If Verizon tries to sue Level3 it will be presented with code which does what is described in some of their patents and is dated at least several years prior to that.
So what? If it's not been disclosed, it doesn't matter.
Notions of anonymity and being able to "start over" are fairly modern. Historically, a single mistake might follow you for the rest of your life.
But it's not like we have a choice anyway. USENET posts had expiration dates, yet a decade later, DejaNews still puts them up on-line. We may wish that digital information expires, but it doesn't. We might be able to achieve this through totalitarian control over information, but that's worse than the problem it's trying to fix.
Trying to restrict freedom of thought and expression among consenting adults should not be acceptable in a democracy. There are lots of arguments one may come up with for and against, but the simple fact remains: giving the state the power to criminalize thoughts, pictures, or speech in areas as vaguely defined as morality and sex is too dangerous.
It is exactly those powers that the Nazis in Germany used to turn a democracy into a fascist state, with the Germans cheering them on. The rhetoric and issues are the same: protecting the children from deviants, degenerate pictures, illegal aliens, family values, Christian values, etc.
People, get a clue: don't fall for this bullshit a second time.
OK, Sun has deliberately skipped explicit backwards compatibility THREE TIMES in their entire history!!!
No, I only gave three examples. Another whopper has been NFS. But there are plenty more.
Linux, on the other hand, does this routinely.
Nonsense. Linux APIs have remained largely stable for the last decade. A lot of stuff has been added, but no radical changes in the APIs.
As for some of their innovations, Sun has been putting their money where their core is: Good technology.
I disagree. Sun is producing software that feature-happy engineers like; that doesn't make it "good" technology.
ZFS is quietly transforming small-to-medium data centres worldwide.
So is Windows. What's your point?
dtrace is shaking out bad code for good in places people hadn't thought to look before
I think the fact that they need DTrace for that tells you more about the benchmarking and testing practice of the Solaris team than about the utility of DTrace.
Well, what a nice touch that they manage to squeeze Sun marketing and damning Linux with faint praise all into a single sentence:
But it's a tricky balance to adopt elements of Linux while preserving Solaris technology and advantages such as the promise of backward compatibility
In reality, I remember Solaris as a backwards compatibility nightmare, like the Solaris 1 -> Solaris 2 transition, OpenView, and NeWS. And there's a simple reason why Solaris is such a pain: Sun engineers apparently can't leave "good enough" alone and need to "innovate", create "advantages", and add "technology". The latest, ZFS, is going to cause a heap of pain for people and tools.
So, here's a simple suggestion for Sun how to make Solaris more Linux-like: stop adding crap and start deleting code.
The mistake these people are making is that they are still thinking in terms of "vendors" and "customers". The point of open source software is that the users are the developers.
As soon as you have vendors in the mix, companies that expect to make money from the software, you have conflicting interests: vendors want to make money, and that money has to come out of the pockets of users. It doesn't matter whether the software is nominally open source, these companies are going to find a way to get at the money somehow.
Often, a "hybrid (open source/commercial) model" translates into simply "we're going to let people do a lot of development and bug fixing for us for free, and then we're going to sell the stuff commercially.
A simple rule of thumb is: don't use software under a "hybrid" or "dual license" model; somehow, you are going to be paying for it sooner or later.
The government monopoly over scientific research is what has led us to these unfortunate circumstances.
WHAT government monopoly? Anybody can conduct scientific research, and they can even patent it to get a private monopoly.
I wonder why people insist on calling things like this "privitization". Are they ignorant or just plain dishonest?
No, they are just realistic: that's what "privatization" means in the real world.
Libertarians just seem to define "true privatization" as "it's like real world privatization, only it works". Well, when you figure out how to make libertarian style privatization a reality let us all know.
JavaFX looks like it requires the entire Java platform and is oriented towards building widget-style user interfaces. In addition, there are worrisome statements about it offering "desktop integration". Those all sound absolutely scary to me.
I think DOM+Javascript is actually a good thing. It has enabled things like Greasemonkey, screen scraping, and hypertext often leads to easier-to-use applications than widgets.
The new version of Javascript should run like a charm with its JIT, and it looks like a nice language. I really don't want to go back to Java applets.
F/OSS takes a lot of criticism regarding it economic model which most businessmen see as non existent
That's based on a misunderstanding. FOSS is enormously valuable to businesses, but not as a "business model" in the sense of earning money. FOSS is about collaborative development by end users for the purpose of reducing risk and costs.
But Sun isn't an end user. They reduce neither their risks nor their costs by open sourcing Java, which raises the question: why is Sun doing this?
