I keep hearing about people saying "Open Source is not a viable business model...yadda yadda yadda..."
These people don't get it.
Not very many people do.
The software is not important anymore!
The people who build solutions with it ARE important,and THAT is where the cash is made.
Now, what software is no longer important anymore?
Why the OS of course. Why is that?
Why? The same reason why IPX became unimportant in the network world the moment you hooked up to the internet.
OPEN STANDARDS.
The OS is NOW becomming a standard, just like TCP/IP, open and free.
Open Source is really, a movement of industry and individuals to OPEN STANARDS platforms.
You may have also noticed, that this is part of the maturation cycle of computer technology. Whole software subsystems, after many years of application support, are now being identified as BOILER PLATE and are now forming the basis for standards.
Why is that?
If you still haven't figured that question out, you should be selling cars!!
Shrinkwrap companies like Microsoft are in the business of selling boiler plate software.
Thats why they are SCARED, they realize that the OS, Office app market is matured to the point it is now pretty much a STANDARD.
Unfortunately for Microsoft and other shrinkwrap software makers in the OS, and Office apps marketplace, they are stuck on one platform.
One platform doesn't cut it if you are hooked up to the internet. Well, it does, if you don't wish to do any business with China, Japan, Europe..etc.
The ONLY WAY to do that, is to embrace OPEN STANARDS and if your company doesn't, you can damn well rest assured your competitors WILL.
Microsoft doesn't work that way. Why? because if they cannot tie you to thier platform or OS, that means they don't have an advantage over you in time to market, cost of development of these BOILER PLATE software products.
OPEN STANDARDS means the death of over 80% of Microsofts current revenue streams over the next 5 years.
I am just counting the days. At the moment, the internets infrastructure is too immature to support this direction NOW.
However, just like your telephone, the net will be as robust as your phone line one day, or cell phone, and when that day comes, this vision will be realized.
Nobody, in thier right mind is going to do business with any company that can't move and send data at a moments notice to a consumer, vendor, or anyone ANYWHERE 24x7, 365 days out of the year here on earth or out in space.
Trying doing that with an operating system that requires you to do business with a customer as long as they by 100 grand worth of microsoft operating system products FIRST.
My response to him would be great! Come here and install and YOU pay for it, meanwhile, I will install a POP3 server and Linux THANKS but NO THANKS!!!
If you think a few billion is going to stop war and disease you have no clue guy about the scope of the problems you suggest could be solved using a few pennies in NASA's budget.
War? Starving children? Disease?
NASA's outlays wouldn't make a dent in any of those.
If you think the human race is going to solve it's problems by turning inward towards itself, any time soon, you obviously have never read any history book of any kind.
We know how to do a couple of things really well.
Kill, war, destroy and explore, and you are proposing we don't do the one thing out of those that could save our species.
The very thought of my fellow human beings living longer than they already do makes me think there is little hope for us all.
Why would we seek to eliminate our most redeeming quality as a species? A gift that destroys evil and makes us strive for good in the short time we have. The child that grows up only to be a child again, eventually? To pass to that place we were before we were born.
We die. Not just the poor or the powerless, or even those who cannot speak. Eventually, but surely as the winter comes, we ALL die. It is a gift to us all, and it is the very reason why our species has survived this long. It is a gift that we cannot refuse.
Most of us are evil, and thankfully all of us who WERE and did evil, are now dead and buried, dust in the wind, with nothing left but bones.
This idea of applying natural philosophy and science to these ends of immortality is evil, I believe. It is just one more example of our species arrogance against the very laws our Universe has set down before us. Believing we can do anything we wish, simply because we feel we need to exert absolute chaos upon the beautiful order I see everynight when I look at the sky.
Most of us are petty, amourous, self seeking creatures that have lives that are too long as is.
What we really need right now is more disease, a biological agent that is capable of wiping us out to numbers that make it a pleasure to walk through the green and vast forests again. To see the wildlife and nature as they were, untouched by the greed of this time. Forests that covered continents from ocean to ocean, which once covered this green, now mostly brown, globe of our!
Thankfully, the people who I have just spoken of, are working on such an agent as we speak, and will be done quite soon, I suspect now that this "great advance" of the human genome project is now complete and the very laws of God are ready to be perverted.
Maybe a drop from 8 billion people to 1.2 million world wide will bring us back to that "wonderful first time" the ancients always talked about.
Then we will start over, as we did before. With great tales of the wonders of old, the men of reknown who walked the earth.
