So fine, let's continue military research. But let's research military applications that show a decent bang (literally!) for the buck, instead of insane programs like the F-22 and the DDG-1000 with their best-possible-and-damn-the-cost designs.
And can we please give up this damned missile shield fantasy? At least until somebody comes up with a system that actually passes real-world tests and isn't more dangerous than the weapons its trying to intercept?
Say what you will, but I run clean, mean Java applications every day. None of them are widely distributed (Sun really was too optimistic about Java's potential for standard desktop applications) so I can't give you an example you can easily run yourself. But if you ever have access to a Sun server built in the last couple years, check out the ILOM Java Remote Console feature. As robust and powerful as any native code terminal software I've ever seen.
I wasn't comparing Jim Crow laws to Copyright Laws. In point of fact, I mostly agree with copyright laws. I object to many of their abuses and ridiculous extensions, but all in all I think "intellectual property" is a useful concept. A lot of people would disagree with me on that, and I can agree to disagree with them. But even if you accept that you have a "right" to free content, comparing the loss of that "right" to the discrimination and humiliation inflicted by Jim Crow is just stupid.
Be that as it may, civil disobedience is an accepted way to oppose laws you consider wrong, whether they be extremely evil laws that treat whole classes of people as subhuman or some ordinance that's just an unnecessary nuisance.
I was under the impression that RMS would insist that you download the OO sources, make sure they work as advertised, and then compile them yourself.
People tell me I have this wrong. It's perfectly cool to just download the OO binaries. But that means I'm trusting the people who compiled the binaries to not have made any modifications without telling me.
And indeed I do trust them to do that. As I trust the people who run web application servers. I don't see why the two situations are different just because the software somebody compiled for me is running on my machine and in the other case the software that somebody compiled for me is running on their machine.
You consider your dog "oppressed"? You have a plan for rehabilitating her so she can go out and support herself? And use a toilet?
No? Didn't think so. Then your analogy is kind of silly. You have a relationship with your dog that (assuming you're a caring owner) suits your dog just fine.
Now, of course people have a greater need for personal freedom than dogs do. But living in a civilized society means accepting some constraints to that freedom — if only to allow for the rights and freedoms of other people.
Hyperlibertarians like RMS who think that "freedom" is this big absolute that trumps all other considerations have a simplistic, self-centered view of how society works. You may think that not being able to blast your stereo at 3AM restricts your freedom, but that freedom is impinging on my right to a decent night's sleep. People have to make compromises in order to live together, and only a child (or somebody with a child-like sense of responsibility) considers that "oppression".
In my case, I make the compromise to use closed-source software when its the best tool for the job. You doubtless think I'm a fool for voluntarily accepting this "oppression". Well dude, I think you're a fool for demanding that everybody make life indefinitely more complicated in the name of an imaginary absolute.
You think that race riots got the civil rights laws passed? I think the most common reaction at the time was that it was time to repeal the 13th amendment.
Incidentally, the first big race riot of that era occurred in 1965 — about a year after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.
I'm not even going to attempt to deal with your ignorant characterization of Malcom X.
Sigh. OK, maybe it wouldn't have cost Sun that much to open up NeWS. But it would have cost them something. Since they had no hope of profiting from NeWS, they had no reason to spend this money. That was my only point. The thing about Adobe technology was just an attempt to gauge the actual cost.
It certainly is possible that NeWS would have beaten out X11 if it had been open source from the beginning. But that wasn't your argument. Your argument was that NeWS might have been saved if Sun had open-sourced it instead of killing it. By the time that decision was taken, it was way too late to save it.
I'm afraid the answer to your second question is a definite "no". Somebody downloads a content because they don't want to pay for it, and you're expecting them to voluntarily hand over their money?
I'm underwealmed. Very slow startup (somebody doesn't know how to manage resources effectively), very crude graphics, and it took me only a few minutes to get bored. It starts out trying to teach you how to cast "fireballs", which amounts to a cutsey implementation of the that lame old computer game artillery. The only way to figure out the right trajectory is trial-and-error, and after a dozen errors I lost interest.