I think there are several answers:
-- Sun has always been primarily a hardware company.
-- Sun does retain proprietary rights, and they are using open sourcing as a way of getting attention and maybe more licensees.
-- Java and Solaris are under siege from a variety of other technologies and have been losing ground; this may be a last ditch attempt to try to make them more relevant again.
-- Sun customers are getting worried that Java and Solaris are at risk if Sun gets acquired.
F/OSS is not only the right thing to do morally
I think claims by any company that they are doing FOSS for "moral" reasons should be viewed as highly suspicious.
And when there is no information available online for the general public to get any kind of information about the costs of particular legislation
There are plenty of organizations that provide this information, organizations with a long track record of neutrality and non-partisanship. Furthermore, the data itself is freely available from the government.
You're attempting to dismiss the entire exercise based on the political philosophy of those putting it out there.
Of course, I do. People presenting information about the supposedly actual cost of legislation should not have a political philosophy at all, at least in their professional lives.
You'll note that those downloads include all the core libraries that Sun promised to release.
OK, here's the deal.
Sun's announcement doesn't talk about including the Java libraries.
Sun's Subversion repository contains none of those libraries in an identifiable place (https://openjdk.dev.java.net/source/browse/openjd k/).
But, after downloading the source zip file and grepping, it turns out there is a lot more stuff in the zip file than in any of the other places. For example, there is actually Swing with a Classpath exception.
Good, that makes the release a lot more real and meaningful. Sun really needs to clean up their act in how they release and communicate things. And I still don't trust them any more than I trust Microsoft.
Sun might feel that they, themselves, would be taken advantage of. After all, they spent billions on Java R&D,
I'm sure that's the way Sun management sees it. I think they're wrong. If Sun spent billions of dollars on Java R&D, they haven't gotten their money's worth, since it's been really just a run-of-the-mill bytecode language from day one. The primary value of Java is that it's widely known and used.
and still have yet to see much return on the investment. Then to just open source the thing and throw away all hope of ROI - well that has some pain associated with it (as far as Sun sees it).
Understandable. But if Sun's intent is to derive "billions of dollars" of "ROI" from Java after open sourcing, open source developers shouldn't touch the software.
What's being open sourced is this (see https://openjdk.dev.java.net/):
Today this project contains two significant components of the JDK:
* The HotSpot Virtual Machine
* The Java programming-language compiler (javac),
with complete NetBeans project metadata
There are several high performance virtual machines and compilers for Java already, so this doesn't really make much difference to anybody.
The parts that matter are the libraries and the specifications. But there are lots of open questions about those. Are they going to be GPL with or without linking exception? What parts are actually going to be missing? Does Sun claim patent rights (creating a Novell/Microsoft-like situation)? What's the effect of Sun's dual licensing? How is Sun going to get community development working if they still have a commercial license? Is Sun going to require copyright assignments?
I'm getting pretty tired of the way this stuff is dribbling out of Sun and the kinds of games Sun seems to be playing with licenses. I've removed Sun Java from my Linux system; gcj, Classpath, and IKVM work fine.
This isn't insightful, it's a poor attempt at flinging an ad hominem attack at libertarians.
"Ad hominems" are (as the name implies) about attacking people, not issues or movements. I'm criticizing a movement, libertarianism, as being prone to populist rhetoric and oversimplification.
Tell us - how do YOU account for the costs of government then??
Carefully, on a case-by-case basis, and without trying to reduce cost/benefit analyses to simple arithmetic exercises.
Sun's model for Java has been to get experts and open source developers work for them for free and then to commercialize it. At the heart has been Sun's misguided JCP. Now, they are compounding the problem with their dual-licensing scheme, which imposes a GPL license on the rest of the world, while Sun reserves a commercial license to themselves and requiring developers to sign over rights to them. Let's not even get into how Sun attempted to rebrand Gnome as the "Java desktop".
Sun is a prime example for taking unfair advantage of open source developers. The solution is for companies like Sun to stop playing games with open source license. If Sun releases Java under a single open source license, then there is no problem and nobody is taken advantage of.
So, here is my challenge to Sun: either stop releasing software under an open source license altogether, or release under a single, open source license that doesn't give Sun any special rights.
The LOC response was heavy-handed and unjustified. But the "Washington Watch" site is typical over-simplifying libertarian rhetoric: you cannot account for the cost of legislation in that way.
So, I don't know which to dislike more: LOC government arrogance, or libertarian populist oversimplification.
Indeed, trying to avoid boredom drives open source development, just like it drives flying to the moon, writing a great symphony, or doing anything else worthwhile. (The other motivations for doing something are being forced to do it, or doing it because one needs the money.)
