I think there is an assumption made, almost unconsciously, that if our other power sources fail we could always "fall back" on nuclear if we wanted to take the risk. It's interesting to see that large scale nuclear power could have similar infrastructure problems to renewables - invest a lot or don't end up viable.
This article focuses primarily on the economic questions of scale-up. I would be curious to know how much uranium is theoretically recoverable and how long it would last us. Perhaps there is so much of it that we could live off of it indefinitely (particularly with waste reprocessing) but I don't know the numbers.
What this article DOES demonstrate, even better than renewables, is the need to sustain and increase basic research into ALL energy problems and technologies. Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and various storage techniques like hydrogen will be needed; it's not a one solution fits all kind of equation. Nor will the solutions just "be there" when we need them, unless we pay attention and take steps to ensure that they are. Even nuclear cannot be taken for granted.
Also - in the long term human beings will consume all available power either by technological/standard of living increases, population increases, or both. There isn't going to be a solution which will be "enough" - we will ALWAYS find something to do with it. Just the scale-up going on right now is putting a healthy demand on resources of all sorts, and that's just the short term. In hundreds or thousands of years there will be some very fundamental problems that need solving, and I think we need to get started working on them sooner rather than later. These things don't happen magically, they take hard and long work.
Business is not to be expected to think long term, certainly not in the current environment. That should be the job of government research funding, and there needs to be a LOT more of it. Perhaps the difficulties of scaling up nuclear power will help to wake people up - it would be nice to do the research on new power technologies in something other than economic crisis mode.
At a certain point, networking requires trust in order to realise it's potential benefits. Open source wouldn't work if everyone had to read every line of source code before running a program, so various organizations and projects develop trust and reputations. We know Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, etc. are OK and can proceed to use them with minimal trouble. A brand new Linux distribution must climb that hill, in addition to providing sufficient incentive for people to find out if they can be trusted. That's tough.
The anonymous nature of the web is what allows things like virus writers to succeed - if they couldn't hide, they wouldn't assume the responsibility for what they're doing (well OK a few nut cases would, but the same is true in real life.) However, forcing unique identities on people opens up a host of other problems, some of them more serious than the ones we have today.
So we must operate in the twilight world of making networks which cannot be successfully attacked by bad actors. There are a wide variety of intermediate solutions, like today's anti-spam techniques, wikipedia's system and even slashdot's own moderation system. But none are perfect and none can be perfect - the problem is not solvable in general. Open source actually helps this in one major way - the community controls that operate in the real world to keep human social systems functional also operate (to some degree) in small scale projects. There the individual traits of interested parties become known over time, and recognition and trust can be built up based on more than just a name or email address. It is not perfectly robust, but then no system to date has been.
Virus problems will continue as long as there are people wanting to write viruses, as they are simply an electronic version of spray painting walls, defacing monuments, or other useless and harmful activities that have persisted since the beginnings of civilization. We must rely on community, the most robust tools we can devise, and (finally) building our own web of trust based on things we have found to work. These issues are fundamental to the human condition and (like all social problems) cannot be resolved by technology. The fact that spam emails can be identified at all, for example, is really just an indication of the lack of skill of spam writers. Likewise, someone really wanting to distribute a virus can just make a freeware program that actually does something real and useful long enough to build a reputation, and then when it is widely distributed trashes every system it is installed on. There are always ways to attack a target, if enough effort is put into the planning. The trick is to be fault tolerent and recover quickly. In specific cases better security can be achieved (classified information, etc.) but for the general case it will always come down to dealing with the consequences of antisocial behavior as it happens.
I have always wondered what would have happened if the idea of using Lisp as the assembly language of a machine had actually taken off. If I understand the Lisp machines correctly, they were actually "lisp on the metal". Given the flexibility and power of the lisp language it would have been very interesting to see what the evolution of the Lisp Machines would have been, had they proved viable in the long term.
Prestige is necessary for a journal to be a major player in a field, and such a reputation is built up over time. They sustain that reputation and academics (particularly new ones) must try to get published in those journals in order to succeed. This creates a feedback loop, as the youngest members of the community who might be the most willing to further a change to a free journal are also the most limited in their ability to buck the establishment.
I would suggest universities and departments "grade" journals and openly state which will be regarded as acceptable publication targets. In this fashion, a review board could be created for a new journal that would have the confidence of departments and could be endorsed as a "safe" publishing target from the get-go. (It would also be a difficult target, just like the established journals, in order to evaluate students according to a standard.) With this official endorsement by "big names" in the field, some momentum could begin to shift. Younger students who are new to the system and not yet accustomed to the high prices would be more willing to try and correct what many see as a serious problem. Those trying for tenure would have less to worry about when being reviewed if their institution endorses the new publication.
Prestige is a dangerous thing to worship, and the real reason for prestige of a journal is the content within it. I think a shakeup is way overdue.
The thing to do about this is to get the big names in the field to agree to transfer their efforts collectively as a body to a free journal. The ones with established careers don't have to worry about vanishing into the mists if they don't publish in a big name, and if they move their efforts as one they can shift the momentum without having to fight it out between old journal and new.
The tools are available to do this - LaTeX is free and already in use in many cases, and there are a multitude of collaborative tools that could be used or adapted to handle article submissions and reviews. ToC at http://theoryofcomputing.org/ has some very useful LaTeX tools defined for online journal publication. All that is really needed is a) the will to do it and b) the organization and support from the major players/schools to do it.
Authors and reviewers already do most of the work for free or worse, all that is needed now is to do that work for someone other than the folks charging high fees to control the work. (There's probably a joke in there somewhere about replacing the publishers of journals with a very small shell script...)
As frustrating as it may seem, there are actually fairly sound reasons for this in some situations. I would argue the internet was one.
In theory, ten years of computer science research might have produced a better design for the internet than the one we have today, back when it was first being developed. However, we have learned a lot from the scale-up that on a practical level would be fairly hard to duplicate in a research setting. Sometimes you just don't think of the possible consequences until you see them happen, particularly things due to human beings TRYING to bring down the system. Think about how long telnet lasted, for example.
In all honesty, it's a miracle the world wide web has scaled the way it has - consider the original scope of the military networks and the small amounts of data they were transmitting. The original designs were to Get Something Working and Justify Our Budget - that's how it has to work. I'd say the return on investment for the various stages of the internet has always more than justified even the costs of redoing it. Sometimes you can't wait to figure out how to do it right, because that will take too much time and what you can build NOW is still useful. Think about automobiles - 10 years from now we will undoubtedly be building better ones than we can build today, but the costs of waiting until we know how to do it "right" are much higher than the costs of replacement.