If this is the best Java gaming has to offer, then I rest my case.
Performance issues used to be a big problem with Java. That's long since been solved. The conventional wisdom was that these caused by Java being an "interpreted" language. That hasn't been true for a long time, and even when it was, it was only a minor factor in Java's performance issues.
Aside from the big overhead in firing up the runtime (still a problem, but not an issue for a service application, like Looking Glass) the biggest impact on Java application performance was bad source code compilers. Sun was in such a hurry to get the thing to market that all the early compilers were hastily adapted from C++ compilers, and created code that was inefficient and full of memory leaks — this on a platform that was specifically designed to make memory leaks impossible!
The Oracle acquisition is like a big second chance for Java, and a lot of other Sun technologies. Finally, they're under the control of a management hierarchy that doesn't consistently shoot itself in the foot!
Applets are still used quite extensively, actually.
Used? Yes. Extensively? No. There are too many competing technology for embedding applications in a web browser, and Java's applet API is the least powerful among them.
And now we have webstart, which is more or less the same candy in a different wrapper.
No it's not. JWS applications don't use the applet API and do not run in a browser window. They're just like non-embedded applications, except that instead of typing "java main class" or executing a JAR file, you execute an XML file that tells your JRE the URLs it needs to download. You might use a web browser to obtain the XML file. But you can also have a local XML file that you can run without firing up a web browser.
Even at Sun, people mostly agree that applets aren't really useful. They're probably be around as long as Java is, but if Oracle has any sense, they'll stay in maintenance mode with no more API development.
Sometimes I just want to browse a damn photo gallery or write an online document.
You can't! It's wrong! Stop now, before it's too late!
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic. I've always thought that RMS's notion of "free software" was totally out of touch with practical realities. But this latest proclamation makes me realize that he subscribes to the Everybody's Like Me fallacy. That is, he believes every computer user is enough of a hacker to compile and run all the software they will ever need. For some of us, that's simply too much trouble just to make a silly ideological point based on bad economics. But for most people, it's simply not possible. About 90% of humanity is not a hacker and never will be. Either they lack the intellectual fundamentals or (more commonly) simply have too much of a life that has nothing to do with computers.
Another thing: if RMS thinks that using an application that somebody else hosts is Evil, why does he stop at Software as a Service? When you surf the web, you're relying on HTTP servers you don't control. When you send email, you rely on SMTP servers you don't control. And consider that there's simply no way you can make a phone call without using somebody else's software.
I give RMS credit for helping to create Open Source. (Credit he won't take, since he thinks the concept is as evil as any other "non-free" software.) But when it comes to almost anything else he's done, including most of the software he's written (baroque bloatware most of it), he's a mediocrity at best.
It's best to avoid illegal acts. If you don't like a law, work to change it.
The copyright laws are not going to get changed anytime soon. The media conglomerates just ahve way too much clout.
Civil disobedience is a tried and true way to oppose unfair laws. The fact that non-whites no longer have to go to the back of the bus is a testimony to that.
But note that it isn't civil disobedience unless you're willing to go to jail. Is anybody out there willing to go to jail for their "right" to download a copy of Terminator Salvation? No? Didn't think so.
That costs money. They have to go through the code and look for everything that they licensed from somebody else. Any libraries that they can't get the owners to open up have to be worked around or re-implemented from scratch. Depending on how much tech they licensed from Adobe (the thing did use Display Postscript) that could be really expensive.
Whatever the cost, a company needs some incentive to spend even a small amount of money. When they open source a product, it's almost always because they think they can make more money off it that way. I don't think a product has ever gotten open sourced just because the existing user community protested against its demise.
When I was at SGI, we were open-sourcing software right and left. But not everything. There was a lot of agitation for us to open up the IRIX Xterm software, mainly from former SGI people who missed using it. Didn't happen, because SGI just had no incentive.
