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Upside Editorial Piece on Sun and Open Source
netkatze writes " Upside did a recent article in the op-ed section. " It's an interesting piece, taking on the notion of Sun being a partner with the open source movement, with the conclusion that Sun doesn't "get it." It's been an ongoing debate within the community - is Sun an enemy? Or is the enemy of my enemy my friend?
No, Sun is not the enemy of Linux. Linux is the enemy of Sun (if either is an enemy). Yes, there is a difference.
this is all just ballyhoo really, suns community license sucks crap and everyone knows it.
No, it's very good for what it's soposed to du, just like GPL is good for what it's soposed to do.
they *know* that their os is completely inferior to linux, lacks scalability, lacks stability, and completely lacks security.
Quite the oposite I'm afraid, everything you wrote is wrong.
they used to have some cool hardware, but now nothing in their enterprise line can even hold a candle to Intel XEON servers. in some recent real world tests, we've seen quad intel xeon machines outperform a 30 cpu E6500 by over 250%
WOW! THAT'S WHAT I CALL A TROLL, LET'S KILL IT!
with oracle8i on linux along with other major vendors, there is simply no reason to buy overpriced inferior hardware that runs an admittedly crappy os.
Yeahm right, that's why Oracle is best friends with Sun?
the verdict is in, linux has won the unix war. within 2 years all the inferior comercial closed source os's will be gone. you cannot compete with open source quality.
What drugs are you on? Let me have some, I want to live in a lie too...
This sounds like the damned if you do or don't case. Sun is getting falmed for publishing the source.
/. too I have seen posts like this site runs redhat or blah. Where is the "this site runs linux". Most of the stuff for linux is beta or a very premeture release and don't match up to the corporate standards that Sun has set. I have used both Solaris and Linux to say that.
Sun is a buisness, Linux is not. Linux was meant to be free and Solaris is a licensed copyrighted product and is Suns flagship software. Asking Sun to give up control is a funny.
Lets look at linux. I use only linux at home and have tried almost all Distros. I have noticed that each distro does what it pleases. Now all rpms on net the are glibc 2.1 or libc5 and other distros that use rpms as thier base packages are screwed and their users are screwed too. So ethier run Redhat, compile and use the glibc 2.1 libraries or compile the packages yourself. Ok for some one experienced in linux can do the last two. But joe shmoe newbie will choose number one or Winbloze. Open source severely lacks standrads.
And for most users and newbies Gnu\linux doesn't exist, there are only distros and on
Every Solaris system on the market is the same standard build and no confusion takes place . And I am not forced to run a particular distro because of incompatabilities. Open source Solaris and you get a bunch of variants and how will Sun benefit form Open sourcing it when they have lost control of Solaris thier flagship.
One more thing that bothers me is the notion people have that Sun is trying to push thin clients on the home market. Sun was never intersted in the home market for their stations. Thin clients are for corporate use and Sun claim that. No pc running which ever Os can compete with a sun workstation or server. The architectures are completely different. 64 bit RISC vs 32bit hybrid.
2-64, 64 bit CPUS vs 2-16, 32 bit CPUS. 128MB-64GB ram vs 128MB-4GB ram . Where is the comaprison. Sun is an Enterprise and corporate player. Linux in its current state is ok for home use and workgroup use. Thats the truth. The Current kernel doesn't support a multithreaded TCP/IP stack or many other critical OS features that Solaris already has. Linux has a long way to evolve and I am an avid suporter of it and use it mind you. But I believe that everything hs its place. Linux at home and workstation and a fat Sun sever doing my enterprise stuff. And winBloze for my grandma and kids.
I support Open source completely. But asking a Company to give up its bread winner is ludicrous.
The most vocal people are also generally the most ignorant. That is, at least, in an open forum like slashdot. I, myself, have nothing against other OS's, I just highly prefer those that are open source (linux, *bsd). Most people who run linux, that have been for a long time, have done so because they *enjoy* hacking code, and being in control of their OS, not the other way around... these are also the people that, unfortunately, are too busy doing just that to spend all day reading the 200+ comments of each article on slashdot. On the other hand, those people that hate [pick an OS] and are using linux because [it's an alternative | it runs better | it has a cooler name] are generally the same people that spend all day at work playing solitaire, browsing the web, etc, and have lots of time to kill. These will be the most vocal linux advocates, unfortunately. This is, of course, generally what I've found, and is by no means a rule set in stone.
-dilinger
Rock ON, man. To call microsoft, sun, or anyone an enemy is simply to seek to their level.
The article is poorly written, to pander to
:-)
the extremist fanatical nazis in the opensource
movement.
Sun is doing a very useful thing for the java
community, and at the same time protecting
its resources.
Here's a summary of an email I sent to the author.
People are getting fanatical about "IT MUST BE
OPEN SOURCE", without thinking WHY it should be.
The only reason you should care about sun's
no-commercial-use restriction on their jvm, is
if you are a COMMERCIAL jvm writer yourself.
If you are, dont expect sun to do all your work
for you.
On the other hand, if you just write java
programs, then their "JCSL" license can benefit
you. If you hit a bug in sun's JVM, and you are
a good coder, you can possibly find the fix
yourself and submit it back to sun.
This is a Good Thing!
This is the primary reason that 'Open Source'
can lead to less buggy code.
The FUD in the article says "YOU'll HAVE TO PAY
FOR YOUR OWN WORK!".
But in reality, how many java coders are distributing a JVM with their code? Almost none.
Even among that small percentage:
You already have a license agreement with someone.
If you are licensing sun's JVM, you wont have
to pay any extra.
If you are licensing someone else's JVM, then
what are you doing submitting bugfixes to sun?
So there is still no loss, and a large possible gain to the java comunity in general, if you
contribute to fixing sun's jvm.
(Or IBM's, or whoever. )
My typical advice is: find out what your core strength is, that advantage that you make your money off of. Keep that. Then, free up as much of the rest that is more peripheral, not really a competitive advantage or quite possibly commodity technology.
When you open something, don't do it half assed. Make it completely open (open standard, L/GPL Source, BSD source).
Don't try to flimflam the community making yourself seem more open than you really are. If you can't open something all the way, don't bother. Stay a strictly proprietary company if your business model requires it.
You'll annoy less people that way in the end.
i'd say a little of both, but mr. joy, imho, is the more creative of the two...
we have NFS , RPC,NIS, libm and other open standards due to Sun, if it changed it mind it is still better than DEC, SCO, IBM that never openned the good stuff Did you mind linux without nfs or nis?
Linux was fun, some time ago. More and more though saying anything that does not fit into the mainstreams opinion is short of life threatening.
Yes, Linux has to go away. It has to to make room for something better, but most of you do not seem to want that. Clinging to what is "right", your own little world. This is not a movement anymore, this has become a religion. No room left for anything else, choke them to death those bastards.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
People never seem to change. Flamebait, I do know, what else could it be, yes.
Solaris has a far better SMP than linux or NT we should learn from them, not fight
Maybe offtopic at this point, but ok. I agree totally. I don't use Linux because of some hatred toward Microsoft(and I don't remember it being that way a few years ago, though I wasn't lurking here either). I use it because I like it. Also because it is teaching me the ways of Unix. The OS that controls a signifigant portion of the internet, the OS that Linux is based on. It also runs on my home computer. I like that :) Now I can pretend to have an Ultra-Sparq without having to sell organs to buy it.
And as to why all these Screeming-Mimis want to take on the tone of "alt.mac.advocacy" is beyond me. Noone cares what benchmarks prove what to whom. REALLY. In order to sell many of my friends on Linux all I had to do was point out that this 1 CD I could give them had as much S/W on it as their entire warez libraries, and that P3 i.d. chip in their computer would never turn them in to M.S. over it. A lot of them like it. Some more want to wait until Winmodems work under it. Some others like [abort][retry][fail] for their computer. All good to me.
Hell, as far as I'm concerned OSS is going to grow if only due to population growth, and there'll still be plenty of people who use, like and write apps for it. As far as Sun goes, I really would like to know what their programmers think about open source. Not their managers, or PR people, the coders. I think that they would benefit a lot from getting a *smoking* linux/sparq system going but then maybe that's not their agenda (the sun-ray systems look like they could be real useful in school/work environments like where I work, where people are Fscking the machines all the damn time). Either way they'll do what they do. The best thing is to be polite, and insistant that they look a little closer at what they and the OSS community are doing different, and let them know that OSS will attract a lot more support than anything else...