Now, of course, the question of knowing how to do something right is distinct from doing correctly what we already know how to do - one is a research problem, one is an implementation problem. I'm inclined to think that the web is more of a research limitation than a "do it right" issue, although I could be wrong - it depends on how much was known in the beginning states.
Google has been doing this now for some years with what appear to be fairly impressive results - I wonder if we might start to see other companies pick up on this a little. What about, say, the major Linux distributions sponsoring some projects for the major open source desktops? Or universities sponsoring some scientific software (I was very interested to see fityk on the supported list this year)? Or perhaps IBM could sponsor some work? There should be many possibilities.
Google is supporting quite a lot of work and a great many projects, but it is unavoidable that many useful projects will fall though their net - they have only so much support they can offer. I would be interested to see other companies either partner with Google or do on their own what Google is doing - if Google can do so much, what could 5 or 10 more companies using the same basic method accomplish?
One thing that is not clear to me is whether these "promises" not to sue on various patents have any legal standing. IANAL so perhaps there is some principle of "public statement of intent" that would contrain their actions, but with no signed contract or agreement in place not to sue couldn't a management change bring about a new policy on those patents?
I think the MAD principle is still what's holding back a patent war in the US (plus a hot and heavy patent fight harmful to the industry might spur software patent reform) and I can't see why Microsoft, as a corporate entity, should be trusted in the least.
Plus, the principle of legal intimidation is still all that is really needed here, not actual victory in a patent case - most open source projects don't have the resources to defend themselves from even a non-valid challenge. That's why MAD is effective where even legal safety might not be - sort of a "don't beat up on the weak kid or you'll start a brawl" effect.
The problem with open source in a legal sense (at least in the US) is that open source volunteer projects need some condition where they CAN'T be sued, and as I understand it that simply isn't possible under the US legal system where anyone can sue anyone else for anything. The suit may not be valid but until that's decided it can go ahead in any case and the accused MUST respond or risk a default judgement against them. Patents make being on unshakable ground impossible in general for anything nontrivial, and once a project is deprived of the ability to assume an absolutly invulnerable position (except not doing the project) the waters get murky fast.
As much as I like the idea of protective clauses in the GPL3 license, I have a feeling that the people inclined to make trouble for free software with patent cases are unlikely to be in a position where the GPL would stop them. They will be competing with GPL software, not using it - being forbidden to use it won't stop them at all.
The conflict is fundamental - patents stop people from doing things with software, and open source programmers want to do those things. The law is a tool towards those ends, which both sides will employ. The stark fact seems to be that the law supports patents, and so does the political establishment and commercial support which funds said establishment.
There are two things stopping a WW3 style patent nuke war, as far as I can tell - one is the MAD assurances provided by the larger open source companies and/or supporters, and the other is the cost/benefit analysis of launching an attack on an open source author/project is not so good. Attacking the project means lots of legal fees if the case is fought, very bad press among the tech community, and the distinct chance the software you are attacking will be reborn, rewritten, or even replaced by something better as thousands of irate geeks seek a technical solution to the legal action. If by some chance the patent being used has covered all possible useful methods of doing something, the community simply waits until it expires and THEN proceeds. Yes 20 years is a long time, but it is not forever. The GIF patents eventually expired, and I would be very surprised if the cost/benefit analysis of those patents was a net plus. Apple has not gone after the freetype project, for example (although they did contact them).
However, these mechanisms cannot be entirely relied upon. JMRI is certainly an example: http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html So long as patents can be filed on software, there is the potential for a slaugher among free projects. I can't think of any license change JMRI might have made that would avoid their current situation. Patents will always pose a serious threat to free sofware, as the representative of commerical control interests. Indeed, I would expect that if patents are abolished some other method would be found, but at least it would be more difficult.
Not to sound like Stallman here, but there have always been two camps - those who think software should be Free as in "we should be able to do what we want with the code for moral/ethical reasons" and those who see practical benefits as in "when people can do what they want with the code everyone benefits."
I would expect most businesses are part of the open source camp, not the free software camp, and open source was always pragmatic. That's WHY it appeals to people where Free doesn't - because there's a definite concrete benefit.
Businesses as they exist in the US are by and large about making money, not upholding principles. Some businesses do both, but look at Google ("do no evil") and how they delt with China. Capitalism has its limits, and one of them is being socially aware - awareness of community responsibility and discharging that responsibility is always a short term loss for a long term gain (i.e. pay more to properly dispose of waste, lose the profit you could have gotten by keeping the $$ and dumping it in the river, but long term preserve the environment and the health of the people around you, avoid litigation and community ill will). Capitalism sucks at long term anything, which is why government needs to be different from and independent of corporations. That's why framing the free/open proposal as "you get a benefit/save $$ from doing this" rather than "you're morally obligated to do this - it's the ethical thing" is effective. It just so happens that releasing free software has immediate benefits AND benefits society, so PR can say the company is doing both. Sure, the ACTUAL reasons they did it might not deserve a halo, but getting outraged over them not being "genuinely committed to the ideals of Free Software" is as pointless as it is futile, in the business world as it exists today.
If people do the right thing, it's not very helpful to wonder if they did it for the wrong reasons. How can we know for sure, and what could we do about it even if we did know for sure and don't like their reasons? Insist they do the wrong thing?
if DRM is removed and piracy jumps, the cause-effect logic will be very hard to refute. It probably CAN be refuted (all that has to happen is to have a file successfully ripped once and it's all over the internet) but an observed jump post-DRM removal would undoubtedly end some careers. Nobody wants to take that chance.
The music industry seems to be doing quite well (which is not to say the artists are getting all they really should, but that's another post) since they have money to spend playing around with copyright law. There is no "we need to try DRM-free music before our profits dry up!" imperative which might drive people to take risks and the company to accept risks, so DRM (which is easy to make sound good, whether it is or not) won't go anywhere until the case for it hurting sales AS A CONCEPT (not just a bad implementation) becomes obvious enough to convince anyone.
The only way I can see that happening is an "open source music" phenomena that replaces corporate music trends, star generators, and hits with something just as good (or "effective" if you don't think it's good) but community controlled. That's hard, because opinions are subjective and can apparently be influenced by ads. We need a central site, lots of sources of music people want to listen to (not what they SHOULD want to listen to, mind you, but what they DO want to listen to - no running people down for their (lack of) taste), and quality control that people can trust. When THAT emerges, DRM will become too much of a liability. I don't see anything else that can do it.
