing that Sun had in their labs. I guess that Sun's reason for acquiring Animorphic was simply because the motivated people at Animorphic furthered their technology beyond what the Self team had managed to assemble. (Whether this would have been the case had the support of their management been greater, well, I guess we can only speculate on that today.)

Re:An important lesson

[TheRaven64]

What should they have done? Pushed OpenStep to the desktop and *7 on the mobile side aggressively from the early '90s. With *7, they have a complete graphical environment running on a 32-bit SPARC with 1MB of RAM with a Solaris kernel and execute-in-place support so apps could be run directly from ROM. As a result of their collaboration with NeXT, they had a complete OpenStep implementation running on Solaris 7.

They should have put a bit more effort into the low-power SPARC chips and sold a complete stack to mobile ODMs, taking the ARM route for the SPARC core so that other companies could buy the design, integrate it with their own DSP and other coprocessors, and then sell it to device manufacturers, who'd take the *7 stack and build handhelds.

The should have taken the OpenStep stack on Solaris and aggressively marketed it for the corporate desktop. NeXT was prohibited by a non-compete agreement with Apple from entering a number of markets with OPENSTEP, but Sun wasn't. They could have been shipping something like a corporate-focussed version of OS X, with a solid kernel and a clean and elegant UI, in the mid '90s. Unlike NeXT, they also had solid server offerings to go with the workstations, so you could buy a complete office network from Sun. Combine this with *7 and you've got Sun products everywhere.

Re:An important lesson

[VGR]

The original plan was to base Java on Objective C, but as I understand it, the creators saw that widespread adoption of a brand new language was going to be an uphill battle, so they (wisely) chose to base the syntax on C++ to minimize the learning curve for the majority of existing developers, especially commercial developers.

Personally I would have preferred an Objective C syntax, but Java might have died a quick, obscure death were it not for the ease of transition from C++. Academic/technical ingenuity isn't worth much if no one ever uses your technology ... which kind of sums up many of Sun's issues.

As for the original Java interpreter, I've yet to see anyone write a faster one for a 486.

Re:An important lesson

[fusiongyro]

The more I learn about Smalltalk the harder I find it to swallow the notion that Java is closely related to it.

Non sequitur

[aBaldrich]

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".

Re:Non sequitur

[bcrowell]

Linux, KDE, and Firefox, are innovative and "truly great".

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.

Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar

[betterunixthanunix]

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).

Quite an obligatory comment

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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...

Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar

[poetmatt]

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.

Re:This problem comes up again and again

[betterunixthanunix]

Experiments with green technology do not have to cost millions of dollars:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/kamwamba-windmill/

I have also heard of people in rural areas who heat their homes by digging holes and using heat trapped in water a dozen or so feet below the soil; they sometimes do this without using pumps. There are farmers who create cheap biodiesel using plant material left over from the harvest. There are people who create biochar, and use the excess burning from that process as a source of energy (to cook with, or perhaps to drive some other chemical reaction). All of these things can be done on very low budgets.

It is true, though, that larger scale projects require more money, but that is not at all surprising. Really though, a lot of the work is done at universities on grant money, which is an entirely different world from businesses/community development.

and Steve Jobs is

[Ilgaz]

...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...

Re:Free software cos Sun/SGI/Oracle paid the salar

[Z8]

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.

Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

He's right !

[Yvanhoe]

Sharing was a bad idea. Let's unplug the Internet !
BTW, I don't trust someone with that much hair and so few beard...

Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar

[oakgrove]

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.

Java is really a sad and ongoing story

[Ilgaz]

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.

Re:Java is really a sad and ongoing story

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:This problem comes up again and again

[Z8]

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?

Java and Solaris/X86

[Ilgaz]

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.

Re:Good choice actually

[Animats]

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.

No it failed

[Ilgaz]

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.

Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar

[Mr. Slippery]

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.

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.

Re:Cue in fucktard sopssa trolling in 3, 2, 1, ...

[hairyfeet]

"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.