Disclaimer:
Posting anonymouse b/c I'm drunk and stuff
what IS a PHB anyway?
Exactly. However, these people already are there and doing a pretty good job of it, by and large. However they are also not most of the people who most fequently scream "Mr. Gates, tear down this WALL!" Them's the ones us linux lovers gotta worry about...
P.S. a PRE tag would be excellent for us linux-using, gpm-style copy and pasting fools to quote folks with, just a suggestion
Thank you for a very insightful post.
Why hasn't this been moderated up? It's by far the best comment so far.
I do not see how you can consider M$ an enemy of Linux, but SUN I can see, if only in the business forum, after all who can afford SUN hardware for home use :) Microsoft should be Linux's best friend. What better advertisiment for LINUX can u have than a CRAPPY M$ system. If M$ OS was good there is no way LINUX would even be close to the success is is today....By the same token does this make crApple an enemy of linux, or just their own worst enemy ? :)
Jim, I'd like to disagree with you. In modern world software sells hardware, not vice versa. If Micro$oft tells one day that W2K will work not on x86 but PowerPC, Intel & AMD will go down the drain. This is why the biggest obstacle for Linux on desktop is not Windows monopoly but Word and Excel. Speaking of Sun, they have something no other big UNIX vendor does. They have THE LEADING UNIX. If you look at the applications side, you'll often see "NT and Solaris supported, with AIX and HP-UX versions in works". Or just "NT & Solaris". In the country, where managers think about VIABILITY more than about cost, Sun's chips can be slower than Intel's and cost more. THEY DO THE JOB. And even though Alpha is the fastest chip, it won't win the wars, because of the DOUBTS IN IT'S FUTURE! If Sun would own Alpha, they would be the king of the hill. And it's Sun's commitment and Solaris's position of the market leader that make software vendors use it and release their products for Solaris first of all. Eugene liedetector@NOSPAM.netscape.net
Old
As far as I'm concerned, not having the source avalible, and not being allowed to give my friend a copy, means that the software sucks...
While the Community License isn't the same as the GPL license, it is a huge deal. If you puchase commercial software it's a big bonus to get the source with out having to pay big bucks for a source code agreement. If you don't buy their software then you really aren't interested in their source code
Face it, many things will have to change before all software has open source to everyone and companies make their money from support and other things. In fact, it's likely never to happen. You do have to feed your family and you can't give everything away. True OpenSource makes sense for some software and doesn't for other software. Even ESR (not that he's the final word) agrees that certain software just won't work well with the OpenSource philosophy.
Sun has done the right thing. Just don't fool yourself that their Community License is OpenSource and don't let their marketing drones fool you.
According to the Register he had a choice. http://theregister.co.uk/991015-000025.html
Remember, Sun aka SUNW is in business to make a profit for it's stock holders much the same way that Microsoft aka MSFT is in business to make a profit for their stock holders. Both of the companies have exhibited similar traits with regard to their business practices, both are guilt of some rather sleazy practices, and both want nothing more than to hold a monopoly and charge you as much money as possible for you to use their product.
Do not for a second believe either company is a "friend" to opensource. This is business, and Sun is well aware that Linux is eating its lunch at the low end. The SCSL is a rather pathetic attempt to forestall some of this effect, but when you look at the SCSL closely, you see it inhibits you from doing anything remotely useful with the source. So I cannot extend missing functionality. I cannot tune the rather pathetic performing OS. There are a whole bunch of things I cannot do with this license. This is free?
No. It isn't. The purpose of open-source is to generate code that doesn't suck. The purpose of SUNW is to make money at selling things. These purposes can be in line, but they are definitely not when it comes to SUNW's activities/stances.
If SUNW were so interested in Open-Source, and making sure that open-standards are the norm, then why have they strong-armed control over Java? There was a point a year or so ago where Java was the API du-jour, and the API was quite fluid. Now it is "out" with no ISO/ANSI standard to make sure it is really open, with many serious deficiencies that need fixing (e.g. its numerical model is horribly horribly broken, and generally regarded as useless for HPC by numerical analysts everywhere, yet SUNW sees money in them thar hills and pushes the technology there even though it is inappropriate). Yet, Java has the SCSL. So you really cannot fix the bugs in it. You really cannot extend it in useful ways. You really cannot do anything but what SUNW lets you...
So how is this different than MSFT? Scott McNealy seems to have fantasies of being Bill Gates. And he is doing everything in his power to make it so that commercial Unix comes on SUNW hardware. Despite the fact that that hardware/software isn't nearly as good as the stuff from their competitors across the garbage dump, or up the street in Palo Alto. If you use SGI, HP, and Sun gear, you understand what I mean. But in the end it doesn't matter, as HP is clueless on marketing, and SGI regularly aims shotguns at its head. What SUNW succeeds at is outmarketing its competition. Its hardware isn't better. Its software most definitely isn't better.
Now HP and SGI have linux strategies (well SGI does, and it is quite good). SUNW needs to respond. After all, it cannot be out marketed, as marketing is the mechanism by which the fools who buy the SUNW hardware are convinced that they should be seperated from their money. Just like with MSFT, SUNW wants a monopoly, they want control (just look at Java, NFS, NIS+, etc.).
SUNW is no friend to the open source movement. SUNW is no friend to Linux. They properly view Linux as a competitor. The Open-source issue seems to be the thing they cannot get their arms around. Understand this the next time you need to decide upon a platform to do something with... try to stick with those who are friends to the movement, not those who wish it would go away and pay lip service.
After all, SUNW would have never done the SCSL if it wasn't concerned about Linux. It has reason to worry. Linux can do pretty much the same job as solaris at a fraction of the cost of hardware, software, and maintainence... which is where SUNW makes its money. Linux takes that revenue stream away from them. They are afraid.
They should be. Support the companies that openly and without reservation support Linux and open source: VAlinux, RedHat, Mandrake, SUSE, Caldera, SGI, IBM. Vote with your dollars.
They haven't made anything open source, let alone "in pieces". The SCL seems to be fooling you.
My first First Post?
AOL scares me. I think they're pretty much the only company right now that has the power to go to war with Microsoft and really hurt Microsoft a lot. The problem is, I don't know if they're going to attack Microsoft, or join forces with them. I hope for the former, it'd be a lot of fun to watch.
And Sun, I think, is doing a lot of good things (open source is great!) but I think they don't get a lot. Networking is not all that! Networking is great, but we still need individual computers too.
I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what they do over the next year. I'm just gonna sit back and watch.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The author states "Eight months ago Linux didn't even exist as far as it was concerned. Now it's a key stepping stone in its 'network is the computer' strategy. Not bad for a slow-moving high-tech behemoth." "...and he's right. Sun reacted reasonably quickly to the Linux phenomenon and has attempted (for whatever their goal) to position themselves in a positive light. Interesting to say the least.
Werd.
Your idealistic argument feels good. however, it's un-realistic. If you define the success of Linux as I do: it's ability to be used in your workplace as a viable alternative to anything else out there, then the ignoarance and misunderstanding of major companies CAN move mountains. What's worse, it's MY mountain they can move. So for me, Sun it the enemy...maybe not THE enemy...but an enemy non the less.
Werd.
We're here for the fun of it. We're here because we can. We're here because Linux is cool.
Don't lose sight of this!
Does it =matter= if Sun doesn't "understand" Open Source? Really? In the end, no it doesn't. Linux will stand or fall on it's own, no matter WHAT Sun or Microsoft do. The only people it makes any difference to at all are those emploed BY Sun. It will be THEY who are affected by Sun's stance, not GNU, not Linux, not the OSI, not even the moons of Saturn.
If Sun =DO= understand Open Source, does =that= really matter? Nope! Linux, the FSF, the Apache lot, etc, will continue just the same. Sun's understanding, as with it's ignorance, affects only Sun.
If Sun go the OSS route, they have long-term survival. If they don't, they won't. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Their call, their consequence, and nobody else need be affected one little bit.
Quite an ego-deflator, to know that the major decisions of top-ranking companies don't move mountains, and barely dent mole-hills. But one I think they're in need of.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As far as Star Office goes, it's way to early to tell. Sun is in about the same position right now as Netscape was at the beginning of the "browser wars." They have a product (office suite) that is in high demand, and they are "giving it away." Sounds a lot like Netscape.