I have a feeling Dtrace probes might be a big, big win here - if they instrument it as they have the Solaris system itself that level of performance tuning integrated into the entire software stack may allow for some Really Impressive payoffs.
On the high end, bottlenecks are something to really watch for and identify, and Dtrace is an excellent tool for that sort of activity. This will be very interesting to watch.
Also, if Solaris DOES go GPLv3, the immediate availability of a superior SAMP stack that is GPL could turn a lot of heads, and may even displace some LAMP systems quickly and painlessly.
when considering GPLv3 for Solaris is to contact the actual authors of key parts of the Linux kernel that they would be interested in incorporating and sound out their willingness to license those parts under v3.
The Linux kernel as a whole is indeed copyright by many people, some of whom are not keen on GPLv3, but what is critical for Solaris is not the WHOLE kernel but the parts which are in fact better than Solaris. The obvious ones are drivers and file system support, but I imagine there are others as well. The point, however, is that Solaris doesn't NEED all of the Linux kernel code. They could only benefit from a few key parts, and the authors of those parts might be convinced to see things differently than Linus and company.
If I were Sun, what I would be doing is a) waiting for the final GPLv3 while being very active in the process of developing the license b) quietly contacting key individual authors of parts of the Linux kernel that would benefit Solaris, sounding out their attitude to see how much code would be available if they did make the switch, and c) putting an in-house team on a Linux vs. Solaris evaluation to determine the major lacks of Solaris and how they might be addressed internally, assuming no Linux code will be usable.
The Free Software Foundation's support is not necessarily a guarantee of OS kernel success (*cough*HURD*cough*) but if all FSF code goes GPLv3 and Solaris follows suit being the new favorite development platform of the GNU toolchain will have to have some benefits.
I'd say the biggest key for Solaris is "what can GPLv3 do for me?" And the biggest immediate factor there is how many of the current Linux kernel authors with desirable code would be willing to consider accommodating Sun by releasing under GPLv3. If they won't, then the question becomes how many new developers could they attract, and that's a much harder question to answer.
"Data could be released provided the following circumstances are met: The certificate containing the requested data is inactive for at least three years; the TC owner of record, or the owner of record's heir, cannot not be located; and the designation of such data as public data will enhance aviation safety."
This is a good step, but it seems to pertain to safety concerns much more than "hobbiest" concerns, which was my first thought when I saw "vintage." (It would be really cool to see, say, original blueprints in svg format for the first commercial airplanes, but good luck getting either access to such information or right to do anything with it.)
I doubt the logic used in this process could be generalized to copyright in general (probably the issue of most interest to slashdot), since it's pretty hard to argue that (for example) old software manuals for a long dead image editing system could pertain to public safety. They might be very well written and a good starting point for new efforts, but the benefits of that are much more indirect.
I think the loss of old documents and knowledge is a very unfortunate thing - there is a certain logic to IP holdings of companies that have "lapsed" or vanished becoming defunct in order to allow the knowledge and resources to be used for further progress. Of course, that would require uniquely identifying IP created by that company as opposed to being licensed from somewhere else, virtually impossible without good records. A nasty situation.
To me the only sensible thing to do with a moon base is to dig it out of the lunar surface, not place buildings on that same surface. Consider!
Builds require structural materials to maintain their integrity, which means mass to haul into space
There is no protective atmosphere on the moon, so the structures are SOL if a rock happens to come wandering in from space, barring LOTS of mass for protection. (Yes it can happen - where do you think meteor showers come from?)
Radiation on the moon's surface is also not cut down, so same problem as incoming high speed rocks. Materials durability concerns, people concerns, all sorts of fun.
If we put the sucker underground, we get a nice layer of rock on top of the base, which will neatly avoid getting lots of support materials up there and will protect everyone. It would also provide thermal inertia against extreme temperature swings, reducing energy and insulation costs. Sure the view would suck, but I'll bet after a while the view on the moon would get old too. Have a viewing station above for observations/airlock/what have you, but build the bulk of it underground. The moon is relatively stable geologically and the far more active Earth has plenty of underground structures on it, so the real question is digging it out.
So I would suggest looking at ways to hollow out large areas on the moon with minimal equipment. My first thought would be small, low mass automated diggers running off of solar power feeds working slowly over time, so we can learn about the environment as we dig into it. Easy to get up there, and over time they could do serious work if built reliable (think filling up a swimming pool one drop at a time, just in reverse.)
It wouldn't have the neat "space base!" look you see on the covers of science fiction books, but I think it would be much more practical, safe, and useful.
Indeed, installing drivers is a problem, but not one that can be solved only on the Linux side.
So long as hardware manufacturers want to keep secrets to themselves inside binary driver code, Linux will have difficulty supporting newer hardware well. I think projects like that open graphics card would be a big step in the right direction, but of course the latest and greatest NVIDIA card will always have this problem. Then, too, patents come into play in this arena.
A graphical "install this driver" setup wouldn't be hard - the problem is much lower level than that, and may actually be as much philosophical as anything else (I'm not a kernel expert).
KDE in its current form is quite usable for most common purposes, and those abilities it doesn't have can probably be added as widespread adoption takes place. OpenOffice has its faults but it usually does the job. I would say at this point, it's not Linux as Linux that's the holdup. It's:
1. Legacy systems, documents, and most importantly user training in said systems and documents. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules when computers are the tool rather than the end goal in and of themselves, and it's hard to fault that logic. If you change your systems you're effectively "breaking" your employees in terms of their productivity, and fixing them is quite a job. It's only justified when the end benefits are worth the pain, and to be fair in most cases they probably aren't, at least in the short term. And we all know how good capitalism is at thinking long term.
2. Compatibility with the largest possible market segment. If your customers/suppliers insist on dealing in old formats (see #1) then it's rather hard to force them to change. And every minute spent dealing with such issues is one less spent on work related to producing something.
3. Costs of retraining your IT department and switching your software/machines. Yes it will take time - hardware support, IT helpdesk training, identifying and testing replacements for currently used apps, etc. Not painless at all.
I would say Linux was "ready for the desktop" several years ago, or at least as ready as Windows. KDE and Gnome are excellent systems for most users, once installed and configured properly. (That's what admins are for - work PCs are not normally maintained directly by users, regardless of OS.) Now the problem is revealed as being rather deeper than originally anticipated - it's not JUST Linux that's the problem, it's change period.
For home use, people want to play media and install thousands of commercial specialty packages, which are all written for Windows. More legacy software issues, with no budget or interest on the part of the people writing them (why target an uncertain platform populated by geeks who give stuff away?)
