As somebody else pointed out, Sun's SCO license payment was so they could release Solaris under the CDDL. They didn't say that at the time because they were still in the process of clearing all the licenses.
I'm not trolling. Fine, it's not an abandoned product. Regardless, comparing the IP issues of such a relatively simple software package with an OS is naive.
You're seriously comparing an abandoned webmail program to an entire OS? Patents and possible infringements are not really an issue with this kind of software, and wouldn't be covered by either the LGPL or the MPL anyway.
I guarantee you the process of clearing the IP for OpenSolaris was a hell of a lot more complicated than for this project.
There's been no confusion on Sun's part about the release of OpenSolaris. Some very visible people expressed their dislike that OpenSolaris wasn't GPL'd, and that the patent grant is only for CDDL projects (a license that explicitly deals with patents--coincidence?). Ok, fair enough. You can't please everybody. If you don't like the license or the software, don't use it. The paranoia and sour-grapes about the CDDL/OpenSolaris is truly bizarre. Did McNealy kick Perens' dog or something?
On Slashdot, Sun's actions are interpreted as simultaneously clueless and methodically sinister. It's more annoying than anything else, as the collective business wisdom here on Slashdot over the years has been impressively wrong.
Full disclosure: I work for Sun, but not on anything to do with Solaris. I don't speak for Sun in any way.
Colocation and renting time on a grid are not the same market. Consider: "Renting office space is not a bargain compared to buying real estate." Well, in some cases that's true, but it's by no means always so. The advantages of renting office space are quite similar to renting grid time.
I haven't been at Sun for 15 years, but I do work on the J2EE specs. Here's where you're wrong:
BEA, IBM, Oracle, Apache, and a host of other companies have a great deal of influence over the direction of J2EE.
Sun's role is a lot more like a plurality party in parliament. Sun can't just run roughshod over the other members in the JCP, but they do drive the agenda for the most part. That doesn't mean that somebody like IBM can't block that agenda though, particularly if there are changes that are perceived to be stricly in Sun's interest and not for the J2EE community at large.
The purpose of the JCP is to deliver both specs *and* reference implementations.
McNealy runs Sun, but that doesn't mean he is involved in the decisions of the JCP or Sun's agenda for the JCP. Duh.
J2EE is a successful platform for application development, largely because it is standardized and portable. Businesses like that. Individual perl (or Ruby or Python or PHP or whatever your average/. reader's favorite language is) jockeys have different requirements. Fear doesn't enter into it.
I'm always amused about how easy large scale enterprise application development is in your typical/. comment. It's like hearing a do-it-yourselfer who added a back porch on their house talk about how easy it would be to build a hotel.
You need #2 because the paper trail is only used in close elections, or situations that warrant a recount. If you can't ensure the accuracy and integrity of the system, the paper trail is worthless in all but the corner cases.
For example, suppose someone breaks into VotingMachineCorp's network and secretly modifies the source code to change the vote totals *after* the paper trail is printed. The only way this is exposed is if there is a recount.
I think fair and accurate elections better serve the public interest than fostering competition among voting machine companies.
Re:Enterprise development
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 1
You probably can, but you're missing the point. Only J2EE 1.5 will use the J2SE 5/1.5, language features.
For example, in J2EE 1.5 you'll use annotations in your EJB implementation class to declare it a remote stateless session bean and the container will figure out the required interface definitions on its own. You can't do this in J2EE 1.3 or 1.4, regardless of the J2SE version used.
Yeah. If there's one thing that Europeans just haven't a clue about, it's history.
Geez.
[You might want to read up on some European-types named Montesquieu, Locke, Hobbes, Mill, and Voltaire and how their ideas relate to American ideas of civil rights before your next History Lesson.]
I only quoted one section, the rest of the article talks about how the "new totalitarianism" isn't dependent on a single individual, a la Hitler or Stalin, and therefore can exist within a democracy, albeit one where the elected officials have a limited ability to change things.