But, consider this: Netscape said they were going to go "open source" and yet Mozilla is totally original based, and not based on fixing/bugtracking the v.1.0-v.4.7 code tree. Yet, Netscape seems to have been highly praised by the open source community. Add to that, there is almost NO ONE who doesn't know what "Netscape" is, and v.5.0 to rise up from the Mozilla code is one of the most highly anticipated projects in existance.
So, Sun comes along, and opens up the code to Star Office from the get go. The minute they get it, they let the code out. Sure, the licence is not all that it could be. But, Netscape didn't even do this much when they went the "open source" route.
My point is, it's too early to judge where Sun is going to go with Star Office. Star Office is a high profile product for Sun, in that it is fully functional, runs on NT, Windows 95, Windows 98, Linux, FreeBSD (with a little work), Solaris, and Solaris x86. Even with a "poor" licence from the "open source" standpoint, they have a broad platform base for a solid product. If they port the Office Suite to Macintosh, IRIX, and Tru64-UNIX, there won't be much that Star Office won't run on.
Then, with an unbelievably broad platform base for a high demand product (an office suite) there isn't much excuse for anyone to not use Star Office which is free rather than pay $300 for Microsoft Office.
First impression, Why support hardware/os's that are not Sun/Solaris? Because once you have a accepted Office Suite that everyone is using, there will be almost no resistance to companies going the way of Heavy Duty Server/Thin Client products. Put Star Office on the server, everyone runs it from an Xterminal. What resistance is there left to not use UNIX, with Sun being UNIX's steller star that made it all possable.
No excuse that "people are use to Windows or Macintosh, and MicroSoft Office. Retraining will cost too much to convert to Unix and client/server technology." They will already have the widespread use of the same office suite that will run on the new technology.
THAT is what it's all about people! It's not about Sun getting into the software market with this new Office Suite. It's about Sun using this new office suite as a spring board to launch the Server/Client technology they are dying to sell. AND, that's why it's Way to early to tell what to think about Sun's stance on Open Source. If Sun sees that completely GPL'ing Star Office would give it the broad based usage they want, they will probably do it. But it's still too early for THEM to make that decision, because they are trying to figure out the best way to get Star Office to replace MicroSoft Office in the general user base.
If Sun simply wanted to sell big servers to run Star Portal on while reducing any proprietary advantage MSOffice has then it would have put at least the filters of Star Office under a BSD license.
Yes I love the GPL as much as the rest of you but if the point is to have everyone able to read/write MSOffice files without paying Bill then the best filters around should be included in every other app. They also need an army of developers to keep them working ( Ask Mr. Allison how many times SMB has changed and how much of his work is just making SaMBa run with the
many versions. )
The only reason Sun is holding SO under the SCSL is so that they can make money licensing it to people and also take it off the market if that suites it's purposes.
It won't work. I know this. Sun doesn't. Life sucks.
The only ways to knock a dominant "standard" product off it's pedestal are to match it byte for byte or to produce a new standard that everybody but the existing leader is using.
That's why the IBM compatible PC whipped the far superior Mac.
That's why USB is far more popular than Firewire.
That's why Windows is the #1 OS in market share.
It's also why Linux will beet both Sun and MS.
The quality of Sun products will only serve to delay it's decline. The SCSL is a boon to all network admins who already depend on Solaris to run the business. Source code that you can patch for performance/bug fixing on a per server basis is better than no source at all. This doesn't compare to what you get with Linux or *BSD but it's a hell of a lot better than Aix or Irix.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Sun is merely jumping on a popular bandwagon. True, they could have used a different "term" for their "open-sourcing" of their code. (IMHO) they are looking for a few things:
1.) More money/marketshare. (Open Source is the buzz right now. Their jumping on the bandwagon should not surprise.)
2.) Publicity. (The old addage, "any publicity is good publicity" certainly applies here.)
3.) More eyeballs debugging and creating better code. (Of course the big downside is, Sun mostly benefits from this. However, their consumers will benefit from better code with fewer bugs in the long run.)
It should not be surprising that Sun has done this. They are, in fact, a business. They have bills to pay and families to feed. We may not be happy with Sun's tactics, but it only lends creedance to the fact that Open Source is a better development model. Also, we cannot expect everyone to have the same attitude when it comes to the "gift culture." Some people and/or companies are bound to take advantage of a good thing when they see it.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I'd like to suggest that the open source community adopt the phrase "visible source" for licenses such as Sun's Community Source License which provide source code, but place restrictive terms on redistribution.
Visible source implies, correctly, that "you can look for free, but touching will cost you."
We could use this distinction to educate the media about the difference between visible and open source. As in, "We applaud Sun for making the source for Solaris visible, and encourage them to go all the way and make it open as well."
Generally, the concept of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a shortsided, usually unethical way to look at things. IMHO it reeks of seeing the whole situation as a race to screw the other guy or be screwed, rather than to either go about your business separately, or cooporate towards a solution.
You have to be patient with the suits, or with the ironed T-shirts (is that what roblimo called them?) because they learn slowly, but are not impervious to good ideas.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Sun almost Gets It, but not quite. They were founded on the premise of utilizing an open software platform, but (originally) on highly closed systems. Then they opened up the processor architecture, but held onto the software (which, by then, was a pretty funky Unix). Now, they agonize over whether or not to open up the crown jewels, but more as a reflex to the two latest driving factors in their business:
1: Hatred of Microsoft
2: Fear of Linux
You know, there's a lot of parallels between Apple and Sun when it comes to being control freaks at the corporate level if you think about it... Neither one is quite willing to give up those family jewels to the world, but they want desperately to reap the benefits of openness anyways.
And both companies come heart-breakingly close to Getting It, only to shy away. "Open" Solaris? Whoopee. Put it under a GPL-like or even a BSD license, now we're talking. Other than that, thanks for playing - you lose.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
that's the problem with you guys. You think you have a good thing with open source -and it is. It helps increase the quality of certain things. But you have an agenda with the GPL and if a company like Sun doesn't subscribe to every detail of your "revolution" then they are evil. Well guess what? Sometimes it's better to listen to your customers and deliver on quality products instead of some kind of ideological revolution. There are many open source products that are just crap. That's the real enemy to open source. If I wanted crap I'd just use Microsoft instead of going out of my way to use a different platform that gives me the same junk. Open source is just a means to the goal of better software. If Sun can achieve this in another way then that's fine by me.
---
"The goal is "Software that doesn't suck". Personally, I don't care who writes it, or what it is. It could be Windows. It could be Solaris. It could be Linux. Who cares? I just want it to work well, without being a hassle."
Sorry if this sounds a bit like a rant, but I just wanted to point out that I totally disagree with that sentence.
For me, the freedom aspects of free software are far more important than having the technically best sollution. Actually, I'm using Linux even thought it's a far worse technical sollution for me and my needs than NT4. With Linux I have to deal with a lot more problems and frustration, for example:
1. I'm really missing a good C Development environment. MS Dev is by _far_ the most comprehensive, feature filled and well thought out development environment I've ever used. When using my current development tools on Linux it feels like I'm puffing along in a tractor when I could have been crusing along in a Ferrari and it actually affects the development time of my projects. KDevelop is on the right track, but still have a lot of things to sort out.
2. The lack of good desktop applications is still quite bad, although it's improving all the time. I sometimes feel like I'm in chains because I know of a tool that will do exactly what I want with only a few mouse clicks, it's there, right outside my reach because it runs on Windows, not Linux.
3. Everytime I buy some new hardware I have to first check if there are drivers for it. Is that scanner/printer/soundcard/camera/PDA supported?
4. GAMES. I'm missing all the games I used to play on my Windows machines! :(
So why do I put up with all this? Windows NT would definitely be a better technical sollution for _my_ personal needs and I would just have to borrow a copy from work and install it and everything would be just fine.
Simply because I value the freedom aspects of free software. I want to use a system and programs that I can tinker with as much as I want. I want to use programs that I can give to my friends. I don't want to be depending on a big software company who technically owns the software I'm just licensed to use. I don't want to pay $$$ every year to keep my word processor up to date so I can read the documents people send me. I don't want to be depending on the "goodwill" of a company for fixing that bug that really doesn't affect their sales but I desperately need to get fixed. I don't want to live in a world where the producers constantly makes two versions of the same program (one that's rediculously expensive and the other one is seriously downgraded) simply because they make slightly more money that way. I don't want to live in a world where developing countries on the edge of having a technological and economical breakthrough are hold back because greedy software companies require them to pay rediculously high software licenses. And I don't want a small number of software companies to be in charge of the infrastructure of tomorrow by holding the right to key software components or software patents since that would seriously degrade whatever is left of our democracy.
