ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
Yes, as long as Oracle continues to make code releases. If they quit, support will become very difficult.
Android is not OpenJDK, rather based on Apache's Harmony.
Doesn't matter. Oracle apparently has good reason to sue Google over it, which means that the technologies that are in OpenJDK are proprietary in some sense, i.e. "pretend" open source, whether due to patents, licensing restrictions, or whatever.
Aren't the Mono folks regularly criticized for running the same risk with Microsoft?
No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over.
SQL is not the be all and end all of database query languages. It is possible to write a real (MVCC, transactional, robust) database that doesn't use it. The Versant Object Database is a very good example of a robust non-SQL object oriented database, for example. No doubt there are others. And for some applications an object oriented database will run circles around anything any existing relational database can do.
Java is theoretically "open source" too. So why is Oracle suing Google? Java and ZFS are covered by dozens of patents - are the patent grants that iron clad that they can't sue a derivative they don't like into oblivion?
If you are in a business like virtual hosting, and need to run large numbers of security isolated environments, Solaris Zones or something like it (there are equivalents on Linux and FreeBSD) will run circles around any VMware / Xen / KVM setup. Thousands instead of hundreds of virtual machines.
Of course if you want to change the kernel, you must restart everything, and zone/container migration is more an idea than a reality. That is just fine for most hosting environments though.
Without Oracle support, OpenSolaris or something like it would probably be mostly dead even if it were GPL. The difference would be that stuff like ZFS would make it into GPL operating systems. Making that impossible is perhaps the real purpose of the CDDL.
Without that it's just another Unix-like operating system amongst many.
ZFS alone is valuable enough that continued licensing allowing, Illumos or something like it is likely to survive for quite some time on that basis alone. Of course if Oracle decides to take ZFS fully proprietary, that might require a ZFS fork at some point in the future, assuming (again) that is even allowed, even under a different name.
It is like the Java license - pretend open source. How "open source" can something really be if companies like Google and other interested parties can't create arbitrary open source forks and derivatives, even if they have to change the name?
I think we can safely say that it is not going to be called "Illumos Open Solaris", or "Open Solaris" anything for long. Oracle won't tolerate it, any more than Red Hat. If Open Solaris is going to live on, it will be under a new name, and not really a version of Solaris at all, but rather a hopefully mostly compatible fork.
This is off topic, but "OpenOffice.org" is such a lame name for an office suite that I consider it an active incentive not to use it. I installed Oracle.com on my machine today, but it took so much memory I deleted it.
I'm only aware of two filesystems in the same class: ZFS and Btrfs
You should probably mention WAFL, the internal NetApp not-a-filesystem file system, which was doing things ZFS is now noted for years before. On proprietary, expensive hardware of course.
I was implying that that they aren't new lanes - they are re-purposing existing lanes.
I agree that is a bad idea. Letting providers of open networks like the Internet allow classes of service that have a hard, unlimited priority over ordinary traffic is a bad idea.
The big Internet providers are now quasi-monopolies and need to be regulated accordingly, which ultimately probably means minimum standards for what "Internet service" is. If the providers can carry other traffic without impairing the quality of service of the existing traffic, that is probably a good thing. From a technical point of view I don't see how they can share the same link without a hard limit on the bandwidth reserved for the expedited traffic, i.e. like a dedicated "lane", not the right to push everyone else off the road.
But it isn't fine if roads have special high-speed lanes for Super Fresh customers.
Sure it is, as long as Super Fresh pays the full cost of those lanes and the traffic on those lanes does not degrade the transit time of the customers using the ordinary lanes.
Telephone companies are common carriers. Have you ever heard of the FCC telling a company, no you cannot establish a private telephone network to interconnect your offices because that way you might get better service than if all your calls were routed through the public network? It doesn't happen, and the FCC doesn't have the authority to do so.
What the FCC does have authority to do is to make telephone companies treat the customers of the "public" network on a fair and equitable basis. Fair and equitable doesn't mean no expedited service, rather it means that (1) all parties can purchase expedited service on comparable rates and terms, (2) expedited service does not degrade non-expedited service, and (3) the provider does not arbitrarily discriminate against parties or applications, even if they are in direct competition.