Yes, it's true that the GPL couldn't be enforced without copyright. But many people in the FSF view the GPL only as a means to an end. It might be preferable, for example, if copyright were abolished and simultaneously there were a law requiring companies to ship source along with any binaries they ship.
Also, in other areas, there are big differences. For example, free software advocates probably don't generally have a problem with a dramatic shortening of copyright terms (down to 10-20 years) even if that means that the terms of the GPL couldn't be enforced afterwards. That's because GPL'ed software keeps getting extended and modified anyway. And, perhaps most importantly, the GPL doesn't rely on DRM, so many free software advocates would probably want DRM to go away.
Personally, I think the direction to move into is to limit copyright terms to 20 years after first publication of the work and to apply copyright only to content that can actually be copied (that is, content not protected by DRM).
The reason ZFS duplicates functionality is because it *has* to do achieve the sorts of features it is able to provide
No, it doesn't "have" to do that. Those features could be provided by well-known and well-defined kernel layers.
Why must there be a line in the sand instead of a productive, usable alternative?
We are discussing whether ZFS represents a good approach to system design and architecture, and I'm firmly on Morton's side: it does not. That's true no matter how well it may work.
Traditional LVMs view disks as places to abstract into a single block of devices. There is no communication between other than "write ok, yes/no? Read ok, yes/no?"
Yes, traditional LVM's are a bad idea. But that doesn't make ZFS a good idea. In fact, ZFS shares many of the same problems that LVMs have.
Linux will have an answer to ZFS in a few years. Unlike ZFS, it will be architected properly, and it will work better. It's taking Linux longer not for lack of resources, but because Linux developers, unlike Sun, take the time to get it right.
I think calling this an "invention" is stretching the term "invention" past its breaking point, given that there are, oh, dozens of ways in which people have done this before.
No doubt, the real innovation of Microsoft's version is that you end up needing a license for each half of the screen and that they are going to use "trusted computing" to enforce that.
Well, they can't fix it retroactively, but they certainly addressed the problem as soon as they realized it. If only all political problems were resolved that quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
If Verizon tries to sue Level3 it will be presented with code which does what is described in some of their patents and is dated at least several years prior to that.
So what? If it's not been disclosed, it doesn't matter.
Notions of anonymity and being able to "start over" are fairly modern. Historically, a single mistake might follow you for the rest of your life.
But it's not like we have a choice anyway. USENET posts had expiration dates, yet a decade later, DejaNews still puts them up on-line. We may wish that digital information expires, but it doesn't. We might be able to achieve this through totalitarian control over information, but that's worse than the problem it's trying to fix.
Besides, you can always change your name.
Trying to restrict freedom of thought and expression among consenting adults should not be acceptable in a democracy. There are lots of arguments one may come up with for and against, but the simple fact remains: giving the state the power to criminalize thoughts, pictures, or speech in areas as vaguely defined as morality and sex is too dangerous.
It is exactly those powers that the Nazis in Germany used to turn a democracy into a fascist state, with the Germans cheering them on. The rhetoric and issues are the same: protecting the children from deviants, degenerate pictures, illegal aliens, family values, Christian values, etc.
People, get a clue: don't fall for this bullshit a second time.
OK, Sun has deliberately skipped explicit backwards compatibility THREE TIMES in their entire history!!!
No, I only gave three examples. Another whopper has been NFS. But there are plenty more.
Linux, on the other hand, does this routinely.
Nonsense. Linux APIs have remained largely stable for the last decade. A lot of stuff has been added, but no radical changes in the APIs.
As for some of their innovations, Sun has been putting their money where their core is: Good technology.
I disagree. Sun is producing software that feature-happy engineers like; that doesn't make it "good" technology.
ZFS is quietly transforming small-to-medium data centres worldwide.
So is Windows. What's your point?
dtrace is shaking out bad code for good in places people hadn't thought to look before
I think the fact that they need DTrace for that tells you more about the benchmarking and testing practice of the Solaris team than about the utility of DTrace.
In reality, I remember Solaris as a backwards compatibility nightmare, like the Solaris 1 -> Solaris 2 transition, OpenView, and NeWS. And there's a simple reason why Solaris is such a pain: Sun engineers apparently can't leave "good enough" alone and need to "innovate", create "advantages", and add "technology". The latest, ZFS, is going to cause a heap of pain for people and tools.
So, here's a simple suggestion for Sun how to make Solaris more Linux-like: stop adding crap and start deleting code.
Sun will sell the software only in a binary version to ensure compatibility across different systems.