NeWS died because nobody was writing applications for it. Making it open source wouldn't have changed that. So Sun just had no incentive at all to keep it alive in any form.
Read something besides the blogosphere now and then. Most PeopleSoft employees are still working at PeopleSoft products. The folks who lost their jobs were mostly support, legal, sales, and other jobs that Oracle already had covered. A lot of stuff has been rebranded, but it's got the same people developing it.
At the time Oracle bought PS. A lot of experts were saying that they'd just kill it. As often happens, they experts were full of shit.
They laid off a lot of people. They never laid off everybody. In fact, they've actually laid off a lot fewer people than you expect. Several times they've acquired companies that were basically competition, and everybody predicted they'd just fold them up, fire everybody, and move all the customer to Oracle products. But they haven't done it. Didn't do it with PeopleSoft. Didn't do it with RDB.
Also, they were dumb enough to buy Sun in the first place.
Right. They're only the second-largest software vendor on the planet. They couldn't possibly walk and chew gum at the same time. I'm sure Larry just told his underlings, "Hey, we have too much cash, and I'm bored. Take $7 billion, buy Sun, then fire everybody."
BTW, have you every managed anything more complicated than a beer run? I suspect not.
What were they supposed to do with NeWS, continue developing it while the rest of the Unix community used X11? If they had, Sun's workstation business would have died about a decade earlier than it did.
Oh please. Sure they'll lay off a lot of people (I suspect most of sales and marketing is toast) but they're not going to spend $5 billion on a bunch of product lines only to fire all the people who create and maintain them. Some products will probably die, but not most of them.
I think this is less about having a phone in his pocket (it's not like he's not surrounded by people who can give him one) then it is about being able to send quick texts to his underlings. One hopes that he doesn't get too obnoxious that way!
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By "real world test" I mean actually shooting down a missile without cheating. "Real world" doesn't have to extend to actually including a nuke.
So fine, let's continue military research. But let's research military applications that show a decent bang (literally!) for the buck, instead of insane programs like the F-22 and the DDG-1000 with their best-possible-and-damn-the-cost designs.
And can we please give up this damned missile shield fantasy? At least until somebody comes up with a system that actually passes real-world tests and isn't more dangerous than the weapons its trying to intercept?
Say what you will, but I run clean, mean Java applications every day. None of them are widely distributed (Sun really was too optimistic about Java's potential for standard desktop applications) so I can't give you an example you can easily run yourself. But if you ever have access to a Sun server built in the last couple years, check out the ILOM Java Remote Console feature. As robust and powerful as any native code terminal software I've ever seen.
I wasn't comparing Jim Crow laws to Copyright Laws. In point of fact, I mostly agree with copyright laws. I object to many of their abuses and ridiculous extensions, but all in all I think "intellectual property" is a useful concept. A lot of people would disagree with me on that, and I can agree to disagree with them. But even if you accept that you have a "right" to free content, comparing the loss of that "right" to the discrimination and humiliation inflicted by Jim Crow is just stupid.
Be that as it may, civil disobedience is an accepted way to oppose laws you consider wrong, whether they be extremely evil laws that treat whole classes of people as subhuman or some ordinance that's just an unnecessary nuisance.
Ask him. I don't particularly care.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
I was under the impression that RMS would insist that you download the OO sources, make sure they work as advertised, and then compile them yourself.
People tell me I have this wrong. It's perfectly cool to just download the OO binaries. But that means I'm trusting the people who compiled the binaries to not have made any modifications without telling me.
And indeed I do trust them to do that. As I trust the people who run web application servers. I don't see why the two situations are different just because the software somebody compiled for me is running on my machine and in the other case the software that somebody compiled for me is running on their machine.
You consider your dog "oppressed"? You have a plan for rehabilitating her so she can go out and support herself? And use a toilet?
No? Didn't think so. Then your analogy is kind of silly. You have a relationship with your dog that (assuming you're a caring owner) suits your dog just fine.
Now, of course people have a greater need for personal freedom than dogs do. But living in a civilized society means accepting some constraints to that freedom — if only to allow for the rights and freedoms of other people.