If Google wants to pay Verizon to establish dedicated "lanes" that do not degrade the performance of other traffic, that is unequivocally a good thing. For one thing, it would keep Youtube traffic from crowding the general purpose links.
If an accusation were made that you were publicly sharing copyrighted works,do you believe that your ISP would fight the legal battle on your behalf to protect your right to share files
It doesn't matter, as long as they are not held liable for your actions, they have no reason to interfere with your traffic.
Do the terms of "common carrier" regarding non-discriminatory packet delivery cover internet "packet" data or do they only apply to voice "packet" data?
The term "common carrier" applies to any kind of traffic, including physical items like freight. The FCC's authority is limited to communications traffic of course. Voice or data doesn't matter, as long as it is _traffic_. Hosting providers are regulated by different laws, and strictly speaking not by the FCC at all.
Any form of cost based pricing is not against common carrier principles. The problem comes when a carrier wants to charge different rates (or block or degrade traffic) by criteria other than cost. If senders want to pay more to get higher quality of service for some of their traffic, that is not a problem, as long as all are allowed the same opportunity on a comparable cost basis. No charging extra or degrading traffic because the packets are destined to or from a competitor or a less or more profitable business.
If Verizon owns the bandwidth lines leading to your community (or to the specific site you're attempting to access), it doesn't matter who your end ISP winds up being.
That is like saying if Verizon owns the telephone lines leading to your community it doesn't matter who your bank ends up being. Telephone companies are legally prohibited from doing things like arbitrarily charging one bank more than another if they want the privilege of receiving incoming calls, let alone listening in on the conversation and charging both parties more if a high value transaction was performed.
The whole net neutrality debate is about extending the non-discrimination rules that apply to common carriers like telephone companies to common carriers like internet access providers. I say "common carrier" advisedly. Unless the law is changed the FCC has ample legal justification to regulate internet access providers as common carriers, under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 as amended.
The key phrase is "large amounts of traffic", as in hundreds of megabits per second. Examining the URLs customers visit for other than network management purposes is probably illegal, by the way.
You are making a mountain out of a mole hill. "Lawful" means "not illegal". ISPs have no desire to police what is lawful or not, it just creates more work for them. ISPs do have an obligation not to aid and abet illegal activity if they have actual knowledge of the same.
This obligation applies primarily to hosting providers. ISPs are not held legally accountable if traffic pertaining to illegal activity traverses their networks, for the same reason that common carriers like telephone companies are not held accountable if two people discuss a bank robbery over the phone.
"Lawful" arises in the context of net neutrality merely by stating that _end users_ should have the right to engage in lawful communications with anyone they want, without ISPs blocking or purposely degrading communication with some sites in a discriminatory manner (i.e. for economic advantage).
ISPs (and common carriers in general) are not _required_ to pass traffic generated by illegal activity. They just have no incentive to even attempt to make that determination, especially since if treated like common carriers the may find themselves at the end of a lawsuit if they make that determination incorrectly.
With NN you cannot make routing choices based on the cost, high or low
On a public, multi-provider, packet switched network, short of getting connections from multiple providers, generally speaking you (the end user) cannot make routing choices at all.
Thats not going to happen as the return on investment isn't there.
The only reason why the return on investment isn't there is because customers don't know enough to care. That and the fact that the big Internet access providers are predatory government supported monopolies of course.
If google is getting premium internet service because they're paying more money, that's not neutral, period.
I am afraid you don't understand what network neutrality is all about, namely acting like a common carrier. Tiered or other special services offered at the same rates to all comers is perfectly neutral. Singling out a customer (or even worse a non-customer) and deciding they should pay you more money because they have a successful business model is not.
Without affecting net-neutrality, Google could easily put bigger cables towards Verizon centers and accomplish exactly the same thing, namely, not so much
Assuming Verizon is willing to interconnect with them at those points, yes. This is probably more economical, however.
(1) Because it is illegal (2) Because the Internet has always operated on the end points pay their provider, providers use part of that revenue to pay interconnection costs principle, just like (wait for it) every telephone network in the country. The word is "common carrier".