The problems aren't technological now - I would say they can be more accurately characterized as inertia. It's hard to give people reasons to switch from something that works, even when the new thing is BETTER than the current one. Linux, due to legal constraints as well as not quite 100% compatibility with things like Word formats, is not and probably CANNOT become (legally) a drop-in which is better in all cases.
Personally, I think the only hope for a massive switch to an open source OS is one where the software is written in such a fashion that it can be PROVEN (mathematically) to be secure/crash proof/what have you. Such a verifiable guarantee might gain enough interest/momentum to be worth the massive shifts that still have not taken place, but I am aware of no other lack in the marketplace severe enough to warrant it.
The Chicxulub event, while large, is not the only large impact suffered in Earth's history. There are quite a number of large craters in the geologic history, and probably more that we have not stumbled upon yet. The Earth Impact Database lists two craters larger than Chicxulub:
There are also questions about a possible crater in Antarctica, but it's too new an announcement to know if the features observed are actually impact related: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/erthboom.htm
My question is, why would the Chicxulub event have been so uniquely deadly?
I suppose one possible scenario is a double (or more) sucker punch of large impact followed by volcanic activity and/or other factors that happened to hit while the Earth was still recovering from the impact. Of course, that's a bit complex for a spectacular headline.
I hope work continues on this - it's a fascinating insight into our environment and might be useful in knowing how to safeguard ourselves against changes in the future.
1. Most software that creates the userland for desktop users can run on Solaris as well as Linux, in the sense of using the kernels.
2. Businesses, which value stability, have watched the Linux kernel abandon the odd-even numbering system in favor of merging major changes into the 2.6 tree (I know there are pros and cons for this, but my money is on this not being a positive move in most commercial business eyes.)
3. The major lack for Solaris, from the user standpoint at least, is the driver support Linux now enjoys - if Solaris supported all the hardware Linux does and had a good/friendly install routine (haven't tried it myself), there would be little to choose between Linux and Solaris.
Now, how could GPLv3 help?
It's true the Linux kernel code, as such, could not be merged straight into Solaris. HOWEVER, key authors of the parts of Linux that actually are better could be contacted and asked if they would license their code for use in Solaris under GPLv3. The CDDL has not, so far, encouraged much of this activity as far as I know. GPL has "street cred" in terms of the open source population, and the key authors of the key parts unique to Linux might be convinced to help Solaris (which has its own bits of Truly Awesome Code).
Many of the arguments are similar to using GPL for Java. Solaris is already freely available and as such is not a direct revenue stream for Sun - the question is how to use it to Make Money in other venues. Now there are risks as well as rewards to being able to run Solaris on a wide variety of hardware, and Sun must make the calculation as to whether universal standardization/use of Solaris would promote their hardware as a very stable, powerful integrated core of a complete Solaris solution. This is not immediately clear, but is possible. Certainly, it would increase Sun's "visibility" in the marketplace, if they displace Linux as the major open source operating system. (I know, I know - the userland tools are what count most, but marketing doesn't seem to work that way.)
Another interesting question is whether the corporations who have made contributions to Linux in order to make it more usable for them might be inclined to work with Sun and Solaris if it becomes available under GPLv3. Corporations seem to be more comfortable working with other corporate entities, and GPL is a good "safeguard" against being taken to the cleaners.
I hope Sun does release a functioning Solaris under GPLv3, with the key parts (dtrace, ZFS, etc) included. I would certainly be interested in such a system, particularly if the key developers cooperate and the major Linux Goodies can be folded into it.
How effective these resources will be depends largely on the learning style of those who plan to study, but what a great resource to have available. So many people could use it:
a) High school students not challenged by their current materials have somewhere to go. b) Students at other universities who need additional resources can look here. c) Those simply looking to learn about the world around them have a low/no cost place to start.
I'm sure there are many, many more. But this, in my opinion, is what colleges should be about - creating a more educated, thoughtful, and critical (in the sense of examining and not simply accepting) population. I'm sorry to see patents and patent revenue becoming such a large part of college/university thinking - if you want to do that, build a commercial research center. Things like this keep hope alive - education for its own sake. There is more to the world than business (although I'm not sure our society remembers that some days) and efforts like this really do make the world a better place.
OK, we all know how useful and accurate these predictions tend to be, but since it's that time of year...
The open-sourcing of Java will have no effect whatsoever on Java's slow decline in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#.
That depends on what market we are talking about. Open sourcing Java will make a MASSIVE difference in terms of Java's appeal to the open source development community. Whether this translates to more Java software or not I don't know, but there are already some very good programs in Java that are open source (Jedit http://jedit.sourceforge.net/, Jabref http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ and JaxoDraw http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/ come readily to mind). Seamless integration with Linux distributions has the potential to make it a much more popular language, and may also result in usability improvements to the environment itself.
Other languages will grow of course, but I would personally be surprised if Java fades too much except perhaps as the "new toy". There is a LOT of Java code out there, and it is doing important work.
The use of the GPL 2 for open-sourcing Java will inhibit the completion and acceptance of the GPL 3 proposal.
I don't understand this. GPL3 will go forward as it is going forward now, with much discussion - I can't imagine any issues Java would raise that aren't already being raised. Anybody with more knowledge of the process and Java know what he's saying here?
Now, just to get into the swing of things, my predictions:
a) Every major Linux distribution will deploy Sun's JRE as a core system component soon after a full open source release is made. Allow six months to replace any pieces that could not be released due to copyright/license issues. The Sun JDK will also see large scale integration.
b) Open source software written in Java that already exists will get a boost in interest and visibility, as it is no longer using a language that is non-free.
c) Graphics performance and native appearance of widgets will be a major focus of interest and effort, possibly resulting in Java applications becoming better integrated visually with the desktop. This may actually cost Java a bit in terms of name recognition, as end users will see less visual evidence of the difference between Java and other languages (I know, I know - that's not what makes Java different, but it's what can be SEEN that counts.)
d) As Linux distributions integrate and include Java by default, it will increase the appeal of both Java and Linux on the server side.
And one that I would like to see proven wrong:
e) No major OEM computer maker will add the Sun JRE as a default part of their desktop, despite it being released as GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there is an assumption made, almost unconsciously, that if our other power sources fail we could always "fall back" on nuclear if we wanted to take the risk. It's interesting to see that large scale nuclear power could have similar infrastructure problems to renewables - invest a lot or don't end up viable.
