People don't want to move away from GUIs (!), figure Macs would be too much trouble, have software that already binds them to Windows. (Have you tried to convert all that VBA script to StarOffice?)
Rats swimming in water at the bottom of slippery-sided containers eventually just give up trying, and accept their fates.
Have you been to an office lately where hardly anyone has a desktop computer? We spend hours a day in the car driving to and from work to spend hours in front of the computer. Heaven forbid we might have to learn a little bit about how either one works in order to save money or have more control over what we use!
From GNU, next to the rest of the files about Emacs, "Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air." True, IBM may let you have the source code to (some of) the software they install for you. If they billed you for air like they bill you for Global Services, however, you'd suffocate in a jiffy.
This case may try the letter of the GPL, but we can guess that it'll stay lightyears away from the spirit.
Calling this the Sun Java Desktop makes only a little less sense than calling a box of ex-iPlanet server products, mostly C daemons, the Sun Java Enterprise System. Maybe there's some stuff written in Java in there but that's not the point. The Java brand is well known and closely linked in the public mind with Sun.
I would agree that it seems hard at first glance to understand what Sun is doing pushing an open source desktop thing like Gnome. CDE, however, did not exactly take the world by storm. People coming from Windows probably find CDE weird but not Gnome (until they become experienced Solaris users and never have, aside from the occasional browser window, anything but a bunch of terminals open on their desktop, at which point they start thinking of Windows as weird). So Sun had to go somewhere. They probably concluded their world's second-most-used desktop is Gnome, which Sun can redistribute almost for free. Maybe they can even save money by putting CDE in maintenance mode like OpenWindows. Why not go with Gnome?
It has nothing to do with commitment to the Open Source model. Listen to Sun executives when they talk about open systems. They mean by open systems that the APIs are all published, and everyone competes on implementation, which means doesn't share the source. They probably want you to use the servers|services in the Java Enterprise System, not Mono.
While it's true that you won't find many Java desktop apps, a lot of what people are using desktops to access -- through browsers -- can be handled using Java. Mono's about replacing.NET, right? Not about moving from one way of managing widgets to another.
Going with Gnome instead of CDE is no big deal. Nobody investing in SUNW ever heard of CDE. Going with Mono ("including a C# compiler", according to
http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_ releases/index.html?pr=oreillymono) would look like an outright attack on Java by Sun, which seems like it would be pretty hard for management to explain away.
Let's say you're a bank implementing extranet account access, with 1700 employees but maybe 5 million customer accounts. Admittedly, paying $170K per year or whatever for internal portals and that sort of stuff seems like a lot.
But imagine that after signing up to buy a bunch of hardware the cost under the old licensing model was $0.10 account for directory entries, the portal software, etc. Maybe this is something on the order of 90% discount over list price (hoping that's a conservative estimate, but I don't have a lot of experience as a customer for order of that size). So for the 5 million customer accounts, you were agreeing to pay $500K, plus whatever all the hardware to run the software cost.
If you expect the service to grow, then this sort of pricing starts to look interesting... unless you find can do it all with GNU Enterprise and cheap PC hardware.
The overall workmanship of my Vaio could be worse. I'm typing this on a PCG-Z600RE that hasn't shocked me too much, yet. The Yamaha sound card burned out after about 6 months, however. Wonder if that has anything to do with shoddy internal wiring.
And the right hand side atop the CPU gets too hot. After an hour, even with the fan on, it's too hot to type without holding your hand high above they keyboard. Some of us just have scorched wrists, but I wonder about the poor soul(s) who probably got electrocuted before they decided to recall all that merchandise...
When SETI@Home spent $10^6 to get everyone to spend $10^8 on electricity alone, how was that a good deal? Have extraterrestrials sent a message that they're about to touch down with a vaccine for AIDS, a formula for cold fusion, a permanent end to unemployment, a sure-fire way to get good representation in government? Could we have spent the money more wisely, Jim?
If Bill paid you folks to do something more than get technically-challenged investors excited, perhaps our software would work better. (And ASN.1 isn't that bad, by the way. Do I need everything going between my machine and the server to be verbose enough to read by hand? When I encode all my messages in XML, in how many cases will I miss the 10000 to 1 ratio just because the encoding is verbose?)
McCullagh invites Clarke, who hacks software that lets you network anonymously -- if for example you live in China and may be subject to persecution for authoring unacceptable political ideas -- to face off with... Oppenheim -- who tries to protect investments in the recording industry from kids listening to more music than they can pay for.
Why not invite somebody from the Ministry of Public Security to face off with Clarke instead? Perhaps CNet sponsors and investors worry more about people ripping off MP3s than they do about political prisoners. Perhaps investment-security-before-freedom thinking is why when Clarke writes, "Free communication is essential to free thought, which is essential to democracy," Oppenheim responds, "An individual who illegally distributes music on a peer-to-peer network..."