I dream of such a time when I am sleeping. That wonderful first time. In the temples, taking measurements of the sun, moon and stars, knowing each number each calculation brings new knowledge and a sense of perfection. Pefection and a sense of timelessness that technology and the things we built would last between the houses of 12 for all to see and understand for generations. A living testament that obeying the laws of the ONE and the Universe we live in brings immortality not just in the physical, with our temples, but the spiritual as well.
Then I awake to a world built with pitiful concrete and iron materials which can't even last 200 years!
A people who cannot see anything but the moments and thier selfish desires between each which last but seconds!
Technology and understanding so weak that it can't last as long as the things built with them for they are just as contrived as well!!!
Tell me this is all a dream and I will awake to that time once again!
All of these posts are only telling half the story, of a quiet revolution that is happening in the computer centers of major companies adopting Java, open source philosophies in enabling business processes.
First, let me state, that Java as a language and Java as an implementation are two very different things.
The posts on Slash.dot here are referring to Java as an implementation, big slow etc, which in fact is true in _some_ instances.
But not true in others. It also isn't the only _implementation_ that is possible, so don't blame Sun for all of these implementation issues.
Java as a language reference can be implemented in both VM and native form.
That means, you don't need a jvm to run your Java program kiddies.
The OOD and OOP implementation benefits the language brings to the table, really, is an acknolwedgement that Software Engineering hasn't advanced very much in the past 30 years.
This is the FIRST language in my opinion that recognizes this fact. I know, I hire people to write ecom software. Software that cannot afford to have too many critical mistakes in it that result in lost dollars or unsafe transactions/privacy issues for the individual/companies. Software that must be designed/run in environments that usually bridges the gap between old and new, and provides direct access to a companies business systems. Also very much firsts, for customers who only requirement is that they use a web browser.
I have seen how this works. Companies who started out on small systems, such as NT boxes that have had to move to large SUN RISC environments after a year or two to meet demand.
Complete whole Ecom systems, moved without a single rewrite of 10's of thousands of lines of code on totally alien environments form where they have been built and ran. In my 15 years, I have never seen this happen before with off the shelf software. It is a true advancement, a real pay off.
A payoff Microsoft does NOT want you to have.
Our tools have become better, certainly some of our methods have improved, but the quality and maintainability of a vast majority of the software that is written is still not very good. (That is being overly complementary in my opinion.)
Java repesents I think an acknowledgement that for the first time, addresses a couple of points that for my business, dare I say software engineering economics (we build and write Ecom software for mission critical sites using ONLY java and open source platforms like Linux, to deploy them) is critical:
First Point is Code Reusability
What does Java have to offer that other languages don't? Reusability with a twist, and that twist is it pulls a API that I can count on between platforms.
Does anyone here have any idea what that means if you want to live in a world that tolerates a large number of OS platforms and you want to do business?
The holy grail in business process/technology is write once and run anywhere. It also has been the driving force behind C's portability and various gnu initiatives. It also We who write software have been seeking in the business world for 3 decades.
It isn't just a business desire either. How many here would like to play Homeworld on a linux box? How about MechWarrior 4???
For the first time I am seeing it actually work on a huge number of platforms, Sun, HP, Linux, As400's, S390's, Intel, with NO effort to port code for a single line.
It is not possible to do this with any other software development technology at such a low cost point and still allow everyone to pick what they want to run as thier OS platform of choice.
I am not sure everyone here understands what this means to organizations who want to save money and still be able to support platform OS diversity, given the kinds of posts I have seen.
It discusses and predicts that based on evidence we know of now, that life in the Universe may be fairly common. But sentient life might be an accident, and at the very least more complex life like plants and animals rare and that planets like our own just as rare.
Most of the stars we study have many characteristics to them that make them inhospitable for life over the time scales required to produce sentient life.
Or at the very least, with all of the things I see, and other scientists see through X-Ray telescopes, Infra Red Telescopes, Visible Light telescopes, spectragraphs, photometers, etc. the universe is a very hostile place over billions of year time scales.
Asteroid impacts, Supernova's in a solar systems local neighborhood, vast dust and gas clouds which could reduce/block sunlight, Black holes neutron stars, to very nasty and large local disturbances which can reach out across vast distances and destroy whole solar systems.
Is it any wonder we are here???
They put forward in the book that our solar system configuration might be very very odd. They say in many different ways we owe a lot to Jupitor the largest planet in our solar system.
Jupitor is large enough to take the big impacts that can take out life on our world and is good gravitationally at sweeping up and keeping the solar system free of large bodies.
The configuration of our very solar system with the larger planets on the outside, protecting the smaller solid/rocky planets inside may be one of the reasons why life has been able to hang on for so long and diversify on our planet.
I use FrameMaker for a book I am writing about Linux and it is a decent program, even in Beta.