Of course I also want software that doesn't suck, but for me the quality of the software is really secondary to the freedom aspects (as long as it's not totally useless) which is proven by the fact that I'm using Linux as my desktop computer even though it isn't the best technical sollution for me _yet_. If Open Source development in the end leads to better software than the proprietary software model (which I also believe it does) that would be great, but it's not my main reason for supporting and taking part in the movement.
Ok, sorry for the rant and sorry if I offended somebody, but I really needed to get that of my chest. Otherwise I totally agree that we should worry less about enemies and concentrate more on getting our programs better.
Incase you haven't noticed, Sun seems to have scheduled releases - ie, they aren't making everything "open source" at once - they're doing it in pieces to get the maximum amount of press. And if you read their licensing, it seems that they are still hesitant to 'let go' of it once and for all and go free software. They need that control so that if open source falters or something, they can pull everything back without much loss.
It's not that Sun's evil... they're certainly making contributions. It's just that the SCL makes sure those contributions aren't that useful to the rest of us. Keep it in perspective though - better the SCL than a Microsoft Artistic License (shudder).
--
Sun is technically an enemy of Linux yes. Solaris and Linux compete with each other, but not anywhere near the competition between them and MSWindows. It seems pretty clear to me, unless I'm missing something.
You can't expect to publish statements like "NT is 3.5 times as fast as a webserver as linux" without coming under fire. This statement itself is both biased and misleading. The way they summarised their results would be appropriate for a microsoft press release or marketting document but not appropriate for an independent benchmark.
Mindcraft's results where questioned and rightly so. I don't see why their professionalism shouldn't have been questioned given the circumstances ( a Microsoft funded test at MS HQ ... under the guise of an "independent test" ).
The tests proved the end result, NT wins in that scenario, Linux looses.
Their "end result" was not about "NT winning", their end result was quantitative data asserting that NT was several times faster than linux. Their quantitative data was vastly inaccurate.
BTW, Linux doesn't "loose" or even "lose" ... unless you need to saturate multiple T3s with static content. Wake me up when yopu need to do that.
For serving static webpages ? yes. If they really want to measure how well linux meets tomorrow's demands, testing static page serving isn't good enough.
Yes the test was funded by Micorosft.
Hence it wasn't independent. Hence it is misleading to portray it as independent.
If Linux advocates wanted to prove them wrong in a different scenario why not have Redhat or whomever hire them for a different test?
Because independent tests should be just that. Independent. Why should Redhat stoop to MS's level and perform an expensive marketting stunt ? Other independent pundits ( such as PC Week, C'T and others ) will conduct independent tests anyway.
Don't you remember any of your industry history? Sun began in the garages of a couple of students who decided to make an open platform workstation, from off-the-shelf parts to a design that anyone could copy. They got as big as they did because the made good gear. And more, they still do[1].
:-) In fact, it probably still makes the majority of it.
Who remembers the Sunsites? Back before the start of the web, a lot of the big mirrors were running on sun-sponsored equipment and bandwidth.[3]
Look at java. It's as open as it can possibly be without being GPL'ed. I have no doubt that it will be one day, once Microsoft has ceased attempting to 'embrace and extend' it[4].
If you want to compare ideologies, then Sun and the Open Source Community are fairly well aligned. Don't let a couple of minor differences scare you. Sun is just what the Open Source community would be if we all went corporate.
Give them a little more time. Sun is actually about three times bigger than Microsoft, so they might take a while to 'notice' things on a corporate level. And don't be surprised if now that they've noticed us, they want to be friends.
~ Orinoco
Come join us: h2g2.com
[1] Wall Street ran their system on Sun gear for a decade, making the company quite profitable, because no-one has more money to spend on good quality gear[2] than the stock exchange.
[2] This is a fundamental point. Sun couldn't care less about software or licences or intellectual property. They're here to make fast hardware. After all, you've always got to have hardware. And as long as people need to buy big computers, there will be Sun.[5]
[3] Sun equipment *built* the internet. (DEC supplied all the terminals
[4] Consider the recent court action. Sun was happy to have Microsoft licence, distribute, and even extend the capabilities of java on windows. But then Microsoft began shipping versions of 'Java' that failed the Java Compatibility Tests. What Microsoft were fighting for, in court, was to ship a broken version of java out to all its customers, and still call it Sun's Java. The court fees give you an example of exactly what it takes to make Microsoft eat one of their own press releases.
[5] I have a friend who works at sun. No, really. He's a quantum mechanic working in their research division. Sun figures that quantum computing has gone from a case of 'if' to 'when', and therefore should be ready for it. This is absolutely true.
Jeremy Lee | Orinoco
There can be no doubt that Sun understands how free software works. The company was founded by Bill Joy, the architect of the original BSD unix, which was released free under the original BSD license.
In its early days Sun kept the tradition alive. They developed a proprietary OS, based on BSD, and included in it a "contrib" collection of free software programs. The combination of a quality OS with commercial support, and a good collection of tools (many free) generated an impressive, healthy culture of SunOS devotees.
Sun also made their original money by undercutting other vendors on price: they were the first Unix vendor to sell "out of the box" systems, everyone else wanted to build you a custom system for every occasion.
The company changed radically in the late 80's, when it fell under the control of a very powerful and very ill informed middle management. They adopted AT&T's SysV OS and dumped BSD, in the belief that this would help get them onto the "business desktop". In order to seem more professional they dumped all the free tools, and buried all evidence of their free software BSD origins.
They never made it onto the business desktop, but they did manage to adopt AT&T's proprietary, paranoid attitude.
Today you have to view Sun as a company with a split culture. There are those who believe in the proprietary AT&T SysV "business desktop", and then there are those who fall into the BSD camp, and have hung on for various reasons.
Or to put it another way: Sun, when Bill Joy is in control, is probably an OSS/free software friend; but Sun when Scott McNealy is in control is a calculating, proprietary, business environment.
I agree that the only person hurt directly by Sun failing to "get it" is Sun. However, if Sun are hurt, then so are the people who use Sun's products. Most importantly - to me at least - are all the developers working with Java in the (mistaken...?) belief that one day it will really be an "open standard".
To me, the SCSL is an indication that right now, Sun's biggest hope is that it will never be open, but always controlled by Sun and Sun only. Kaffe, Japhar, Jikes and Classpath all provide hope of someday providing some legitimate competition, thereby taking "de-facto" control away from Sun. However, in the meantime, those of us who want to use a powerful, well-designed language like Java have no choice other than using non-free software - and worse yet, a closed "standard". Therefore, we are hurt.
I see this as a far more important issue than whether StarOffice is opened or not, because StarOffice will ultimately be out-competed by KOffice and GNOME workshop. Java cannot be out-competed anywhere near as easily, because the *standards* are controlled by Sun. Remind you of any other companies?
Stuart.
There are two serious dangers of using "semi-open" source code that are not often discussed here.
... that happened to run much more efficiently then the bloated, "traditionally-designed" MVS/TSO combination.
... which is a shame, because there are lots of things in VM, Rexx and CMS pipelines, for instance, that provide functionality that simply does not exist in the Unix environment.
1) There is the very real possibility that the owner of the source code may yank the source code out from under you. This has happened. Specifically, in the IBM VM community.
VM started back in the mid 1960s as a small internal IBM project, with a few extremely talented programmers, who were trying to scratch an itch. Sound familiar? The specific itch was: "How can we run multiple operating systems on the same computer", so that we can do our testing during the day instead of having to schedule downtime for the entire system to make our tests?"
The result was a program called CP, that runs on IBM 370 iron, where each and every task is a "virtual 370". Just like VMWARE, but for mainframes. You've seen how VMWARE lets you bring up Windows 95 in a Unix window. Well, VM allowed you to bring up MVS, or any other 370 operating system, including VM itself on a terminal. Just for fun, I once set up a second level VM, then went into that second level VM, and built a third and fourth level VM, and it worked.
CP found its sweet spot when it was combined with a different single-user operating system called CMS. VM is really the marriage of CP and CMS. CMS was originally designed as a single-user, high performance operating system to run on bare iron. CMS is single-tasking, and provides the filesystem, compilers, I/O, interrupt structure, etc.
The system provided performance that was simply unheard of on unix systems of similar power. At our peak, we easily ran over a thousand CMS sessions on our 3090 -- each of which was emulating an entire 370 for a single user.