Sun Software VP Jonathan Schwartz seems to consider open standards more important than Open Source. See the CNet article from a couple of months ago.
Perhaps there's a sense that locking down more of the Java developer market is more important than keeping the intellectual property in the implementation of Java "hidden". Once you put the open source version out, you can hope yours will become the defacto standard. But why go to Red Hat to open the Java source? Couldn't you just open it up yourself?
Maybe Sun just needs a high-volume distributor to developers everywhere. Developers who might use Java more if they didn't have to download it, if it were just there. Who serves up more downloads? Red Hat when they release another version of their distro? Sun when they release another version of Solaris? If you want to reach developers and M$ doesn't want to help, wouldn't you go for the next largest crowd?
According to the WTO, 140 countries, probably including yours, are working to render it even easier for companies to move service jobs from one country to another. Probably not so they can pay you more locally for a job more cheaply performed elsewhere.
It's called GATS, the service sector counterpart of GATT. The WTO GATS homepage (see the above link), "recognizes the right of Members to regulate the supply of services in pursuit of their own policy objectives, and does not seek to influence these objectives." But if you think that means your representatives are aiming to save your white collar job, well PT Barnum was probably right.
Think about it some more. Which service sector jobs are going to move? The waitress serving coffee at the local diner. The guy standing behind the counter ringing up your gas and soft drink? Your hairdresser? Or the folks writing software? The people handling support calls?
The licensing is aimed at getting people to run this stuff on Sun servers. It has nothing to do with GNU/Linux and lots more to do with SPARC/Solaris being the platform for ASPs.
If you can convince Ed Zander that making StarOffice really free (as in free speech) will increase sales of E10000's, Sun'll do it in half a heartbeat, nevermind philosophical disagreements between Bill Joy and Richard Stallman. This has everything to do with money.
Sun does have something to gain from continuing to promote open formats at least, however. Last I heard, StarOffice was supposed to go to native XML.
You can get StarOffice from Sun. I've used it on Linux and Solaris and it does what you need an office suite to do -- for free, since you only have to pay if you bundle it or integrate it with something you sell.
Caveat: I work at Sun, so if you believe in conspiracy theories and so forth, perhaps you should get a second opinion.
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How does the Open Governance Index compare with the Open-By-Rule benchmark?
People don't want to move away from GUIs (!), figure Macs would be too much trouble, have software that already binds them to Windows. (Have you tried to convert all that VBA script to StarOffice?)
Rats swimming in water at the bottom of slippery-sided containers eventually just give up trying, and accept their fates.
Have you been to an office lately where hardly anyone has a desktop computer? We spend hours a day in the car driving to and from work to spend hours in front of the computer. Heaven forbid we might have to learn a little bit about how either one works in order to save money or have more control over what we use!
Might as well be watching TV...
From GNU, next to the rest of the files about Emacs, "Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air." True, IBM may let you have the source code to (some of) the software they install for you. If they billed you for air like they bill you for Global Services, however, you'd suffocate in a jiffy.
This case may try the letter of the GPL, but we can guess that it'll stay lightyears away from the spirit.
Masturbation does not extend your life. The Bush Administration told me so.
Calling this the Sun Java Desktop makes only a little less sense than calling a box of ex-iPlanet server products, mostly C daemons, the Sun Java Enterprise System. Maybe there's some stuff written in Java in there but that's not the point. The Java brand is well known and closely linked in the public mind with Sun.
I would agree that it seems hard at first glance to understand what Sun is doing pushing an open source desktop thing like Gnome. CDE, however, did not exactly take the world by storm. People coming from Windows probably find CDE weird but not Gnome (until they become experienced Solaris users and never have, aside from the occasional browser window, anything but a bunch of terminals open on their desktop, at which point they start thinking of Windows as weird). So Sun had to go somewhere. They probably concluded their world's second-most-used desktop is Gnome, which Sun can redistribute almost for free. Maybe they can even save money by putting CDE in maintenance mode like OpenWindows. Why not go with Gnome?
It has nothing to do with commitment to the Open Source model. Listen to Sun executives when they talk about open systems. They mean by open systems that the APIs are all published, and everyone competes on implementation, which means doesn't share the source. They probably want you to use the servers|services in the Java Enterprise System, not Mono.
While it's true that you won't find many Java desktop apps, a lot of what people are using desktops to access -- through browsers -- can be handled using Java. Mono's about replacing .NET, right? Not about moving from one way of managing widgets to another.
Going with Gnome instead of CDE is no big deal. Nobody investing in SUNW ever heard of CDE. Going with Mono ("including a C# compiler", according to http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_ releases/index.html?pr=oreillymono) would look like an outright attack on Java by Sun, which seems like it would be pretty hard for management to explain away.