Hyperlibertarians like RMS who think that "freedom" is this big absolute that trumps all other considerations have a simplistic, self-centered view of how society works. You may think that not being able to blast your stereo at 3AM restricts your freedom, but that freedom is impinging on my right to a decent night's sleep. People have to make compromises in order to live together, and only a child (or somebody with a child-like sense of responsibility) considers that "oppression".
In my case, I make the compromise to use closed-source software when its the best tool for the job. You doubtless think I'm a fool for voluntarily accepting this "oppression". Well dude, I think you're a fool for demanding that everybody make life indefinitely more complicated in the name of an imaginary absolute.
So explain to me why it's OK to buy access to somebody else's SMTP server, but it's not OK to buy access to somebody else's application server.
You think that race riots got the civil rights laws passed? I think the most common reaction at the time was that it was time to repeal the 13th amendment.
Incidentally, the first big race riot of that era occurred in 1965 — about a year after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.
I'm not even going to attempt to deal with your ignorant characterization of Malcom X.
You would support Oracle spending $7 billion to shut down a company that isn't even a competitor? OK, whatever.
Sigh. OK, maybe it wouldn't have cost Sun that much to open up NeWS. But it would have cost them something. Since they had no hope of profiting from NeWS, they had no reason to spend this money. That was my only point. The thing about Adobe technology was just an attempt to gauge the actual cost.
It certainly is possible that NeWS would have beaten out X11 if it had been open source from the beginning. But that wasn't your argument. Your argument was that NeWS might have been saved if Sun had open-sourced it instead of killing it. By the time that decision was taken, it was way too late to save it.
I'm afraid the answer to your second question is a definite "no". Somebody downloads a content because they don't want to pay for it, and you're expecting them to voluntarily hand over their money?
I'm underwealmed. Very slow startup (somebody doesn't know how to manage resources effectively), very crude graphics, and it took me only a few minutes to get bored. It starts out trying to teach you how to cast "fireballs", which amounts to a cutsey implementation of the that lame old computer game artillery. The only way to figure out the right trajectory is trial-and-error, and after a dozen errors I lost interest.
If this is the best Java gaming has to offer, then I rest my case.
1998 called. It wants its Java cliches back.
Performance issues used to be a big problem with Java. That's long since been solved. The conventional wisdom was that these caused by Java being an "interpreted" language. That hasn't been true for a long time, and even when it was, it was only a minor factor in Java's performance issues.
Aside from the big overhead in firing up the runtime (still a problem, but not an issue for a service application, like Looking Glass) the biggest impact on Java application performance was bad source code compilers. Sun was in such a hurry to get the thing to market that all the early compilers were hastily adapted from C++ compilers, and created code that was inefficient and full of memory leaks — this on a platform that was specifically designed to make memory leaks impossible!
The Oracle acquisition is like a big second chance for Java, and a lot of other Sun technologies. Finally, they're under the control of a management hierarchy that doesn't consistently shoot itself in the foot!
I play a lot of games on the web, and I've never seen a really good Java game. Flash seems to dominate this market.
Applets are still used quite extensively, actually.
Used? Yes. Extensively? No. There are too many competing technology for embedding applications in a web browser, and Java's applet API is the least powerful among them.
And now we have webstart, which is more or less the same candy in a different wrapper.
No it's not. JWS applications don't use the applet API and do not run in a browser window. They're just like non-embedded applications, except that instead of typing "java main class" or executing a JAR file, you execute an XML file that tells your JRE the URLs it needs to download. You might use a web browser to obtain the XML file. But you can also have a local XML file that you can run without firing up a web browser.
Even at Sun, people mostly agree that applets aren't really useful. They're probably be around as long as Java is, but if Oracle has any sense, they'll stay in maintenance mode with no more API development.
Sometimes I just want to browse a damn photo gallery or write an online document.
You can't! It's wrong! Stop now, before it's too late!