As for being aware, how has the awareness of the outside events checked the designs of our administration's push to war? It hasn't. Did the unpopularity of starting the war without the consent of the UN have any effect on Bush and company? Did the disapproval of most of our allies, and more or less the rest of the world, keep the US from invading Iraq?
I don't necessarily agree with Buchele, but he makes some compelling points about how the Bush administration is acting.
From Nicolas Buchele in the Arab News, quoted in a piece in Salon (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/03/22/w orld21/index1.html):
"Americans often seem baffled that others fail to admire their system of government. They know after all that in the United States there exists a lively culture of debate, where the whole lunatic spectrum of opinion can find a platform of one kind or another (though at the same time the difference between the political parties it is actually possible to elect is vanishingly small)...
"They have a vibrant and largely unchecked artistic community. They have the First Amendment...
"The new totalitarianism has learned a second lesson from its heavy-handed predecessors. If artists and intellectuals were able to do precisely nothing about Hitler or Stalin or any of the legion of tin-pot dictators around the world, it follows that you might as well have freedom of expression.
"In the new totalitarian system, people can say whatever they like, and it makes absolutely no difference."
I work for Sun, and while I won't pretend to speak for them, I work most of the time on the various J2EE JSRs, so I sort of understand how the whole process works, and therefore understand the rationale for why Java isn't an ECMA or ISO standard.
The Java Community Process (http://www.jcp.org) is an independent organization that sets the standards for Java. Anyone can join the JCP, although most members are companies. The Java language, the different distributions of Java (J2SE, J2EE, J2ME), and technologies that are built on Java use Java Specification Requests (JSRs). Various members (the expert group) collaborate on the JSR to define the technology, and work on a reference implementation. For example, Tomcat is the reference implementation of the JSP and Java servlet APIs. This is one major difference between ECMA/ISO and the JCP: the requirement of a reference implementation.
I think the idea behind the JCP was to be able to modify the language and the APIs more quickly than other standards bodies, and ensure that there are useful implementations of the standards that go hand in hand with the standard.
In the case of Apache, there have been some modifications to the JCP to allow open-source implementations of JSRs, and to make the compatibility tests available for non-profits. JBoss and Sun have locked horns because, in Sun's view, JBoss is not a non-profit, and are using the J2EE JSRs to make money without licensing the J2EE brand, as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Borland, and others have done. Because Apache is in fact a non-profit organization, Sun's been much more willing to work with them.
Sun produces most of the JSRs, but not overwhelmingly so (around 60% if I remember correctly). Your average open-source hacker will find it harder to contribute to a JSR compared to, say, Gnome or KDE. Unlike.NET, though, it is possible to get involed in the development of Java and J2EE, either directly as an individual member of the JCP, or indirectly by providing comments during the public reviews of JSRs.
There are many people at Sun that would like the public more involved in developing Java, and others who would not.
Keep in mind that this is my impression of Sun's rationale, and I do not speak for Sun on any level.
>My point is, is that society has created a backlash >against this natural tendency - a backlash called >"the feminist movement"
Wow, where to begin? The critique that attempts to use a biological basis of determining normal and healthy social practices has been popping up throughout history. At various times in the past in the U.S. and Europe, it's been against nature for blacks to vote, before that for un-propertied white men to vote, and before that for men to vote period.
The point is that it's difficult to determine these sorts of biological "goods" and "bads," and attempts to do so almost always end up looking ridiculous, as society has been constantly evolving, and what was unthinkable before is perfectly healthy and normal now.
I also don't think you can even characterize feminism as a single point of view anymore, and you probably couldn't legitimately do so in the past. As just one example, look at the debate over sex within the feminist community: sex-positives don't see any problem with consensual sexual activity among adults in whatever manner they want, while others don't think that there is such thing as consensual sex between men and women.
