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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.

3 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. From TFA by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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
  2. 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!
  3. Sun software by yyxx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).