What I can't understand is given the code base, it must be a snap too support both the Linux and the Solaris versions/Unix versions.
It cannot be all that different.
If Adobe's software engineering of the program is worth any salt at all, it can't be a problem to support it.
I mean, you cannot tell me that there are more HP UNIX users out there using the program, or COULD be using the program rather than Linux users.
The program, which I use it for is writing books and typsetting my documentation for my Linux cluster in my basement.
What I want to know is, why Adobe didn't approach a distribution such as Debian or RedHat and say, "Hey how about you guys bundle FrameMaker "Lite" with your distribution?
Instead they just waited for people to download it off thier site, waited a year, and basically didn't approach the open source community in any practical business manner.
I have no intention of buying a another desktop machine so I can just run FrameMaker, so I offerred to buy the beta for the cost of the Unix license.
The program works well, and has surprisingly few bugs (i.e. no show stoppers that I can't work around.) for at least the kinds of layout work I do.
I mean, as a niche market, there are even fewer mathematicains such as myself, and Wolfram supports linux with its Mathematica product?
????
I can't imagine why Adobe would do this considering building a commercial publishing system would be so much easier/superior and cost effective with Linux servers than any other OS?
Scaling such a system would be far easier than any other OS platform they list as supported and you could definately pump out a book far faster using clusters to do your publishing.
Given the complexities of thier products, I don't accept the idea that the user base can't operate the product from a Gnome desktop.
My NFS file system does this now, on a daily basis. Am I missing something here? I wouldn't say it takes the idea A LOT further. I would say it brings an already existing feature, for free, to the NT operating system which Bill will convince you you have to pay for, which for NT admins living in the closed proprietary loop universe probably seems like a big thing. Oh, and the whole crack about Linux being a bit head OS, tell that too my secretary who uses it every day to write letters, faxes, yadda yadda with StarOffice. You are the one who should do some reading guy, your level of understanding of the OpenSource revolution is pretty infantile.
Slashdot Mirror
How does it go???
......
laaa da de daaa...
...a question of origin...only in the recent past seekers fought to realize.....
A ? of Origin....
10,000 Millions speak toward the westward light,
Secrets of Science the future is surely made....
Our Home is Our WORLD.
www.homeworld.com
I keep hearing about people saying "Open Source is not a viable business model...yadda yadda yadda..."
These people don't get it.
Not very many people do.
The software is not important anymore!
The people who build solutions with it ARE important,and THAT is where the cash is made.
Now, what software is no longer important anymore?
Why the OS of course. Why is that?
Why? The same reason why IPX became unimportant in the network world the moment you hooked up to the internet.
OPEN STANDARDS.
The OS is NOW becomming a standard, just like TCP/IP, open and free.
Open Source is really, a movement of industry and individuals to OPEN STANARDS platforms.
You may have also noticed, that this is part of the maturation cycle of computer technology. Whole software subsystems, after many years of application support, are now being identified as BOILER PLATE and are now forming the basis for standards.
Why is that?
If you still haven't figured that question out, you should be selling cars!!
Shrinkwrap companies like Microsoft are in the business of selling boiler plate software.
Thats why they are SCARED, they realize that the OS, Office app market is matured to the point it is now pretty much a STANDARD.
Unfortunately for Microsoft and other shrinkwrap software makers in the OS, and Office apps marketplace, they are stuck on one platform.
One platform doesn't cut it if you are hooked up to the internet. Well, it does, if you don't wish to do any business with China, Japan, Europe..etc.
The ONLY WAY to do that, is to embrace OPEN STANARDS and if your company doesn't, you can damn well rest assured your competitors WILL.
Microsoft doesn't work that way. Why? because if they cannot tie you to thier platform or OS, that means they don't have an advantage over you in time to market, cost of development of these BOILER PLATE software products.
OPEN STANDARDS means the death of over 80% of Microsofts current revenue streams over the next 5 years.
I am just counting the days. At the moment, the internets infrastructure is too immature to support this direction NOW.
However, just like your telephone, the net will be as robust as your phone line one day, or cell phone, and when that day comes, this vision will be realized.
Nobody, in thier right mind is going to do business with any company that can't move and send data at a moments notice to a consumer, vendor, or anyone ANYWHERE 24x7, 365 days out of the year here on earth or out in space.
Trying doing that with an operating system that requires you to do business with a customer as long as they by 100 grand worth of microsoft operating system products FIRST.
My response to him would be great! Come here and install and YOU pay for it, meanwhile, I will install a POP3 server and Linux THANKS but NO THANKS!!!
You have to be kidding me.