And, I find it almost unbelievable that you claim that the major cause of women not advancing in society is *the individual attitudes of women*, exclusively. As in, if a woman is marginalized in her job, kept from advancing to positions of power, by a male in a position of power, it's the feminists fault because the woman hasn't accepted the natural order of things, and in fact she'd feel a lot better, feel less shame for not being a power-broker, if she accepted the fact that she's naturally more submissive. And the boss would feel better about himself too if he didn't have those damned feminists trying to make him feel guilty about doing what's been hard-wired in his genes, right?
Am I in the minority here in seeing this argument as completely bogus? Would anyone here is Slashland, next performance review, freely accept that they won't get promoted because somebody thinks it's against biology for you to advance any higher?
That's the adapter, not the card....
on
Wireless Mania
·
· Score: 1
The $40 item is so you can use a 301 in a desktop computer in a PCI slot. The card itself $75 on buy.com, it appears.
And before everyone gets indignant about this, notice that every one of the classes is numbered in the 80s (e.g. Theater Arts 80N). 80-series classes are optional, only occasionally taught, and generally deal with subject matter that wouldn't be appropriate in a regular class.
"Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I will move the world" -Archimedes
The point being more about leverage and the perceived impossibility of certain actions.
-Ian
What is funny/sad about all the bickering about the "RMS is a zealot," "would he just shut up about the GPL," "I'll do whatever the hell I want with my code" comments here on/. is that it is very anachronistic.
What I mean is, the comments are usually made by people who don't know or understand the history of GNU, Unix, BSD, gcc, Linux, and all the other little stories that created our current environment. It would take too long to go into this history here, but I'd strongly encourage people who think that RMS is a whiner to read up on how all these threads began.
It's anachronistic in the same sense that folks in countries with a history of democracy and political liberalism (in the technical sense) don't understand why people get so worked up about voting and free speech. They've benefited from that history, but have also been blinded by it.
Disclaimer: I'm not blind to the attempts by both governments and corporations to marginalize the democratic process and civil liberties in the US and other countries--I'm being somewhat simplistic in these comments to make a larger point.
Actually, RMS's motivations for creating GNU and the FSF are a little more broad than that. From what I've read, RMS was working in the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT in the late '70s/early '80s, working on a system called ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System, running on a DEC PDP-10).
The first thing that happened was that DEC decided to discontinue the PDP-10, in favor of the Unix-friendly PDP-11 and VAX lines. ITS, then, was left out in the cold. RMS and his AI lab colleagues decided to try to write a new OS based on Lisp. This failed for the next reason.
Then corporations became interested in AI, and a lot of the research projects at the AI lab became funded by various corporations, with the ensuing NDAs, protections of intellectual property, patents, etc. This pretty much killed the open exchange of information and code that the AI lab had previously enjoyed. A similar thing happened to Unix when it went from being a university and research lab project to being a commercial enterprise, and you saw AT&T releasing binary-only versions of Unix.
So, seemingly arbitrary business decisions by DEC, and closed, proprietary ventures from corporations, basically screwed up a good working environment for RMS, and he said, "Screw this. I'm going to re-build Unix and make it so I don't have to worry about the suits screwing things up." Hence GNU, hence the FSF, hence the GPL, hence RMS's emphasis on "free," as in speech.
Because of his experience at the AI lab it is more clear why he is so outspoken about free software, why he wants to frame the debate around freedom, and why he thinks "open-source" is an unacceptible dilution of his ideas.
He makes sweeping generalizations (e.g. no one who started on AOL has ever switched to a different provider, ever, much less learned anything about the 'net, technology, personal computers, etc.; and the comment about the unwashed masses being "minimally educated, apathetic peasents [sic]"), uses straw men (e.g. the responder suggests that an elitist 'net that doesn't allow certains kinds of sites and, effectively, censors content, would be worse than wading through inane sites that pander to the masses--this gets re-interpreted by Mr. Erikson as "what do you have against informative and non-corporate controlled web sites?", which is not at all what the criticism was about), and basically adds no new information, or even an original perspective on the situation.