VM was a tight, lean operating system with great performance. Of course, it didn't hurt that the people who wrote it were some of IBM's best hackers, and they had an additional incentive to produce excellent code: all of their work was visible to the customers.
IBM also tried more then once to kill off this "upstart" operating system
Since the first days of the VM mainframe operating system, the entire operating system was distributed with full, buildable source code to the entire operating system. The result was that sites could and did experiment with the CP and CMS kernels, adding functionality, finding bugs, and creating what was, to many, the finest mainframe operating system ever designed.
VM system programmers freely traded their mods around, in source code form, and some of the best of these mods became part of the VM core distribution. In other words, the Open Source process was ALIVE AND WORKING in practice, only it was restricted to paying customers of IBM. The IBM users group is called SHARE, and VM systems programming community had its' share of brilliant programmers who share their work in exactly the same spirit of the current open source community.
Of course, this never harmed IBM, because almost all of this work was being written in IBM 370 assembler language (for maximum efficiency, of course), and with the exception of a few Amdahl sites, must sites were running IBM mainframe hardware anyway.
This was all fine until the mid 80s, when IBM made a management decision to withdraw source code to all of their products. Dispite the outcry from sites around the world, IBM started selectively removing parts of the source code from their distributions, and introducing new functionality without source. Along with the new functionality came huge, bloated object code modules, and conceptually defective interfaces. IBM also threw hundreds of programmers at VM, and the efficiency and elegance of the operating system started to deteriorate.
The result was a disaster that virtually killed the VM community. Whereas in an open source environment, system administrators such as myself could trace crash dumps, find bugs, and report them to IBM, we were all left in the situation where we would crash a crash dump, only to have the trace lead into an "object-code-only" module. This made it much more difficult to maintain a reliable system.
The other disaster was to sites (such as ours) that had made large numbers of local modifications to the IBM-supplied source code. More then once, I had the experience of sitting down to port our local mods to the next release of VM, only to find that one of the modules that I needed to modify had had the source code removed. The result was that people such as myself were forced to disassemble the IBM object decks, work out binary patches, and apply them blindly. I still have a couple of these binary-only patches, based on five year old source code, on our VM system.
We are currently in the process of phasing out our VM systems, and not surprisingly, so are many other VM sites.
So here's the question. Say you are a company that builds a mission-critical system by joining the Sun Community Source License program. You download the source code, and make a large number of changes to the source code to build your mission-critical production server. Now, a year or two down the line, Sun announces the end of the Community Source License program. The next month, Sun releases a new object-code-only version of Solaris that incorporates new features or bug fixes that you need.
Now you are absolutely screwed. Don't think that this couldn't happen. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED TO IBM'S VM CUSTOMERS.
For the curious, an excellent history of the VM operating system may be found on Melinda Varian's home page:
http://pucc.princeton.edu/~melinda
2) The second danger that is not often discussed here is the danger of accidently incorporating propriatary code, or code that is "close enough to sue", in an open source project.
The WINE project has been able to proceed on safe legal ground, because reverse engineering is a legal activity. Microsoft can hardly claim that parts of Wine were derived illegally from Microsoft propriatary source code, because Microsoft closely guards access to the source code. If Microsoft were to release the windows source code, and someone were to read the windows source code and use that information to fix a bug or add a feature to WINE, or someone just happened to write their own code that happened to resemble part of Windows' source code, Microsoft could file a lawsuit against the WINE developers, and probably obtain a injunction banning distribution of Wine. The fact that Windows is Object Code Only is the ONLY defense against legal harassment, and I predict that this will become a serious problem as more propriatary source code is made available under non-free licensing terms.
Could the same thing happen with Sun and Linux? How farfetched would it be to imagine that sometime down the road, Sun were to file a lawsuit against the major Linux distributors, claiming that some newly-written feature of Linux was so much like a Solaris feature that it must have been illegally copied from Solaris, even if the feature was independantly written, and just happened to look like Sun's solution because both authors solved the problem essentially the same way.
I see Sun's "Community Licensing" as a serious, dangerous threat to the open source community, and I think that we would be much better off if they were to simply not release their source code, rather then release it under their unacceptable terms.
Obviously, free software developers cannot afford to fight lawsuits, and Sun is giving us NOTHING that we can use, while putting themselves in a position to use lawsuits to try and put free software competitors out of business. Whether or not this an "Accidental" feature of their policy, it is still a danger that has not been addressed.
- John Schulien
jms@uic.edu
Would you spend weeks picking berries if you knew that you'd have to pay for each one you ate? I wouldn't, and I doubt many other people will either.
Management, on the other hand, knows only the simple equation: Open Source(tm) = Good Thing(tm) and doesn't really care whether it's truely open or not.
Using Microsoft software is like having unprotected sex.
Bite the hand.
Once Sun's source code is out there (but not free to use), Sun will be able to claim that an independent implementation of a Sun feature is a ripoff of Sun's source. That is, Sun's release of source code could contaminate everyone and make an independent, parallel "clean room" implementation impossible.
Worst case, Sun could gain standing to sue Linux distributors and the Free Software Foundation merely by finding something in a GPL'd product that is similar to Sun's version. Even an unwinnable suit could do great damage.
PLEASE READ John Schulien's second point in his long post above (jms). Thank you, sir, for the enlightening essay.
I thought of this contamination problem, but before posting I read through the earlier comments to see if I had been anticipated. Sure enough, one of our fellow Slashdotters has nailed it perfectly.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -Albert Einstein
Lets step back and think !!!
What is Linux ??
It is 30 years old idea done difrently. That's all it is. It is trying to imitate branded Unix and , for God's sake, it isn't even as good as things like Solaris or HP Unix. It is not.
There is nothing revolutionary about Linux OS. What is new is the way it is being developed. That's all that matters here.
If Open Source fails, Linux won't matter anymore because there is nothing inovative about Linux OS.
Most of the time it simply tries to catch up with commercial offerings. I have yet to see single innovative technical idea come from Linux.
Don't look at this as a flamebait, stop for a second and think about what I just wrote...
Uhm, ok...
My guess is you misread QPL as GPL, or
maybe you weren't replying to my post.
I agree with your wording: there is an
opportunity. But if Sun opens the
compatibility suite everyone will come to
conform, because at present it's the most
comprehensive compatibility test suite.
Cygnus and HP have this open test suite
called Chai, but it significantly less
exhaustive than Sun's (at least last time
I checked it was).
So yes, there are efforts to get Sun out
of the equation and if successful, this would
either lead to a modified Java or even a
split Java. As I said, I believe Sun will
eventually lose its Java revenue, so the
only good thing they can do is open-sourcing
Java while they are still ahead in terms
of implementation, so that others will unify
around one leader. By carefully choosing an
open source license, they can advance this
cause faster.
I spent some time thinking about what I'd want Sun to do about Java licensing. They do have to keep it compatible because it's all the value there is to Java, else you could just use C++ (where all compilers have their quirks) or even some sh_tty non-OO language. I tend to think that QPL is the ideal license for them. Coupled with 100% pure Java campaign it could prevent forking. Forking through patches is enough of a pain that people wouldn't do it. Of course, they will lose Java revenue, but I have a feeling it's inevitable anyway. It is important to realise that Java licensing MUST include open-sourcing their compatibility test suite, else open-sourcing Java would either be a joke or would force forking. I am saying this because I gave up hope to see Java an open well-defined standard, so at least we need an open reference implementation.
So you can't limit the freedom of other people. Freedom for only one person, is no freedom but a dictatorship.
Well, I don't know what you mean by "natural and unalienable rights", but by looking at Solaris code you can lose the right to work on other OSs code.
I like to think of my self as a pragmatic person.
Well, good for you.
I have yet to see any new stuff originating from the OSS community.
Uh, just about all the software written in universities, etc. for a long time was OSS - if you sent them a letter requesting a copy of some program, they'd mail you back a tape. (Case in point: the MIT, from whence came Lisp, emacs, X, etc.)
I think that the reason why so much OSS nowadays is imitation is simply that it's very hard to come up with something that is both innovative and doable, especially in an OSS development scheme; by contrast, people working in corporative environments will write the software or get fired.
Besides, most OSS projects originate in the Linux community, and Linux is itself a Unix clone, so most stuff that comes out of it will probably have an Unix-y feel to it.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
"Open Source is a movement that encourages people to release their source code without caring about the freedom associated with it."