If you think a few billion is going to stop war and disease you have no clue guy about the scope of the problems you suggest could be solved using a few pennies in NASA's budget.
War? Starving children? Disease?
NASA's outlays wouldn't make a dent in any of those.
If you think the human race is going to solve it's problems by turning inward towards itself, any time soon, you obviously have never read any history book of any kind.
We know how to do a couple of things really well.
Kill, war, destroy and explore, and you are proposing we don't do the one thing out of those that could save our species.
-hackus
The very thought of my fellow human beings living longer than they already do makes me think there is little hope for us all.
Why would we seek to eliminate our most redeeming quality as a species? A gift that destroys evil and makes us strive for good in the short time we have. The child that grows up only to be a child again, eventually? To pass to that place we were before we were born.
We die. Not just the poor or the powerless, or even those who cannot speak. Eventually, but surely as the winter comes, we ALL die. It is a gift to us all, and it is the very reason why our species has survived this long. It is a gift that we cannot refuse.
Most of us are evil, and thankfully all of us who WERE and did evil, are now dead and buried, dust in the wind, with nothing left but bones.
This idea of applying natural philosophy and science to these ends of immortality is evil, I believe. It is just one more example of our species arrogance against the very laws our Universe has set down before us. Believing we can do anything we wish, simply because we feel we need to exert absolute chaos upon the beautiful order I see everynight when I look at the sky.
Most of us are petty, amourous, self seeking creatures that have lives that are too long as is.
What we really need right now is more disease, a biological agent that is capable of wiping us out to numbers that make it a pleasure to walk through the green and vast forests again. To see the wildlife and nature as they were, untouched by the greed of this time. Forests that covered continents from ocean to ocean, which once covered this green, now mostly brown, globe of our!
Thankfully, the people who I have just spoken of, are working on such an agent as we speak, and will be done quite soon, I suspect now that this "great advance" of the human genome project is now complete and the very laws of God are ready to be perverted.
Maybe a drop from 8 billion people to 1.2 million world wide will bring us back to that "wonderful first time" the ancients always talked about.
Then we will start over, as we did before. With great tales of the wonders of old, the men of reknown who walked the earth.
I dream of such a time when I am sleeping. That wonderful first time. In the temples, taking measurements of the sun, moon and stars, knowing each number each calculation brings new knowledge and a sense of perfection. Pefection and a sense of timelessness that technology and the things we built would last between the houses of 12 for all to see and understand for generations. A living testament that obeying the laws of the ONE and the Universe we live in brings immortality not just in the physical, with our temples, but the spiritual as well.
Then I awake to a world built with pitiful concrete and iron materials which can't even last 200 years!
A people who cannot see anything but the moments and thier selfish desires between each which last but seconds!
Technology and understanding so weak that it can't last as long as the things built with them for they are just as contrived as well!!!
Tell me this is all a dream and I will awake to that time once again!
-hackus
-hackus
All of these posts are only telling half the story, of a quiet revolution that is happening in the computer centers of major companies adopting Java, open source philosophies in enabling business processes.
First, let me state, that Java as a language and Java as an implementation are two very different things.
The posts on Slash.dot here are referring to Java as an implementation, big slow etc, which in fact is true in _some_ instances.
But not true in others. It also isn't the only _implementation_ that is possible, so don't blame Sun for all of these implementation issues.
Java as a language reference can be implemented in both VM and native form.
That means, you don't need a jvm to run your Java program kiddies.
The OOD and OOP implementation benefits the language brings to the table, really, is an acknolwedgement that Software Engineering hasn't advanced very much in the past 30 years.
This is the FIRST language in my opinion that recognizes this fact. I know, I hire people to write ecom software. Software that cannot afford to have too many critical mistakes in it that result in lost dollars or unsafe transactions/privacy issues for the individual/companies. Software that must be designed/run in environments that usually bridges the gap between old and new, and provides direct access to a companies business systems. Also very much firsts, for customers who only requirement is that they use a web browser.
I have seen how this works. Companies who started out on small systems, such as NT boxes that have had to move to large SUN RISC environments after a year or two to meet demand.
Complete whole Ecom systems, moved without a single rewrite of 10's of thousands of lines of code on totally alien environments form where they have been built and ran. In my 15 years, I have never seen this happen before with off the shelf software. It is a true advancement, a real pay off.
A payoff Microsoft does NOT want you to have.
Our tools have become better, certainly some of our methods have improved, but the quality and maintainability of a vast majority of the software that is written is still not very good. (That is being overly complementary in my opinion.)