It's the same old argument that's been repeated over and over throughout history: the masses don't know enough to decide for themselves what is best for them, and we should [a) decide for them or b) let them wallow in their own ignorance while we pursue the more refined arts, in a glorious intellectual paradise where no outsiders can sully our crytalline thoughts and ideas].
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. The deal had provisions to allow Sun to release Solaris's source under a license that provided indemnification.
This article describes why Sun needed to get the additional license.
I'm not interested in a flame war, either.
As somebody else pointed out, Sun's SCO license payment was so they could release Solaris under the CDDL. They didn't say that at the time because they were still in the process of clearing all the licenses.
I'm not trolling. Fine, it's not an abandoned product. Regardless, comparing the IP issues of such a relatively simple software package with an OS is naive.
You're seriously comparing an abandoned webmail program to an entire OS? Patents and possible infringements are not really an issue with this kind of software, and wouldn't be covered by either the LGPL or the MPL anyway.
I guarantee you the process of clearing the IP for OpenSolaris was a hell of a lot more complicated than for this project.
There's been no confusion on Sun's part about the release of OpenSolaris. Some very visible people expressed their dislike that OpenSolaris wasn't GPL'd, and that the patent grant is only for CDDL projects (a license that explicitly deals with patents--coincidence?). Ok, fair enough. You can't please everybody. If you don't like the license or the software, don't use it. The paranoia and sour-grapes about the CDDL/OpenSolaris is truly bizarre. Did McNealy kick Perens' dog or something?
On Slashdot, Sun's actions are interpreted as simultaneously clueless and methodically sinister. It's more annoying than anything else, as the collective business wisdom here on Slashdot over the years has been impressively wrong.
Full disclosure: I work for Sun, but not on anything to do with Solaris. I don't speak for Sun in any way.
Colocation and renting time on a grid are not the same market. Consider:
"Renting office space is not a bargain compared to buying real estate." Well, in some cases that's true, but it's by no means always so. The advantages of renting office space are quite similar to renting grid time.
Sun's role is a lot more like a plurality party in parliament. Sun can't just run roughshod over the other members in the JCP, but they do drive the agenda for the most part. That doesn't mean that somebody like IBM can't block that agenda though, particularly if there are changes that are perceived to be stricly in Sun's interest and not for the J2EE community at large.
I'm always amused about how easy large scale enterprise application development is in your typical
You need #2 because the paper trail is only used in close elections, or situations that warrant a recount. If you can't ensure the accuracy and integrity of the system, the paper trail is worthless in all but the corner cases.
For example, suppose someone breaks into VotingMachineCorp's network and secretly modifies the source code to change the vote totals *after* the paper trail is printed. The only way this is exposed is if there is a recount.
I think fair and accurate elections better serve the public interest than fostering competition among voting machine companies.
You probably can, but you're missing the point. Only J2EE 1.5 will use the J2SE 5/1.5, language features.
For example, in J2EE 1.5 you'll use annotations in your EJB implementation class to declare it a remote stateless session bean and the container will figure out the required interface definitions on its own. You can't do this in J2EE 1.3 or 1.4, regardless of the J2SE version used.
Yeah. If there's one thing that Europeans just haven't a clue about, it's history.
Geez.
[You might want to read up on some European-types named Montesquieu, Locke, Hobbes, Mill, and Voltaire and how their ideas relate to American ideas of civil rights before your next History Lesson.]
No, that person is a solipsist, not an idealist.
Solipsism entails idealism, though.
Somehow I have a feeling Eric Raymond would just *love* to shoot somebody.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/03/20/wo rld19/
Of course, correct for lameness filter.
Hrmmm. The article used to be there.
I only quoted one section, the rest of the article talks about how the "new totalitarianism" isn't dependent on a single individual, a la Hitler or Stalin, and therefore can exist within a democracy, albeit one where the elected officials have a limited ability to change things.