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic. I've always thought that RMS's notion of "free software" was totally out of touch with practical realities. But this latest proclamation makes me realize that he subscribes to the Everybody's Like Me fallacy. That is, he believes every computer user is enough of a hacker to compile and run all the software they will ever need. For some of us, that's simply too much trouble just to make a silly ideological point based on bad economics. But for most people, it's simply not possible. About 90% of humanity is not a hacker and never will be. Either they lack the intellectual fundamentals or (more commonly) simply have too much of a life that has nothing to do with computers.
Another thing: if RMS thinks that using an application that somebody else hosts is Evil, why does he stop at Software as a Service? When you surf the web, you're relying on HTTP servers you don't control. When you send email, you rely on SMTP servers you don't control. And consider that there's simply no way you can make a phone call without using somebody else's software.
I give RMS credit for helping to create Open Source. (Credit he won't take, since he thinks the concept is as evil as any other "non-free" software.) But when it comes to almost anything else he's done, including most of the software he's written (baroque bloatware most of it), he's a mediocrity at best.
It's best to avoid illegal acts. If you don't like a law, work to change it.
The copyright laws are not going to get changed anytime soon. The media conglomerates just ahve way too much clout.
Civil disobedience is a tried and true way to oppose unfair laws. The fact that non-whites no longer have to go to the back of the bus is a testimony to that.
But note that it isn't civil disobedience unless you're willing to go to jail. Is anybody out there willing to go to jail for their "right" to download a copy of Terminator Salvation? No? Didn't think so.
That costs money. They have to go through the code and look for everything that they licensed from somebody else. Any libraries that they can't get the owners to open up have to be worked around or re-implemented from scratch. Depending on how much tech they licensed from Adobe (the thing did use Display Postscript) that could be really expensive.
Whatever the cost, a company needs some incentive to spend even a small amount of money. When they open source a product, it's almost always because they think they can make more money off it that way. I don't think a product has ever gotten open sourced just because the existing user community protested against its demise.
When I was at SGI, we were open-sourcing software right and left. But not everything. There was a lot of agitation for us to open up the IRIX Xterm software, mainly from former SGI people who missed using it. Didn't happen, because SGI just had no incentive.
NeWS died because nobody was writing applications for it. Making it open source wouldn't have changed that. So Sun just had no incentive at all to keep it alive in any form.
Rights that would have really pleased his stockholders. Especially now.
Read something besides the blogosphere now and then. Most PeopleSoft employees are still working at PeopleSoft products. The folks who lost their jobs were mostly support, legal, sales, and other jobs that Oracle already had covered. A lot of stuff has been rebranded, but it's got the same people developing it.
At the time Oracle bought PS. A lot of experts were saying that they'd just kill it. As often happens, they experts were full of shit.
They laid off a lot of people. They never laid off everybody. In fact, they've actually laid off a lot fewer people than you expect. Several times they've acquired companies that were basically competition, and everybody predicted they'd just fold them up, fire everybody, and move all the customer to Oracle products. But they haven't done it. Didn't do it with PeopleSoft. Didn't do it with RDB.
Also, they were dumb enough to buy Sun in the first place.
Right. They're only the second-largest software vendor on the planet. They couldn't possibly walk and chew gum at the same time. I'm sure Larry just told his underlings, "Hey, we have too much cash, and I'm bored. Take $7 billion, buy Sun, then fire everybody."
BTW, have you every managed anything more complicated than a beer run? I suspect not.
What were they supposed to do with NeWS, continue developing it while the rest of the Unix community used X11? If they had, Sun's workstation business would have died about a decade earlier than it did.
Oh please. Sure they'll lay off a lot of people (I suspect most of sales and marketing is toast) but they're not going to spend $5 billion on a bunch of product lines only to fire all the people who create and maintain them. Some products will probably die, but not most of them.
I think this is less about having a phone in his pocket (it's not like he's not surrounded by people who can give him one) then it is about being able to send quick texts to his underlings. One hopes that he doesn't get too obnoxious that way!