This article focuses primarily on the economic questions of scale-up. I would be curious to know how much uranium is theoretically recoverable and how long it would last us. Perhaps there is so much of it that we could live off of it indefinitely (particularly with waste reprocessing) but I don't know the numbers.
What this article DOES demonstrate, even better than renewables, is the need to sustain and increase basic research into ALL energy problems and technologies. Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and various storage techniques like hydrogen will be needed; it's not a one solution fits all kind of equation. Nor will the solutions just "be there" when we need them, unless we pay attention and take steps to ensure that they are. Even nuclear cannot be taken for granted.
Also - in the long term human beings will consume all available power either by technological/standard of living increases, population increases, or both. There isn't going to be a solution which will be "enough" - we will ALWAYS find something to do with it. Just the scale-up going on right now is putting a healthy demand on resources of all sorts, and that's just the short term. In hundreds or thousands of years there will be some very fundamental problems that need solving, and I think we need to get started working on them sooner rather than later. These things don't happen magically, they take hard and long work.
Business is not to be expected to think long term, certainly not in the current environment. That should be the job of government research funding, and there needs to be a LOT more of it. Perhaps the difficulties of scaling up nuclear power will help to wake people up - it would be nice to do the research on new power technologies in something other than economic crisis mode.
beg pardon, that should be "realize its" not "realise it's" - sorry.
At a certain point, networking requires trust in order to realise it's potential benefits. Open source wouldn't work if everyone had to read every line of source code before running a program, so various organizations and projects develop trust and reputations. We know Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, etc. are OK and can proceed to use them with minimal trouble. A brand new Linux distribution must climb that hill, in addition to providing sufficient incentive for people to find out if they can be trusted. That's tough.
The anonymous nature of the web is what allows things like virus writers to succeed - if they couldn't hide, they wouldn't assume the responsibility for what they're doing (well OK a few nut cases would, but the same is true in real life.) However, forcing unique identities on people opens up a host of other problems, some of them more serious than the ones we have today.
So we must operate in the twilight world of making networks which cannot be successfully attacked by bad actors. There are a wide variety of intermediate solutions, like today's anti-spam techniques, wikipedia's system and even slashdot's own moderation system. But none are perfect and none can be perfect - the problem is not solvable in general. Open source actually helps this in one major way - the community controls that operate in the real world to keep human social systems functional also operate (to some degree) in small scale projects. There the individual traits of interested parties become known over time, and recognition and trust can be built up based on more than just a name or email address. It is not perfectly robust, but then no system to date has been.
Virus problems will continue as long as there are people wanting to write viruses, as they are simply an electronic version of spray painting walls, defacing monuments, or other useless and harmful activities that have persisted since the beginnings of civilization. We must rely on community, the most robust tools we can devise, and (finally) building our own web of trust based on things we have found to work. These issues are fundamental to the human condition and (like all social problems) cannot be resolved by technology. The fact that spam emails can be identified at all, for example, is really just an indication of the lack of skill of spam writers. Likewise, someone really wanting to distribute a virus can just make a freeware program that actually does something real and useful long enough to build a reputation, and then when it is widely distributed trashes every system it is installed on. There are always ways to attack a target, if enough effort is put into the planning. The trick is to be fault tolerent and recover quickly. In specific cases better security can be achieved (classified information, etc.) but for the general case it will always come down to dealing with the consequences of antisocial behavior as it happens.
I have always wondered what would have happened if the idea of using Lisp as the assembly language of a machine had actually taken off. If I understand the Lisp machines correctly, they were actually "lisp on the metal". Given the flexibility and power of the lisp language it would have been very interesting to see what the evolution of the Lisp Machines would have been, had they proved viable in the long term.
Prestige is necessary for a journal to be a major player in a field, and such a reputation is built up over time. They sustain that reputation and academics (particularly new ones) must try to get published in those journals in order to succeed. This creates a feedback loop, as the youngest members of the community who might be the most willing to further a change to a free journal are also the most limited in their ability to buck the establishment.
I would suggest universities and departments "grade" journals and openly state which will be regarded as acceptable publication targets. In this fashion, a review board could be created for a new journal that would have the confidence of departments and could be endorsed as a "safe" publishing target from the get-go. (It would also be a difficult target, just like the established journals, in order to evaluate students according to a standard.) With this official endorsement by "big names" in the field, some momentum could begin to shift. Younger students who are new to the system and not yet accustomed to the high prices would be more willing to try and correct what many see as a serious problem. Those trying for tenure would have less to worry about when being reviewed if their institution endorses the new publication.
Prestige is a dangerous thing to worship, and the real reason for prestige of a journal is the content within it. I think a shakeup is way overdue.
The thing to do about this is to get the big names in the field to agree to transfer their efforts collectively as a body to a free journal. The ones with established careers don't have to worry about vanishing into the mists if they don't publish in a big name, and if they move their efforts as one they can shift the momentum without having to fight it out between old journal and new.
The tools are available to do this - LaTeX is free and already in use in many cases, and there are a multitude of collaborative tools that could be used or adapted to handle article submissions and reviews. ToC at http://theoryofcomputing.org/ has some very useful LaTeX tools defined for online journal publication. All that is really needed is a) the will to do it and b) the organization and support from the major players/schools to do it.
Authors and reviewers already do most of the work for free or worse, all that is needed now is to do that work for someone other than the folks charging high fees to control the work. (There's probably a joke in there somewhere about replacing the publishers of journals with a very small shell script...)
As frustrating as it may seem, there are actually fairly sound reasons for this in some situations. I would argue the internet was one.
In theory, ten years of computer science research might have produced a better design for the internet than the one we have today, back when it was first being developed. However, we have learned a lot from the scale-up that on a practical level would be fairly hard to duplicate in a research setting. Sometimes you just don't think of the possible consequences until you see them happen, particularly things due to human beings TRYING to bring down the system. Think about how long telnet lasted, for example.
In all honesty, it's a miracle the world wide web has scaled the way it has - consider the original scope of the military networks and the small amounts of data they were transmitting. The original designs were to Get Something Working and Justify Our Budget - that's how it has to work. I'd say the return on investment for the various stages of the internet has always more than justified even the costs of redoing it. Sometimes you can't wait to figure out how to do it right, because that will take too much time and what you can build NOW is still useful. Think about automobiles - 10 years from now we will undoubtedly be building better ones than we can build today, but the costs of waiting until we know how to do it "right" are much higher than the costs of replacement.