As for being aware, how has the awareness of the outside events checked the designs of our administration's push to war? It hasn't. Did the unpopularity of starting the war without the consent of the UN have any effect on Bush and company? Did the disapproval of most of our allies, and more or less the rest of the world, keep the US from invading Iraq?
I don't necessarily agree with Buchele, but he makes some compelling points about how the Bush administration is acting.
From Nicolas Buchele in the Arab News, quoted in a piece in Salon (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/03/22/w orld21/index1.html):
...
...
"Americans often seem baffled that others fail to admire their system of government. They know after all that in the United States there exists a lively culture of debate, where the whole lunatic spectrum of opinion can find a platform of one kind or another (though at the same time the difference between the political parties it is actually possible to elect is vanishingly small)
"They have a vibrant and largely unchecked artistic community. They have the First Amendment
"The new totalitarianism has learned a second lesson from its heavy-handed predecessors. If artists and intellectuals were able to do precisely nothing about Hitler or Stalin or any of the legion of tin-pot dictators around the world, it follows that you might as well have freedom of expression.
"In the new totalitarian system, people can say whatever they like, and it makes absolutely no difference."
I work for Sun, and while I won't pretend to speak for them, I work most of the time on the various J2EE JSRs, so I sort of understand how the whole process works, and therefore understand the rationale for why Java isn't an ECMA or ISO standard.
.NET, though, it is possible to get involed in the development of Java and J2EE, either directly as an individual member of the JCP, or indirectly by providing comments during the public reviews of JSRs.
The Java Community Process (http://www.jcp.org) is an independent organization that sets the standards for Java. Anyone can join the JCP, although most members are companies. The Java language, the different distributions of Java (J2SE, J2EE, J2ME), and technologies that are built on Java use Java Specification Requests (JSRs). Various members (the expert group) collaborate on the JSR to define the technology, and work on a reference implementation. For example, Tomcat is the reference implementation of the JSP and Java servlet APIs. This is one major difference between ECMA/ISO and the JCP: the requirement of a reference implementation.
I think the idea behind the JCP was to be able to modify the language and the APIs more quickly than other standards bodies, and ensure that there are useful implementations of the standards that go hand in hand with the standard.
In the case of Apache, there have been some modifications to the JCP to allow open-source implementations of JSRs, and to make the compatibility tests available for non-profits. JBoss and Sun have locked horns because, in Sun's view, JBoss is not a non-profit, and are using the J2EE JSRs to make money without licensing the J2EE brand, as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Borland, and others have done. Because Apache is in fact a non-profit organization, Sun's been much more willing to work with them.
Sun produces most of the JSRs, but not overwhelmingly so (around 60% if I remember correctly). Your average open-source hacker will find it harder to contribute to a JSR compared to, say, Gnome or KDE. Unlike
There are many people at Sun that would like the public more involved in developing Java, and others who would not.
Keep in mind that this is my impression of Sun's rationale, and I do not speak for Sun on any level.
Seen it. You obviously haven't hung out around lit. grad students....
...finals week is over, dude. You can turn off the academicspeak.
You might have wanted to re-read the quote and compare it to A.C. Clarke's before you made an ass of yourself in public....
>My point is, is that society has created a backlash
>against this natural tendency - a backlash called
>"the feminist movement"
Wow, where to begin? The critique that attempts to use a biological basis of determining normal and healthy social practices has been popping up throughout history. At various times in the past in the U.S. and Europe, it's been against nature for blacks to vote, before that for un-propertied white men to vote, and before that for men to vote period.
The point is that it's difficult to determine these sorts of biological "goods" and "bads," and attempts to do so almost always end up looking ridiculous, as society has been constantly evolving, and what was unthinkable before is perfectly healthy and normal now.
I also don't think you can even characterize feminism as a single point of view anymore, and you probably couldn't legitimately do so in the past. As just one example, look at the debate over sex within the feminist community: sex-positives don't see any problem with consensual sexual activity among adults in whatever manner they want, while others don't think that there is such thing as consensual sex between men and women.