Evidently, the new Sun is like the old Microsoft.
The mistake these people are making is that they are still thinking in terms of "vendors" and "customers". The point of open source software is that the users are the developers.
As soon as you have vendors in the mix, companies that expect to make money from the software, you have conflicting interests: vendors want to make money, and that money has to come out of the pockets of users. It doesn't matter whether the software is nominally open source, these companies are going to find a way to get at the money somehow.
Often, a "hybrid (open source/commercial) model" translates into simply "we're going to let people do a lot of development and bug fixing for us for free, and then we're going to sell the stuff commercially.
A simple rule of thumb is: don't use software under a "hybrid" or "dual license" model; somehow, you are going to be paying for it sooner or later.
The government monopoly over scientific research is what has led us to these unfortunate circumstances.
WHAT government monopoly? Anybody can conduct scientific research, and they can even patent it to get a private monopoly.
I wonder why people insist on calling things like this "privitization". Are they ignorant or just plain dishonest?
No, they are just realistic: that's what "privatization" means in the real world.
Libertarians just seem to define "true privatization" as "it's like real world privatization, only it works". Well, when you figure out how to make libertarian style privatization a reality let us all know.
Dr. Evil: "Finally, I can do DoS attacks on the highway system without oil slicks or fake road signs. Muhahaha."
It's what gives Glagnar's Human Rinds that special human-y flavor.
Glagnar's human rinds! It's a buncha muncha cruncha human!
JavaFX looks like it requires the entire Java platform and is oriented towards building widget-style user interfaces. In addition, there are worrisome statements about it offering "desktop integration". Those all sound absolutely scary to me.
I think DOM+Javascript is actually a good thing. It has enabled things like Greasemonkey, screen scraping, and hypertext often leads to easier-to-use applications than widgets.
The new version of Javascript should run like a charm with its JIT, and it looks like a nice language. I really don't want to go back to Java applets.
F/OSS takes a lot of criticism regarding it economic model which most businessmen see as non existent
That's based on a misunderstanding. FOSS is enormously valuable to businesses, but not as a "business model" in the sense of earning money. FOSS is about collaborative development by end users for the purpose of reducing risk and costs.
But Sun isn't an end user. They reduce neither their risks nor their costs by open sourcing Java, which raises the question: why is Sun doing this?
I think there are several answers:
-- Sun has always been primarily a hardware company.
-- Sun does retain proprietary rights, and they are using open sourcing as a way of getting attention and maybe more licensees.
-- Java and Solaris are under siege from a variety of other technologies and have been losing ground; this may be a last ditch attempt to try to make them more relevant again.
-- Sun customers are getting worried that Java and Solaris are at risk if Sun gets acquired.
F/OSS is not only the right thing to do morally
I think claims by any company that they are doing FOSS for "moral" reasons should be viewed as highly suspicious.
And when there is no information available online for the general public to get any kind of information about the costs of particular legislation
There are plenty of organizations that provide this information, organizations with a long track record of neutrality and non-partisanship. Furthermore, the data itself is freely available from the government.
You're attempting to dismiss the entire exercise based on the political philosophy of those putting it out there.
Of course, I do. People presenting information about the supposedly actual cost of legislation should not have a political philosophy at all, at least in their professional lives.
You'll note that those downloads include all the core libraries that Sun promised to release.
d k/).
OK, here's the deal.
Sun's announcement doesn't talk about including the Java libraries.
Sun's Subversion repository contains none of those libraries in an identifiable place (https://openjdk.dev.java.net/source/browse/openj
But, after downloading the source zip file and grepping, it turns out there is a lot more stuff in the zip file than in any of the other places. For example, there is actually Swing with a Classpath exception.
Good, that makes the release a lot more real and meaningful. Sun really needs to clean up their act in how they release and communicate things. And I still don't trust them any more than I trust Microsoft.
Sun might feel that they, themselves, would be taken advantage of. After all, they spent billions on Java R&D,
I'm sure that's the way Sun management sees it. I think they're wrong. If Sun spent billions of dollars on Java R&D, they haven't gotten their money's worth, since it's been really just a run-of-the-mill bytecode language from day one. The primary value of Java is that it's widely known and used.
and still have yet to see much return on the investment. Then to just open source the thing and throw away all hope of ROI - well that has some pain associated with it (as far as Sun sees it).
Understandable. But if Sun's intent is to derive "billions of dollars" of "ROI" from Java after open sourcing, open source developers shouldn't touch the software.