Now, of course, the question of knowing how to do something right is distinct from doing correctly what we already know how to do - one is a research problem, one is an implementation problem. I'm inclined to think that the web is more of a research limitation than a "do it right" issue, although I could be wrong - it depends on how much was known in the beginning states.
Google has been doing this now for some years with what appear to be fairly impressive results - I wonder if we might start to see other companies pick up on this a little. What about, say, the major Linux distributions sponsoring some projects for the major open source desktops? Or universities sponsoring some scientific software (I was very interested to see fityk on the supported list this year)? Or perhaps IBM could sponsor some work? There should be many possibilities.
Google is supporting quite a lot of work and a great many projects, but it is unavoidable that many useful projects will fall though their net - they have only so much support they can offer. I would be interested to see other companies either partner with Google or do on their own what Google is doing - if Google can do so much, what could 5 or 10 more companies using the same basic method accomplish?
I have a bad feeling about this... that poor server.
And amusingly enough, the image text for passing this through is IMMINENT. No kidding...
One thing that is not clear to me is whether these "promises" not to sue on various patents have any legal standing. IANAL so perhaps there is some principle of "public statement of intent" that would contrain their actions, but with no signed contract or agreement in place not to sue couldn't a management change bring about a new policy on those patents?
I think the MAD principle is still what's holding back a patent war in the US (plus a hot and heavy patent fight harmful to the industry might spur software patent reform) and I can't see why Microsoft, as a corporate entity, should be trusted in the least.
Plus, the principle of legal intimidation is still all that is really needed here, not actual victory in a patent case - most open source projects don't have the resources to defend themselves from even a non-valid challenge. That's why MAD is effective where even legal safety might not be - sort of a "don't beat up on the weak kid or you'll start a brawl" effect.
The problem with open source in a legal sense (at least in the US) is that open source volunteer projects need some condition where they CAN'T be sued, and as I understand it that simply isn't possible under the US legal system where anyone can sue anyone else for anything. The suit may not be valid but until that's decided it can go ahead in any case and the accused MUST respond or risk a default judgement against them. Patents make being on unshakable ground impossible in general for anything nontrivial, and once a project is deprived of the ability to assume an absolutly invulnerable position (except not doing the project) the waters get murky fast.
As much as I like the idea of protective clauses in the GPL3 license, I have a feeling that the people inclined to make trouble for free software with patent cases are unlikely to be in a position where the GPL would stop them. They will be competing with GPL software, not using it - being forbidden to use it won't stop them at all.
The conflict is fundamental - patents stop people from doing things with software, and open source programmers want to do those things. The law is a tool towards those ends, which both sides will employ. The stark fact seems to be that the law supports patents, and so does the political establishment and commercial support which funds said establishment.
There are two things stopping a WW3 style patent nuke war, as far as I can tell - one is the MAD assurances provided by the larger open source companies and/or supporters, and the other is the cost/benefit analysis of launching an attack on an open source author/project is not so good. Attacking the project means lots of legal fees if the case is fought, very bad press among the tech community, and the distinct chance the software you are attacking will be reborn, rewritten, or even replaced by something better as thousands of irate geeks seek a technical solution to the legal action. If by some chance the patent being used has covered all possible useful methods of doing something, the community simply waits until it expires and THEN proceeds. Yes 20 years is a long time, but it is not forever. The GIF patents eventually expired, and I would be very surprised if the cost/benefit analysis of those patents was a net plus. Apple has not gone after the freetype project, for example (although they did contact them).
However, these mechanisms cannot be entirely relied upon. JMRI is certainly an example: http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html So long as patents can be filed on software, there is the potential for a slaugher among free projects. I can't think of any license change JMRI might have made that would avoid their current situation. Patents will always pose a serious threat to free sofware, as the representative of commerical control interests. Indeed, I would expect that if patents are abolished some other method would be found, but at least it would be more difficult.
Not to sound like Stallman here, but there have always been two camps - those who think software should be Free as in "we should be able to do what we want with the code for moral/ethical reasons" and those who see practical benefits as in "when people can do what they want with the code everyone benefits."
I would expect most businesses are part of the open source camp, not the free software camp, and open source was always pragmatic. That's WHY it appeals to people where Free doesn't - because there's a definite concrete benefit.
Businesses as they exist in the US are by and large about making money, not upholding principles. Some businesses do both, but look at Google ("do no evil") and how they delt with China. Capitalism has its limits, and one of them is being socially aware - awareness of community responsibility and discharging that responsibility is always a short term loss for a long term gain (i.e. pay more to properly dispose of waste, lose the profit you could have gotten by keeping the $$ and dumping it in the river, but long term preserve the environment and the health of the people around you, avoid litigation and community ill will). Capitalism sucks at long term anything, which is why government needs to be different from and independent of corporations. That's why framing the free/open proposal as "you get a benefit/save $$ from doing this" rather than "you're morally obligated to do this - it's the ethical thing" is effective. It just so happens that releasing free software has immediate benefits AND benefits society, so PR can say the company is doing both. Sure, the ACTUAL reasons they did it might not deserve a halo, but getting outraged over them not being "genuinely committed to the ideals of Free Software" is as pointless as it is futile, in the business world as it exists today.
If people do the right thing, it's not very helpful to wonder if they did it for the wrong reasons. How can we know for sure, and what could we do about it even if we did know for sure and don't like their reasons? Insist they do the wrong thing?
if DRM is removed and piracy jumps, the cause-effect logic will be very hard to refute. It probably CAN be refuted (all that has to happen is to have a file successfully ripped once and it's all over the internet) but an observed jump post-DRM removal would undoubtedly end some careers. Nobody wants to take that chance.
The music industry seems to be doing quite well (which is not to say the artists are getting all they really should, but that's another post) since they have money to spend playing around with copyright law. There is no "we need to try DRM-free music before our profits dry up!" imperative which might drive people to take risks and the company to accept risks, so DRM (which is easy to make sound good, whether it is or not) won't go anywhere until the case for it hurting sales AS A CONCEPT (not just a bad implementation) becomes obvious enough to convince anyone.
The only way I can see that happening is an "open source music" phenomena that replaces corporate music trends, star generators, and hits with something just as good (or "effective" if you don't think it's good) but community controlled. That's hard, because opinions are subjective and can apparently be influenced by ads. We need a central site, lots of sources of music people want to listen to (not what they SHOULD want to listen to, mind you, but what they DO want to listen to - no running people down for their (lack of) taste), and quality control that people can trust. When THAT emerges, DRM will become too much of a liability. I don't see anything else that can do it.