Java repesents I think an acknowledgement that for the first time, addresses a couple of points that for my business, dare I say software engineering economics (we build and write Ecom software for mission critical sites using ONLY java and open source platforms like Linux, to deploy them) is critical:
First Point is Code Reusability
What does Java have to offer that other languages don't? Reusability with a twist, and that twist is it pulls a API that I can count on between platforms.
Does anyone here have any idea what that means if you want to live in a world that tolerates a large number of OS platforms and you want to do business?
The holy grail in business process/technology is write once and run anywhere. It also has been the driving force behind C's portability and various gnu initiatives. It also We who write software have been seeking in the business world for 3 decades.
It isn't just a business desire either. How many here would like to play Homeworld on a linux box? How about MechWarrior 4???
For the first time I am seeing it actually work on a huge number of platforms, Sun, HP, Linux, As400's, S390's, Intel, with NO effort to port code for a single line.
It is not possible to do this with any other software development technology at such a low cost point and still allow everyone to pick what they want to run as thier OS platform of choice.
I am not sure everyone here understands what this means to organizations who want to save money and still be able to support platform OS diversity, given the kinds of posts I have seen.
-gc
Woops.
You forgot memory guy.
With no ECC corrective memory you will stay up even less.
-gc
Has anyone read the book Rare Earth?
It discusses and predicts that based on evidence we know of now, that life in the Universe may be fairly common. But sentient life might be an accident, and at the very least more complex life like plants and animals rare and that planets like our own just as rare.
Most of the stars we study have many characteristics to them that make them inhospitable for life over the time scales required to produce sentient life.
Or at the very least, with all of the things I see, and other scientists see through X-Ray telescopes, Infra Red Telescopes, Visible Light telescopes, spectragraphs, photometers, etc. the universe is a very hostile place over billions of year time scales.
Asteroid impacts, Supernova's in a solar systems local neighborhood, vast dust and gas clouds which could reduce/block sunlight, Black holes neutron stars, to very nasty and large local disturbances which can reach out across vast distances and destroy whole solar systems.
Is it any wonder we are here???
They put forward in the book that our solar system configuration might be very very odd. They say in many different ways we owe a lot to Jupitor the largest planet in our solar system.
Jupitor is large enough to take the big impacts that can take out life on our world and is good gravitationally at sweeping up and keeping the solar system free of large bodies.
The configuration of our very solar system with the larger planets on the outside, protecting the smaller solid/rocky planets inside may be one of the reasons why life has been able to hang on for so long and diversify on our planet.
I use FrameMaker for a book I am writing about Linux and it is a decent program, even in Beta.
What I can't understand is given the code base, it must be a snap too support both the Linux and the Solaris versions/Unix versions.
It cannot be all that different.
If Adobe's software engineering of the program is worth any salt at all, it can't be a problem to support it.
I mean, you cannot tell me that there are more HP UNIX users out there using the program, or COULD be using the program rather than Linux users.
The program, which I use it for is writing books and typsetting my documentation for my Linux cluster in my basement.
What I want to know is, why Adobe didn't approach a distribution such as Debian or RedHat and say, "Hey how about you guys bundle FrameMaker "Lite" with your distribution?
Instead they just waited for people to download it off thier site, waited a year, and basically didn't approach the open source community in any practical business manner.
I have no intention of buying a another desktop machine so I can just run FrameMaker, so I offerred to buy the beta for the cost of the Unix license.
The program works well, and has surprisingly few bugs (i.e. no show stoppers that I can't work around.) for at least the kinds of layout work I do.
I mean, as a niche market, there are even fewer mathematicains such as myself, and Wolfram supports linux with its Mathematica product?
????
I can't imagine why Adobe would do this considering building a commercial publishing system would be so much easier/superior and cost effective with Linux servers than any other OS?
Scaling such a system would be far easier than any other OS platform they list as supported and you could definately pump out a book far faster using clusters to do your publishing.
Given the complexities of thier products, I don't accept the idea that the user base can't operate the product from a Gnome desktop.
Something smells fishy.
IMHO,
Microsoft Breakup into:
#1 Applications
#2 OS
#3 Internet
Companies, would result in:
Incredible new growth for the industry
Excellent oportunity for consumers with new choices.
A boon to stock holders.
I don't see a down side.
My NFS file system does this now, on a daily basis. Am I missing something here? I wouldn't say it takes the idea A LOT further. I would say it brings an already existing feature, for free, to the NT operating system which Bill will convince you you have to pay for, which for NT admins living in the closed proprietary loop universe probably seems like a big thing. Oh, and the whole crack about Linux being a bit head OS, tell that too my secretary who uses it every day to write letters, faxes, yadda yadda with StarOffice. You are the one who should do some reading guy, your level of understanding of the OpenSource revolution is pretty infantile.