What's being open sourced is this (see https://openjdk.dev.java.net/):
Today this project contains two significant components of the JDK:
* The HotSpot Virtual Machine
* The Java programming-language compiler (javac),
with complete NetBeans project metadata
There are several high performance virtual machines and compilers for Java already, so this doesn't really make much difference to anybody.
The parts that matter are the libraries and the specifications. But there are lots of open questions about those. Are they going to be GPL with or without linking exception? What parts are actually going to be missing? Does Sun claim patent rights (creating a Novell/Microsoft-like situation)? What's the effect of Sun's dual licensing? How is Sun going to get community development working if they still have a commercial license? Is Sun going to require copyright assignments?
I'm getting pretty tired of the way this stuff is dribbling out of Sun and the kinds of games Sun seems to be playing with licenses. I've removed Sun Java from my Linux system; gcj, Classpath, and IKVM work fine.
This isn't insightful, it's a poor attempt at flinging an ad hominem attack at libertarians.
"Ad hominems" are (as the name implies) about attacking people, not issues or movements. I'm criticizing a movement, libertarianism, as being prone to populist rhetoric and oversimplification.
Tell us - how do YOU account for the costs of government then??
Carefully, on a case-by-case basis, and without trying to reduce cost/benefit analyses to simple arithmetic exercises.
Sun's model for Java has been to get experts and open source developers work for them for free and then to commercialize it. At the heart has been Sun's misguided JCP. Now, they are compounding the problem with their dual-licensing scheme, which imposes a GPL license on the rest of the world, while Sun reserves a commercial license to themselves and requiring developers to sign over rights to them. Let's not even get into how Sun attempted to rebrand Gnome as the "Java desktop".
Sun is a prime example for taking unfair advantage of open source developers. The solution is for companies like Sun to stop playing games with open source license. If Sun releases Java under a single open source license, then there is no problem and nobody is taken advantage of.
So, here is my challenge to Sun: either stop releasing software under an open source license altogether, or release under a single, open source license that doesn't give Sun any special rights.
The LOC response was heavy-handed and unjustified. But the "Washington Watch" site is typical over-simplifying libertarian rhetoric: you cannot account for the cost of legislation in that way.
So, I don't know which to dislike more: LOC government arrogance, or libertarian populist oversimplification.
Indeed, trying to avoid boredom drives open source development, just like it drives flying to the moon, writing a great symphony, or doing anything else worthwhile. (The other motivations for doing something are being forced to do it, or doing it because one needs the money.)
Yes, it's true that the GPL couldn't be enforced without copyright. But many people in the FSF view the GPL only as a means to an end. It might be preferable, for example, if copyright were abolished and simultaneously there were a law requiring companies to ship source along with any binaries they ship.
Also, in other areas, there are big differences. For example, free software advocates probably don't generally have a problem with a dramatic shortening of copyright terms (down to 10-20 years) even if that means that the terms of the GPL couldn't be enforced afterwards. That's because GPL'ed software keeps getting extended and modified anyway. And, perhaps most importantly, the GPL doesn't rely on DRM, so many free software advocates would probably want DRM to go away.
Personally, I think the direction to move into is to limit copyright terms to 20 years after first publication of the work and to apply copyright only to content that can actually be copied (that is, content not protected by DRM).
Why would people move back to landlines? The only thing that's patented (or revenue generating) is VoIP-landline gateways.
Most people will probably just move to cell phones and free VoIP.
Landlines aren't coming back.
The reason ZFS duplicates functionality is because it *has* to do achieve the sorts of features it is able to provide
No, it doesn't "have" to do that. Those features could be provided by well-known and well-defined kernel layers.
Why must there be a line in the sand instead of a productive, usable alternative?
We are discussing whether ZFS represents a good approach to system design and architecture, and I'm firmly on Morton's side: it does not. That's true no matter how well it may work.
Traditional LVMs view disks as places to abstract into a single block of devices. There is no communication between other than "write ok, yes/no? Read ok, yes/no?"
Yes, traditional LVM's are a bad idea. But that doesn't make ZFS a good idea. In fact, ZFS shares many of the same problems that LVMs have.
Linux will have an answer to ZFS in a few years. Unlike ZFS, it will be architected properly, and it will work better. It's taking Linux longer not for lack of resources, but because Linux developers, unlike Sun, take the time to get it right.
I think calling this an "invention" is stretching the term "invention" past its breaking point, given that there are, oh, dozens of ways in which people have done this before.
No doubt, the real innovation of Microsoft's version is that you end up needing a license for each half of the screen and that they are going to use "trusted computing" to enforce that.
Well, they can't fix it retroactively, but they certainly addressed the problem as soon as they realized it. If only all political problems were resolved that quickly.