I have a feeling Dtrace probes might be a big, big win here - if they instrument it as they have the Solaris system itself that level of performance tuning integrated into the entire software stack may allow for some Really Impressive payoffs.
On the high end, bottlenecks are something to really watch for and identify, and Dtrace is an excellent tool for that sort of activity. This will be very interesting to watch.
Also, if Solaris DOES go GPLv3, the immediate availability of a superior SAMP stack that is GPL could turn a lot of heads, and may even displace some LAMP systems quickly and painlessly.
It looks like other people have had this thought too:
- linux-kernel-code-is-gpl-2.html
http://6thsenseless.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-much
when considering GPLv3 for Solaris is to contact the actual authors of key parts of the Linux kernel that they would be interested in incorporating and sound out their willingness to license those parts under v3.
The Linux kernel as a whole is indeed copyright by many people, some of whom are not keen on GPLv3, but what is critical for Solaris is not the WHOLE kernel but the parts which are in fact better than Solaris. The obvious ones are drivers and file system support, but I imagine there are others as well. The point, however, is that Solaris doesn't NEED all of the Linux kernel code. They could only benefit from a few key parts, and the authors of those parts might be convinced to see things differently than Linus and company.
If I were Sun, what I would be doing is a) waiting for the final GPLv3 while being very active in the process of developing the license b) quietly contacting key individual authors of parts of the Linux kernel that would benefit Solaris, sounding out their attitude to see how much code would be available if they did make the switch, and c) putting an in-house team on a Linux vs. Solaris evaluation to determine the major lacks of Solaris and how they might be addressed internally, assuming no Linux code will be usable.
The Free Software Foundation's support is not necessarily a guarantee of OS kernel success (*cough*HURD*cough*) but if all FSF code goes GPLv3 and Solaris follows suit being the new favorite development platform of the GNU toolchain will have to have some benefits.
I'd say the biggest key for Solaris is "what can GPLv3 do for me?" And the biggest immediate factor there is how many of the current Linux kernel authors with desirable code would be willing to consider accommodating Sun by releasing under GPLv3. If they won't, then the question becomes how many new developers could they attract, and that's a much harder question to answer.
"Data could be released provided the following circumstances are met: The certificate containing the requested data is inactive for at least three years; the TC owner of record, or the owner of record's heir, cannot not be located; and the designation of such data as public data will enhance aviation safety."
This is a good step, but it seems to pertain to safety concerns much more than "hobbiest" concerns, which was my first thought when I saw "vintage." (It would be really cool to see, say, original blueprints in svg format for the first commercial airplanes, but good luck getting either access to such information or right to do anything with it.)
I doubt the logic used in this process could be generalized to copyright in general (probably the issue of most interest to slashdot), since it's pretty hard to argue that (for example) old software manuals for a long dead image editing system could pertain to public safety. They might be very well written and a good starting point for new efforts, but the benefits of that are much more indirect.
I think the loss of old documents and knowledge is a very unfortunate thing - there is a certain logic to IP holdings of companies that have "lapsed" or vanished becoming defunct in order to allow the knowledge and resources to be used for further progress. Of course, that would require uniquely identifying IP created by that company as opposed to being licensed from somewhere else, virtually impossible without good records. A nasty situation.
To me the only sensible thing to do with a moon base is to dig it out of the lunar surface, not place buildings on that same surface. Consider!
Builds require structural materials to maintain their integrity, which means mass to haul into space
There is no protective atmosphere on the moon, so the structures are SOL if a rock happens to come wandering in from space, barring LOTS of mass for protection. (Yes it can happen - where do you think meteor showers come from?)
Radiation on the moon's surface is also not cut down, so same problem as incoming high speed rocks. Materials durability concerns, people concerns, all sorts of fun.
If we put the sucker underground, we get a nice layer of rock on top of the base, which will neatly avoid getting lots of support materials up there and will protect everyone. It would also provide thermal inertia against extreme temperature swings, reducing energy and insulation costs. Sure the view would suck, but I'll bet after a while the view on the moon would get old too. Have a viewing station above for observations/airlock/what have you, but build the bulk of it underground. The moon is relatively stable geologically and the far more active Earth has plenty of underground structures on it, so the real question is digging it out.
So I would suggest looking at ways to hollow out large areas on the moon with minimal equipment. My first thought would be small, low mass automated diggers running off of solar power feeds working slowly over time, so we can learn about the environment as we dig into it. Easy to get up there, and over time they could do serious work if built reliable (think filling up a swimming pool one drop at a time, just in reverse.)
It wouldn't have the neat "space base!" look you see on the covers of science fiction books, but I think it would be much more practical, safe, and useful.
Indeed, installing drivers is a problem, but not one that can be solved only on the Linux side.
So long as hardware manufacturers want to keep secrets to themselves inside binary driver code, Linux will have difficulty supporting newer hardware well. I think projects like that open graphics card would be a big step in the right direction, but of course the latest and greatest NVIDIA card will always have this problem. Then, too, patents come into play in this arena.
A graphical "install this driver" setup wouldn't be hard - the problem is much lower level than that, and may actually be as much philosophical as anything else (I'm not a kernel expert).
KDE in its current form is quite usable for most common purposes, and those abilities it doesn't have can probably be added as widespread adoption takes place. OpenOffice has its faults but it usually does the job. I would say at this point, it's not Linux as Linux that's the holdup. It's:
1. Legacy systems, documents, and most importantly user training in said systems and documents. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules when computers are the tool rather than the end goal in and of themselves, and it's hard to fault that logic. If you change your systems you're effectively "breaking" your employees in terms of their productivity, and fixing them is quite a job. It's only justified when the end benefits are worth the pain, and to be fair in most cases they probably aren't, at least in the short term. And we all know how good capitalism is at thinking long term.
2. Compatibility with the largest possible market segment. If your customers/suppliers insist on dealing in old formats (see #1) then it's rather hard to force them to change. And every minute spent dealing with such issues is one less spent on work related to producing something.
3. Costs of retraining your IT department and switching your software/machines. Yes it will take time - hardware support, IT helpdesk training, identifying and testing replacements for currently used apps, etc. Not painless at all.
I would say Linux was "ready for the desktop" several years ago, or at least as ready as Windows. KDE and Gnome are excellent systems for most users, once installed and configured properly. (That's what admins are for - work PCs are not normally maintained directly by users, regardless of OS.) Now the problem is revealed as being rather deeper than originally anticipated - it's not JUST Linux that's the problem, it's change period.