And what freedom would that be? It's not a political freedom. I call it Free Software because it's free for me to use it, not because it gives me some right akin to free speech. If you truly think Free Software is the moral equivalent of Free Speech, then you really don't know much at all about Free Speech. Free Speech gives me the right NOT to speak. Free Software as defined by RMS tells me that I MUST release my source code.
"I care about good software, but I care more about freedom."
Good for you. I feel the same way. Unfortunately, Free Software has nothing to do with freedom. If Congress is passing onerous laws like UCITA, or preventing me from creating code through patent laws, then they are taking away my freedom. But Sun does nothing to infringe any of my natural and unalienable rights, or any of my political freedoms granted or ungranted by my government.
"Open Source" is much more accurate than "Free". And "open" is just as positive as "free". Unfortunately, "open" doesn't have the emotional quality that "free" does. Revolutionaries always like the words "free" and "freedom". They incite emotions in the simple populace, who are so ignorant that they fall for that old trick, and gladly install dictators over them.
Stop fooling yourself. Free Software is not liberty.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"I want source with my software because that is my right!"
But it's not your software! It's mine. I own it, it is my intellectual property. If it was not mine, then I couldn't demand that you follow the dictates of the GPL license that I put it under! If there is no intellectual property, then ALL software is public domain.
You may have the right to fix YOUR broken chair, but you have no right whatsoever to fix MY broken chair that I lent to you.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Oh yes, I have read those pages. And they still have nothing to do with political liberty. They give me the freedom to use someone else's software. They are a list of permissions. I have the permission to redistribute the software. I have the permission to modify the software. I have permission to redistribute the modifications. And so on. If you think that Free Software is morally akin to Free Speech, do you also think that it should be enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well?
I'll rephrase your question to me. Who precisely forces you to use Sun's license? If you are free to choose not to use it, then it isn't restricting your freedom!
The Sun license says that I must follow their rules to use their source code. Ironically enough, Richard Stallman says exactly the same thing: follow my rules or don't use my software.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The situation can be summed up rather simply: with MS you have a company that wishes to control you through a rigid licensing of binary software. With Sun you have a company that wants to rigidly control you (not quite as bad though)through Source-Code licensing. They both are not Open Source, they both give control to a single company, and they are both not what the community wants or needs. You have to see that this is merely a product of Sun't position as a public company, i.e if people are waiting for Sun to Open Source Java and other pieces of software here is a wake-up call:
;)
If for example they Open Sourced Java they lose a revenue stream of Java licensees such as micros~1, IBM and others. Losing revenue is VERY bad for a public company becuause your owners (stockholders) want their stock to INCREASE in value. Sun as a public company can't afford to be altruistic, and it's stock holders may fire a board that does so. There are two ways to compete in a broad marketplace: have the best price, differentitate yourself by product. If Sun GPLed their products then they lose both avenues in order to beat their competitors. Sun would have to move into a service-based revenue stream which would be too difficult to change to at this point. It took IBM YEARS to do this, and Sun's corporate culture wouldn't allow methinks
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
"First of all, I believe that any company that produces only proprietary software is an enemy of Free Software, and freedom in general. I know this sounds Stallman-esqe, but that's because it is. Remember Free Software? It's what we believed in before open source turned us into proponents of a business model instead of an ideal."
I never believed in free software. Linux is a nice product, I might use it in the future but its not revolutionary. I'm not an idealist. I like to think of my self as a pragmatic person. All this talk about evil companies and enemies of OSS makes me laugh.
OSS is an efficient way of incrementally improving software. I have yet to see any new stuff originating from the OSS community. With new I mean something that is not a cleanroom implementation of something that already exists. I think John Carmack made a similar statement in the interview earlier today.
Most companies currently involved in OSS are pragmatic too and are in it for one thing only: making more profit. Red Hat sells shrink wrapped linux, IBM and SUN are hardware companies in the first place. They also make money supporting software (either their own or open source stuff.). Making software is something they do only to support the first two things.
Because of this, Linux is not an "enemy" to SUN. They can make money selling hardware that runs Linux and they can make money selling support (something they are not doing right now).
Giving away their own software (under GPL) won't boost their hardware sales significantly, also it won't improve their support revenue. So why are they bothering with semi OSS? Simple: they found out that it is a good way to improve their software without losing control.
Is SUN different from MS? Yes, MS is a software selling company in the first place and a software support company only in the second place. OSS can only cut their revenue since everything given away won't bring in revenue. SUN on the other hand only gets a minor percentage of their revenue from software sales. If they can boost hardware sales by giving away software they will do it. IBM is in the same position and is following a similar strategy.
Jilles
Back during the benchmarking circus, Mindcraft published hate mail from Linux people. It was deplorable of people to send this hate mail, don't get me wrong. What Mindcraft did was to publish this hate mail under the guise of: "Here? See what these Linux people are like? Do you want to base your company on stuff written by these folks?" In some slashdot discussions it was pointed out that, by publishing the hate mail, they were spreading FUD.
Similarly, I dislike the fact that Sun advocates sent hate mail to upside. But, just as most Linux folks do not want to be seen as fanatics just because some loonies like the OS, all of Sun should not be demonized because some wackos called an upside journalist an "idiot."
...
Re-reading your post, I think this answers your question. What exactly was your criticism?
"So, what do you want to hack for, Bickle?"
"I can't sleep nights."
"They got porno theaters for that."
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
"So, what do you want to hack for, Bickle?"
"I can't sleep nights."
"They got porno theaters for that."
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I care about good software, but I care more about freedom. Certainly, I'm pragmatic when I need to be, just as most people are. However, I have never had a reason to ignore the issue of freedom altogether. I think that saying "we" (Free Software advocates) have a "problem" is a little insulting. We just have different priorities.
The only real enemies of Free Software are the ones that present a danger to it. Microsoft is not dangerous right now. This battle is about ideals in the sense that the only way to defeat Free Software is to make us not care about it any more. That's why I dislike Sun's attempts at a "compromise."
I agree, to a point. But what about "open source" products that aren't "open" at all? Is that not also an enemy to Open Source, maybe even a greater one? I think so.But hey, opinions make the world go 'round. Or something. ^_^
-zackFirst of all, I believe that any company that produces only proprietary software is an enemy of Free Software, and freedom in general. I know this sounds Stallman-esqe, but that's because it is. Remember Free Software? It's what we believed in before open source turned us into proponents of a business model instead of an ideal.
But now, Sun has progressed beyond simply producing proprietary software. They have taken the same software and given you the source without giving you the right to use it as you see fit. Fine, that's their disgusting prerogative. Here's the worst part. They're calling it a community license. They can blabber all they want about how they never presented it as "open source." They know exactly what the word "community" implies, and they're spitting in the face of this concept.
This ladies and germs, is what makes them the enemy. I kept hoping that Sun would either rename or redesign the SCSL before they released more software under it, but I have given up hope after the Solaris announcement. As a Free Software proponent, I find Sun's actions disgusting, subversive, misrepresenting and manipulative.
I hope that other Free Software advocates see this as the gross ruse that it is, and spread the word about the SCSL and it's danger to the very community that it claims to represent.
-zack
I don't understand why the Linux community, and the OSS movement as it relates to Linux, has to think of any company as an enemy.
The very nature of OSS as a non-profit operation means that the normal rules of capitalistic competition do no apply. As open source software's original goal was never "domination of the desktop", but more provide free alternatives that any may choose or not choose, then what possible effect can an enemy of Linux have on those who choose it?
The real enemy of Linux specifically at this point is its success. Questions like how long can donated development co-exist with a deluge of commercial releases will make this a very interesting ride. But please, let's get off the track of us versus the world and who's with us and who's against us.
Hotnutz.com
I think he is wrong, to some extent, since he doesn't see the differences between Java and Linux.
Linux has a dictator in Linus. He is a good dictator, since he has proven over and over again to make good decisions that are good for us all.
Java has a dictator as well, Sun. If Sun made Java open source, the risk of fragmentation is high, because Microsoft wants nothing else than fragmentation of the Java movement, AND they have the channels to do it. They could just twist the Java source the way they want it to be (tied to Windows) and then ship it with every Windows box, which would make it turn up on perhaps 80% of all
PC:s on this planet.
No one else wants that, but that is what would happen if they just made Java open source.
Linux doesn't have that risk hovering over its head, because MS is very unlikely to ever ship an incompatible Linux version to anyone.
