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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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: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: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.

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

[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.

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?

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: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: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.