For home use, people want to play media and install thousands of commercial specialty packages, which are all written for Windows. More legacy software issues, with no budget or interest on the part of the people writing them (why target an uncertain platform populated by geeks who give stuff away?)
The problems aren't technological now - I would say they can be more accurately characterized as inertia. It's hard to give people reasons to switch from something that works, even when the new thing is BETTER than the current one. Linux, due to legal constraints as well as not quite 100% compatibility with things like Word formats, is not and probably CANNOT become (legally) a drop-in which is better in all cases.
Personally, I think the only hope for a massive switch to an open source OS is one where the software is written in such a fashion that it can be PROVEN (mathematically) to be secure/crash proof/what have you. Such a verifiable guarantee might gain enough interest/momentum to be worth the massive shifts that still have not taken place, but I am aware of no other lack in the marketplace severe enough to warrant it.
The Chicxulub event, while large, is not the only large impact suffered in Earth's history. There are quite a number of large craters in the geologic history, and probably more that we have not stumbled upon yet. The Earth Impact Database lists two craters larger than Chicxulub:
S ort2.htm
http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/CIDiameter
Wikipedia blurbs on the two largest (as usual, do more research to verify if interested:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vredefort_crater
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin
There are also questions about a possible crater in Antarctica, but it's too new an announcement to know if the features observed are actually impact related: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/erthboom.htm
My question is, why would the Chicxulub event have been so uniquely deadly?
I suppose one possible scenario is a double (or more) sucker punch of large impact followed by volcanic activity and/or other factors that happened to hit while the Earth was still recovering from the impact. Of course, that's a bit complex for a spectacular headline.
I hope work continues on this - it's a fascinating insight into our environment and might be useful in knowing how to safeguard ourselves against changes in the future.
Consider the following points:
1. Most software that creates the userland for desktop users can run on Solaris as well as Linux, in the sense of using the kernels.
2. Businesses, which value stability, have watched the Linux kernel abandon the odd-even numbering system in favor of merging major changes into the 2.6 tree (I know there are pros and cons for this, but my money is on this not being a positive move in most commercial business eyes.)
3. The major lack for Solaris, from the user standpoint at least, is the driver support Linux now enjoys - if Solaris supported all the hardware Linux does and had a good/friendly install routine (haven't tried it myself), there would be little to choose between Linux and Solaris.
Now, how could GPLv3 help?
It's true the Linux kernel code, as such, could not be merged straight into Solaris. HOWEVER, key authors of the parts of Linux that actually are better could be contacted and asked if they would license their code for use in Solaris under GPLv3. The CDDL has not, so far, encouraged much of this activity as far as I know. GPL has "street cred" in terms of the open source population, and the key authors of the key parts unique to Linux might be convinced to help Solaris (which has its own bits of Truly Awesome Code).
Many of the arguments are similar to using GPL for Java. Solaris is already freely available and as such is not a direct revenue stream for Sun - the question is how to use it to Make Money in other venues. Now there are risks as well as rewards to being able to run Solaris on a wide variety of hardware, and Sun must make the calculation as to whether universal standardization/use of Solaris would promote their hardware as a very stable, powerful integrated core of a complete Solaris solution. This is not immediately clear, but is possible. Certainly, it would increase Sun's "visibility" in the marketplace, if they displace Linux as the major open source operating system. (I know, I know - the userland tools are what count most, but marketing doesn't seem to work that way.)
Another interesting question is whether the corporations who have made contributions to Linux in order to make it more usable for them might be inclined to work with Sun and Solaris if it becomes available under GPLv3. Corporations seem to be more comfortable working with other corporate entities, and GPL is a good "safeguard" against being taken to the cleaners.
I hope Sun does release a functioning Solaris under GPLv3, with the key parts (dtrace, ZFS, etc) included. I would certainly be interested in such a system, particularly if the key developers cooperate and the major Linux Goodies can be folded into it.
Interesting times.
How effective these resources will be depends largely on the learning style of those who plan to study, but what a great resource to have available. So many people could use it:
a) High school students not challenged by their current materials have somewhere to go.
b) Students at other universities who need additional resources can look here.
c) Those simply looking to learn about the world around them have a low/no cost place to start.
I'm sure there are many, many more. But this, in my opinion, is what colleges should be about - creating a more educated, thoughtful, and critical (in the sense of examining and not simply accepting) population. I'm sorry to see patents and patent revenue becoming such a large part of college/university thinking - if you want to do that, build a commercial research center. Things like this keep hope alive - education for its own sake. There is more to the world than business (although I'm not sure our society remembers that some days) and efforts like this really do make the world a better place.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0607135
From back in August?
OK, we all know how useful and accurate these predictions tend to be, but since it's that time of year...
The open-sourcing of Java will have no effect whatsoever on Java's slow decline in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#.
That depends on what market we are talking about. Open sourcing Java will make a MASSIVE difference in terms of Java's appeal to the open source development community. Whether this translates to more Java software or not I don't know, but there are already some very good programs in Java that are open source (Jedit http://jedit.sourceforge.net/, Jabref http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ and JaxoDraw http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/ come readily to mind). Seamless integration with Linux distributions has the potential to make it a much more popular language, and may also result in usability improvements to the environment itself.
Other languages will grow of course, but I would personally be surprised if Java fades too much except perhaps as the "new toy". There is a LOT of Java code out there, and it is doing important work.
The use of the GPL 2 for open-sourcing Java will inhibit the completion and acceptance of the GPL 3 proposal.
I don't understand this. GPL3 will go forward as it is going forward now, with much discussion - I can't imagine any issues Java would raise that aren't already being raised. Anybody with more knowledge of the process and Java know what he's saying here?
Now, just to get into the swing of things, my predictions:
a) Every major Linux distribution will deploy Sun's JRE as a core system component soon after a full open source release is made. Allow six months to replace any pieces that could not be released due to copyright/license issues. The Sun JDK will also see large scale integration.
b) Open source software written in Java that already exists will get a boost in interest and visibility, as it is no longer using a language that is non-free.
c) Graphics performance and native appearance of widgets will be a major focus of interest and effort, possibly resulting in Java applications becoming better integrated visually with the desktop. This may actually cost Java a bit in terms of name recognition, as end users will see less visual evidence of the difference between Java and other languages (I know, I know - that's not what makes Java different, but it's what can be SEEN that counts.)
d) As Linux distributions integrate and include Java by default, it will increase the appeal of both Java and Linux on the server side.
And one that I would like to see proven wrong:
e) No major OEM computer maker will add the Sun JRE as a default part of their desktop, despite it being released as GPL.