What Sun should do is to give the current Java 2 spec to ISO for standardization. That would be fast and pretty painless. Microsoft cannot fiddle with ISO. They tried 2 years ago and failed. After that there would be a standard base which all Java environments had to adhere to, and from there on Sun could let people innovate, by making the rest of Java open source.
because some of the codebase belongs to other companies. I got this from James Gosling who I chatted to last week (he was visiting this country).
He said to me that Scott McNealy is pro OSS but at the moment his hands are tied up a bit by companies like SCO who are being sticky about the issue since they have some code in there. It made sense to me given the history of commercial *nix source - I think that Sun hasn't gone all the way with their source licensing but couldn't figure out why. Maybe it's because they can't just yet...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
is Sun an enemy? Or is the enemy of my enemy my friend?
Why do they have to be either? They are a software developer. If they're smart, this is the first step in testing the waters of true Open Source. After all, they may find that Linux makes huge strides in some area that they want to pick up source from. If they move to a truely open license in the future, they will be able to do this.
This makes them no more or less an enemy than BeOS. They are a software developer and have the same standing in the community as any other software developer give-or-take the quality of their code and the nature of their actions WRT the community.
We must never drop to the level of "Not... us... must be... enemy! Must... KILL!" That department is well stocked with hundreds of companies of which the usuall ScapeGoat mentioned here on Slashdot is only the most successful. If Sun chooses to embrace a different path, we should not turn around and slap them in the face for it!
Ok, when anyone does anything, its generally because they see an advantage in it. RMS created FSF due to his morals, Linus created Linux because he was interested in it, etc. Sun would embrace the Open Source movement if it saw an incentive for it. The article basicly says.. Sun is inept by openning its code, but doesn't give it out freely for the developers to tweak. I don't see the incentive, I generally see the same people saying "Linux rules.. we'll kill all other UNIXes (and OSes)." That's one way to solve the UNIX frgmented market, I guess.
Lets examine how SUN would make money (more money) off putting everything under the GPL or the BSDL. The Solaris/Sparc combination is highly used at ISPs because of stability and performance. Many of the same ISPs that use Sun boxes use FreeBSD on lower end PCs, because FreeBSD has great performance/stability, and can handle what a Sparc isn't needed for.
Sun made Solaris's code open, which IMO was to make it easier for developers to write on the Solaris/Sparc platform, rather than getting them to go find bugs and enhance the OS. I doubt that if Sun made the OS open source, that anything more than leeching of code would take place, just like the Slashdot forums were full of comments about trying to GPL open source BSDs (for good and down right sickening reasons) when the BSDL changed. This merely improves Linux (& BSD), but on a range of platforms. Linux gets stabler, and now Sun has to deal with competing with PCs running an OS closing in on Solaris's quality, rather then NT which many have gripes towards. That, IMO, would increase compitition, and as PCs are dominent, it would not create a bigger market for Sun hardware.
Lastly, if Sun did do that, its competetors (IBM, Compaq, Microsoft) could take the code too. That is, unless they use the GPL due to its restrictions, and thus taunt its competitors with access.. yet not without them opening up too. Instead, Sun is using the SCSL to help developers use its technologies, but Sun gets some revenue and doesn't see splintering. Sun never gave up its power over Java, and has bitterly fought Microsoft for trying to make it platform dependant. By opening its technologies under the SCSL, Sun also increases its market by not having increasesd compitition, but rather having more out there for customers.
It could easily be argued that SUN would help the community by opening up, but when you look at the bottom line, I have not yet seen a good argument on why Sun's revenue would sky rocket. If someone has an answer, I'd love to see it.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Little factual error: he seems to think before the free *NIXes came along that Sun's offerings had achieved a total dominance amongst UNIXes. Not true: IRIX, SCO and AIX are still quite healthy in their respective user bases.
The one serious problem with this statement is that Sun does not now nor has it ever made money from its software. Any doubt about that was quelled with the Solar System fiasco. At best Solaris helps sell Sun hardware; they sell more hardware (a lot more) by offering Solaris than not.
Now, lots of lipwork has gone into the battle between Sun and Microsoft. But here's the thing: Sun's enemy isn't Microsoft. If anything Sun could to pretty well cooperating with Microsoft, leveraging their software expertise against Sun's hardware expertise. That they have not done so to date has been to their advantage in that they provide little encouragement to their customers to stop using Sun hardware. But for how much longer?
Sun's problem isn't Microsoft and it never was. Sun's problem is Intel . Sun makes their money from hardware. They always have. They sold stuff that could do things almost nobody else could do at a terrific price point. The fact that it ran UNIX instead of Domain or VMS wasn't material to customers -- it was fast and cheap.
The problem they have is that commodity hardware (Intel hardware) has improved to the point that there's not much you can do on Sun systems that you can't do on Intel systems -- but at a lower cost. Barring some reason not to do so people will tend to buy the cheaper stuff.
One big reason Sun customers haven't jumped onto Intel stuff wholesale is that it was not all that easy to get UNIX software to run under Windows. But now there's this Linux thing: it's not hard at all to move Solaris-based software to Linux, and Linux provides many of the same benefits you'd get running Solaris. All that's missing is the really big hardware and Moore's law and the quest for more money is driving the Intel vendors that way at breakneck pace.
We've seen this before. It's exactly how Digital took the market from IBM with its minis and how Sun took the market from Digital with its workstations. The question is not which one is better, it's which one is cheaper and still gets the job done.
In the past few years a lot of prior Sun customers like myself started using NT. We did so not because we thought NT was better but because it was good enough and a lot cheaper. Now here's this Linux thing; we can have everything we always liked Sun for, but at a price even better than that of NT. I don't know about the rest of you, but that's pretty damn appealing to me. It may be why a quarter of engineers at my company run Linux today, a transition that happened in just the last couple of months.
And that's Sun's problem in a nutshell. Intel-based systems are going to eat them alive, and Linux availability is going to make that happen far faster than it would if they were competing against vendors running only NT.
Sun's "community source license" is a PR stunt, taking advantage of the momentum of open source in public perception. The licenses are a sham; you're welcome to help them but you can't make money off of it. That is not a sustainable position; one incentive for Open Source is that there is always the possibility that you can take what you did and make some money off of it. As we've seen there are certainly people making money off of Linux!
Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft for dirtying Java is also a PR stunt. Have you actually used Microsoft's JVM? It's pretty good. If I were interested in suing people for dirtying the language I'd be suing Netscape in a flash because their JVM is a piece of crap. (Actually that should be plural. There are dozens of incompatible -- both with the Java standard and amongst themselves -- Netscape JVMs, and none of them are stable enough to use for real work.) That Sun went after the big boy Microsoft rather than the real core of the problem is rather illuminating in terms of their underlying motivation.
I've been a Sun proponent for years, ever since my first exposure to the Sun2. But I can see the handwriting on the wall: Sun's position is untenable. Their life has been extended a few years by the explosion in large system demand caused by the Internet, but it is not sustainable. All this PR around their community license and whatnot is great in the short term but completely beside the point.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
- is Sun an enemy? Or is the enemy of my enemy my friend?
I'd say that talk of "enemies" is dangerous. Forget "enemies". Forget talk of "Beating Company X".
Remember, the goal isn't for Linux to rule, or for FreeBSD to rule, are whatever. The goal is "Software that doesn't suck". Personally, I don't care who writes it, or what it is. It could be Windows. It could be Solaris. It could be Linux. Who cares? I just want it to work well, without being a hassle. And quite frankly, no OS I've used is there yet. In fifteen years, many of these religious wars will sound as stupid as the "C-64 vs. Apple ][+" debates that raged on the BBSes in 1984.
Hell, if the long term of destiny Linux was nothing more than to force Microsoft to start competing by producing better software instead of using shady business practices, I'd call it a victory for all of us.
If you want good software, well I'd say that the key is to stop worrying about "enemies" and instead:
1) Write good software.
2) Calmly and rationally explain the good points and bad points of any software you encounter.
3) Promote development methods that promote good software.
The only way Sun could be "The enemy", in my mind, is if they break the law. (By, for example, stealing GPL'd software.) Otherwise, they are just a company that may or may not have a product worth having. No need to worry unless you are buying.
These stories remind me a lot of the alarmism about communism a couple decades back. The theory was that the free market was more efficient than communism. If you truly believed that, than there was no need to "fight" communism, as the free market, being more efficient, was bound to emerge victorious. Same goes here. If "Open Source" really does produce better software than the alternatives, then there is no need to fight for it. It will "win" on its own, and the companies that support it will survive. Those that don't, won't. All that is important is that we ensure that everyone fights fair.