And, I find it almost unbelievable that you claim that the major cause of women not advancing in society is *the individual attitudes of women*, exclusively. As in, if a woman is marginalized in her job, kept from advancing to positions of power, by a male in a position of power, it's the feminists fault because the woman hasn't accepted the natural order of things, and in fact she'd feel a lot better, feel less shame for not being a power-broker, if she accepted the fact that she's naturally more submissive. And the boss would feel better about himself too if he didn't have those damned feminists trying to make him feel guilty about doing what's been hard-wired in his genes, right?
Am I in the minority here in seeing this argument as completely bogus? Would anyone here is Slashland, next performance review, freely accept that they won't get promoted because somebody thinks it's against biology for you to advance any higher?
The $40 item is so you can use a 301 in a desktop computer in a PCI slot. The card itself $75 on buy.com, it appears.
And before everyone gets indignant about this, notice that every one of the classes is numbered in the 80s (e.g. Theater Arts 80N). 80-series classes are optional, only occasionally taught, and generally deal with subject matter that wouldn't be appropriate in a regular class.
"Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I will move the world" -Archimedes The point being more about leverage and the perceived impossibility of certain actions. -Ian
What I mean is, the comments are usually made by people who don't know or understand the history of GNU, Unix, BSD, gcc, Linux, and all the other little stories that created our current environment. It would take too long to go into this history here, but I'd strongly encourage people who think that RMS is a whiner to read up on how all these threads began.
It's anachronistic in the same sense that folks in countries with a history of democracy and political liberalism (in the technical sense) don't understand why people get so worked up about voting and free speech. They've benefited from that history, but have also been blinded by it.
Disclaimer: I'm not blind to the attempts by both governments and corporations to marginalize the democratic process and civil liberties in the US and other countries--I'm being somewhat simplistic in these comments to make a larger point.
The first thing that happened was that DEC decided to discontinue the PDP-10, in favor of the Unix-friendly PDP-11 and VAX lines. ITS, then, was left out in the cold. RMS and his AI lab colleagues decided to try to write a new OS based on Lisp. This failed for the next reason.
Then corporations became interested in AI, and a lot of the research projects at the AI lab became funded by various corporations, with the ensuing NDAs, protections of intellectual property, patents, etc. This pretty much killed the open exchange of information and code that the AI lab had previously enjoyed. A similar thing happened to Unix when it went from being a university and research lab project to being a commercial enterprise, and you saw AT&T releasing binary-only versions of Unix.
So, seemingly arbitrary business decisions by DEC, and closed, proprietary ventures from corporations, basically screwed up a good working environment for RMS, and he said, "Screw this. I'm going to re-build Unix and make it so I don't have to worry about the suits screwing things up." Hence GNU, hence the FSF, hence the GPL, hence RMS's emphasis on "free," as in speech.
Because of his experience at the AI lab it is more clear why he is so outspoken about free software, why he wants to frame the debate around freedom, and why he thinks "open-source" is an unacceptible dilution of his ideas.
He makes sweeping generalizations (e.g. no one who started on AOL has ever switched to a different provider, ever, much less learned anything about the 'net, technology, personal computers, etc.; and the comment about the unwashed masses being "minimally educated, apathetic peasents [sic]"), uses straw men (e.g. the responder suggests that an elitist 'net that doesn't allow certains kinds of sites and, effectively, censors content, would be worse than wading through inane sites that pander to the masses--this gets re-interpreted by Mr. Erikson as "what do you have against informative and non-corporate controlled web sites?", which is not at all what the criticism was about), and basically adds no new information, or even an original perspective on the situation.
It's the same old argument that's been repeated over and over throughout history: the masses don't know enough to decide for themselves what is best for them, and we should [a) decide for them or b) let them wallow in their own ignorance while we pursue the more refined arts, in a glorious intellectual paradise where no outsiders can sully our crytalline thoughts and ideas].