Manufacturing companies perhaps. The key appears to lie in the "unlimited right to use for all Intranet and Internet deployments." See http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-09/sunf lash.20030916.2.html
Let's say you're a bank implementing extranet account access, with 1700 employees but maybe 5 million customer accounts. Admittedly, paying $170K per year or whatever for internal portals and that sort of stuff seems like a lot.
But imagine that after signing up to buy a bunch of hardware the cost under the old licensing model was $0.10 account for directory entries, the portal software, etc. Maybe this is something on the order of 90% discount over list price (hoping that's a conservative estimate, but I don't have a lot of experience as a customer for order of that size). So for the 5 million customer accounts, you were agreeing to pay $500K, plus whatever all the hardware to run the software cost.
If you expect the service to grow, then this sort of pricing starts to look interesting... unless you find can do it all with GNU Enterprise and cheap PC hardware.
The overall workmanship of my Vaio could be worse. I'm typing this on a PCG-Z600RE that hasn't shocked me too much, yet. The Yamaha sound card burned out after about 6 months, however. Wonder if that has anything to do with shoddy internal wiring.
And the right hand side atop the CPU gets too hot. After an hour, even with the fan on, it's too hot to type without holding your hand high above they keyboard. Some of us just have scorched wrists, but I wonder about the poor soul(s) who probably got electrocuted before they decided to recall all that merchandise...
When SETI@Home spent $10^6 to get everyone to spend $10^8 on electricity alone, how was that a good deal? Have extraterrestrials sent a message that they're about to touch down with a vaccine for AIDS, a formula for cold fusion, a permanent end to unemployment, a sure-fire way to get good representation in government? Could we have spent the money more wisely, Jim?
If Bill paid you folks to do something more than get technically-challenged investors excited, perhaps our software would work better. (And ASN.1 isn't that bad, by the way. Do I need everything going between my machine and the server to be verbose enough to read by hand? When I encode all my messages in XML, in how many cases will I miss the 10000 to 1 ratio just because the encoding is verbose?)
McCullagh invites Clarke, who hacks software that lets you network anonymously -- if for example you live in China and may be subject to persecution for authoring unacceptable political ideas -- to face off with... Oppenheim -- who tries to protect investments in the recording industry from kids listening to more music than they can pay for.
Why not invite somebody from the Ministry of Public Security to face off with Clarke instead? Perhaps CNet sponsors and investors worry more about people ripping off MP3s than they do about political prisoners. Perhaps investment-security-before-freedom thinking is why when Clarke writes, "Free communication is essential to free thought, which is essential to democracy," Oppenheim responds, "An individual who illegally distributes music on a peer-to-peer network..."
Sun Software VP Jonathan Schwartz seems to consider open standards more important than Open Source. See the CNet article from a couple of months ago.
Perhaps there's a sense that locking down more of the Java developer market is more important than keeping the intellectual property in the implementation of Java "hidden". Once you put the open source version out, you can hope yours will become the defacto standard. But why go to Red Hat to open the Java source? Couldn't you just open it up yourself?
Maybe Sun just needs a high-volume distributor to developers everywhere. Developers who might use Java more if they didn't have to download it, if it were just there. Who serves up more downloads? Red Hat when they release another version of their distro? Sun when they release another version of Solaris? If you want to reach developers and M$ doesn't want to help, wouldn't you go for the next largest crowd?
It's called GATS, the service sector counterpart of GATT. The WTO GATS homepage (see the above link), "recognizes the right of Members to regulate the supply of services in pursuit of their own policy objectives, and does not seek to influence these objectives." But if you think that means your representatives are aiming to save your white collar job, well PT Barnum was probably right. Think about it some more. Which service sector jobs are going to move? The waitress serving coffee at the local diner. The guy standing behind the counter ringing up your gas and soft drink? Your hairdresser? Or the folks writing software? The people handling support calls?
The licensing is aimed at getting people to run this stuff on Sun servers. It has nothing to do with GNU/Linux and lots more to do with SPARC/Solaris being the platform for ASPs.
If you can convince Ed Zander that making StarOffice really free (as in free speech) will increase sales of E10000's, Sun'll do it in half a heartbeat, nevermind philosophical disagreements between Bill Joy and Richard Stallman. This has everything to do with money.
Sun does have something to gain from continuing to promote open formats at least, however. Last I heard, StarOffice was supposed to go to native XML.
Not one that replaces a bunch of post-its stuck to the front of my current fridge.
What good is it if it cannot even tell when the beer level is getting too low?
You can get StarOffice from Sun. I've used it on Linux and Solaris and it does what you need an office suite to do -- for free, since you only have to pay if you bundle it or integrate it with something you sell.
Caveat: I work at Sun, so if you believe in conspiracy theories and so forth, perhaps you should get a second opinion.