The cake is a pie
How can a company make money from OSS?
I read this great article explaining the business model of open source or free software. Probably one of the most important points is that something like 90% of all code is written in house. This means a large majority of software is written by people who work at a company with the intention of using it, not selling it.
Therefore, a company like sun can release software open source, save time and money on the programming side, have better end results, and concentrate on their core business: hardware.
Other companies will concentrate on service, and others on things like books.
The point of open source software is not just good software...but software that does what you want-exactly what you want.
My first reaction is to wonder what drugs you are on.... but that would be pointless and counter-productive. It would also be a rather ignorant responce to your comment...
Instead, I expect to see your apology to the *nix community 6 months after the actual release of W2K for thinking that one product can be the answer to all computing needs.
Every OS has it's place, thinking that any one OS can be the answer to all is rather ignorant. Even Linux doesn't belong everywhere. Besides, it's a much more interesting world when there is diversity.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
I work on Sun boxes all day long, because Sun's advertising and salesreps convinced someone in my company, who wouldn't know a line of code from a line of Goethe, that our company would be better off paying for Solaris than running Linux.
That's a problem, and not one that's going to go away while Sun looks to make a profit.
We need to be very careful of Sun. They seem to be hanging around and paying attention, but not really agreeing with what we're doing. They know the buzzwords, and they seem to know the philosophy, but the people making decisions are staying close enough for the magic to hopefully rub off, but definitely staying out of the range of the "Holy Penguin Pee".
ROFL that's the feeling i get when i see scott or oracle say anything. You're so correct it's untrollably funny when you say everything coming out of mcnealy's mouth is "MS this and MS that".
Isn't there already an oppurtunity for Java to fork due to clean-room implementations of the JVM like Japhar and Kaffe (under LGPL and GPL, respectively)? It's a notion that popped into my head a while back, never gave it too much thought, though.. I haven't looked at Java 2.0 (or even that Java compiler I think Cygnus came out with.. as you can tell I don't exactly stay "on top" of the Java scene ;), but I hear it was mostly bloat. A fork in Java might not be all that bad (slap a new name on it, of course), as avoiding bloat is good. ;)
~ Kish
Disclaimer: My views, as usual, are strong. I'm very much in the "free software" camp. Enjoy this post at your own leisure if you really care to hear what I have to say.. ;) (I'm also not quite awake.. not enough caffeine..)
Precisely.. wrong. As explained by Stallman himself:
Now, on to the bulk of this post..
Perhaps I should begin by saying that there are several kinds of "freedom". For absolute fanatics (like the one you are arguing with, apparently, as they remind me of some BSD elitists I had the misfortune of speaking with.. note the difference between BSD user/proponent/advocate and elitist .. this is not a bland generalization on my part, as I am not including all those who like BSD), there is this cute little page which explains what "freedoms" the GPL is intended to impart. No one on the GPL side of the fence kids themselves: this is a restrictive license. However, the astute will notice that even a democracy such as the U.S. is not truly "free" in the strictest of terms. Pure anarchy would be much closer to being "free" in the way certain fanatics would scream out against the GPL. For those of you who think like that: get a life.
Before I begin, I think I should note that my political stance is between that of Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, leaning toward the former. I believe free software is better than proprietary software, and dislike using stuff that isn't under the GPL (except for simple things like PINE or PICO, which really don't need me to tinker with them, anyway). However, I understand the need for choice. BSD elitists will complain about the GPL. GPL elitists will complain about the BSD license. However, neither are as restrictive as most proprietary licenses. I must stress that he/she who produces the software is free to use any license they want. You don't like it? Who gives a fuck? No one forces you to use their license. No one forces you to use their software. It's your decision. If you don't like something, don't subject yourself to it. Complaining about it isn't going to make it go away. Elitists on either side of the fence on this issue usually are making arguements which, if they could make them a reality, would take away freedom from the other group. Freedom is about choice. Exercise that freedom, and let others get on with their lives. Otherwise you might as well be Joe Public complaining about how horrible television is and yet you continue to sit on your fat ass and watch it all day. Real productive.
Sort of, but not quite. Source code is what is used to create a given piece of software. If you take this arguement to its logical extreme, you're really complaining that when someone sells you a chair, they should also give you the tools necessary to build it (which would probably be what, an entire factory? heh). Also, you're missing the point that you can't really change a chair. A chair is a chair is a chair. It will always be a chair (or else a pile of useless wood if you get really angry.. or some other material if it's not wooden). Software, however, can evolve. And while some may think its a neat idea to put a third arm on a chair, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Most uses of the term "freedom" are highly generalized. I would like to once again assert that there are several different kinds of freedoms, and obviously if you had some Star Trek-esque replicator people are going to have a hard time keeping you from replicating your chair and giving it to a neighbor. However, by the time our technology is that advanced, there won't be much of a market (or need for) chair makers, as we will by then have a strong market for companies who produce gadgets that fuck with molecular structures and what have you.
Well, that's your right if the software in question is covered under the GPL or a similar licensing scheme. Contrary to popular belief (sort of), people can do with their code whatever they damn well please.
~ Kish
..you should read up just a little on the topics at hand before you shoot your mouth off like that? I believe you should bother yourself to check out this page which defines what "free software" is and what freedoms it is meant to bestow upon you (as there is definitely more than one kind of "freedom" in the world), and that page which goes out of its way to explain the difference between "open source" and "free software". It's almost like getting hit by a clue-by-four, one might say..
If you're still not clue-aware after that, you can go ahead and read this post. If your attention span is too short for that, I'll sum it up with this basic question: who precisely forces you to license your software under the GPL, use GPL'ed software, or modify GPL'ed software? That said, why must you release your source because RMS "said so"? You can certainly use another license or piece of software, don't you think?
~ Kish
Sun is a public coporation. Therefore Scott & co have a fiscal and legal responsibility to shareholders. Solaris and Java licensing contribute to Sun's profit margin. I have yet to see anyone propose how to minimalize the impact to Sun's bottom line. If RMS or ESR can I'm sure Sun would love to listen, because they win a lot of fans. However, until that is done, the board at Sun's hands are tied, because if they decrease their bottom line without justification (ie loss now for future revenues) then the board can be sued by the shareholders for fiscal damage. Not a position I'd want to be in.
Every time the radicals (I'm not saying all OSS/Free software advocates) yell at public companies that normally make money on a product to replace it, consider what I've mentioned above.
That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.
I have a great and not so original idea, use the software that works the best for you. I only use software that works for *me*, I couldn't give a rats ass who makes it, if it proprietary, community source, etc. In the end i'm using the maker of the software, if they don't deleiver I won't use it. I'm the bad guy, the enemy, companies/open source software developers can't make me use anything, I use want I want to and throw away the rest. Eric (Just a view from the demand side of things to show anther side of things. Microsoft is successful because people buy their stuff, if nobody bought their stuff, they would disapear almost over night).
Did you mean 'hacker' or 'cracker'?
Do you know the diffrence? I don't think you do.
To be completely honest, I am not an Open Source Zealot. The only reason I support Linux is because it's NO WHERE near as crash-prone as Windows. I don't doubt that Solaris is just as stable.
I have a tremendous deal or respect for Sun. If they were to say, usurp this "monopoly" from Microsoft, I seriously would NOT care. Why not? Because it's not the monopoly that bothers me. If Sun can get a product that WORKS to dominate the market, more power to 'em.
But that's me.
Does he even know how to turn a computer on? How is this guy running a company? Oh wait he was the non technically person surronded by a bunch of nerds, so hey, he should run the company. Everything coming out of that guy's mouth is M$ this M$ that, I think he has a non sexual crush on Bill Gates and is afraid to admit it. Do us all a favor and come out of the closet or else keep your trap shut.
Its karma, Kramer.
I work as an admin at a major telecom. We use Solaris for part of our network. One of the main reasions is the security. While open source code is great it also alows for security flaws to be found quicker. Sun spends a lot of time searching their code for flaws (they also let a select few from large companies look at relivent code). This tightness is very useful to a company that needs to keeps files and access to switches secure. Another reason is that the switches can only be controled (legaly anyway) by software that will only run on solaris. Each operating systems has it's streangths and weaknesses, and by using a correct combination of those operating systems a company can have a better network then by just using one operating system.