Or acceptance that, sooner or later, the FCC will be in a position to enforce net neutrality
The FCC already is in a position to enforce network neutrality. The question at this point is whether Congress is going to take that right away, by exempting Internet access providers from existing laws.
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The solution is very simple: Cross-domain iframes should be prohibited. End of problem.
Google "Altair 8800". Very nice, influential box.
ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
Yes, as long as Oracle continues to make code releases. If they quit, support will become very difficult.
Android is not OpenJDK, rather based on Apache's Harmony.
Doesn't matter. Oracle apparently has good reason to sue Google over it, which means that the technologies that are in OpenJDK are proprietary in some sense, i.e. "pretend" open source, whether due to patents, licensing restrictions, or whatever.
Aren't the Mono folks regularly criticized for running the same risk with Microsoft?
No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over.
SQL is not the be all and end all of database query languages. It is possible to write a real (MVCC, transactional, robust) database that doesn't use it. The Versant Object Database is a very good example of a robust non-SQL object oriented database, for example. No doubt there are others. And for some applications an object oriented database will run circles around anything any existing relational database can do.
That is strange. Would someone (other than Microsoft) get away with calling their software "Microsoft.org"?
"The good news is, it's open source. Fork it."
Java is theoretically "open source" too. So why is Oracle suing Google? Java and ZFS are covered by dozens of patents - are the patent grants that iron clad that they can't sue a derivative they don't like into oblivion?
If you are in a business like virtual hosting, and need to run large numbers of security isolated environments, Solaris Zones or something like it (there are equivalents on Linux and FreeBSD) will run circles around any VMware / Xen / KVM setup. Thousands instead of hundreds of virtual machines.
Of course if you want to change the kernel, you must restart everything, and zone/container migration is more an idea than a reality. That is just fine for most hosting environments though.
Without Oracle support, OpenSolaris or something like it would probably be mostly dead even if it were GPL. The difference would be that stuff like ZFS would make it into GPL operating systems. Making that impossible is perhaps the real purpose of the CDDL.
Without that it's just another Unix-like operating system amongst many.
ZFS alone is valuable enough that continued licensing allowing, Illumos or something like it is likely to survive for quite some time on that basis alone. Of course if Oracle decides to take ZFS fully proprietary, that might require a ZFS fork at some point in the future, assuming (again) that is even allowed, even under a different name.
It is like the Java license - pretend open source. How "open source" can something really be if companies like Google and other interested parties can't create arbitrary open source forks and derivatives, even if they have to change the name?
I think we can safely say that it is not going to be called "Illumos Open Solaris", or "Open Solaris" anything for long. Oracle won't tolerate it, any more than Red Hat. If Open Solaris is going to live on, it will be under a new name, and not really a version of Solaris at all, but rather a hopefully mostly compatible fork.
This is off topic, but "OpenOffice.org" is such a lame name for an office suite that I consider it an active incentive not to use it. I installed Oracle.com on my machine today, but it took so much memory I deleted it.
I'm only aware of two filesystems in the same class: ZFS and Btrfs
You should probably mention WAFL, the internal NetApp not-a-filesystem file system, which was doing things ZFS is now noted for years before. On proprietary, expensive hardware of course.
I was implying that that they aren't new lanes - they are re-purposing existing lanes.
I agree that is a bad idea. Letting providers of open networks like the Internet allow classes of service that have a hard, unlimited priority over ordinary traffic is a bad idea.
The big Internet providers are now quasi-monopolies and need to be regulated accordingly, which ultimately probably means minimum standards for what "Internet service" is. If the providers can carry other traffic without impairing the quality of service of the existing traffic, that is probably a good thing. From a technical point of view I don't see how they can share the same link without a hard limit on the bandwidth reserved for the expedited traffic, i.e. like a dedicated "lane", not the right to push everyone else off the road.
But it isn't fine if roads have special high-speed lanes for Super Fresh customers.
Sure it is, as long as Super Fresh pays the full cost of those lanes and the traffic on those lanes does not degrade the transit time of the customers using the ordinary lanes.
Telephone companies are common carriers. Have you ever heard of the FCC telling a company, no you cannot establish a private telephone network to interconnect your offices because that way you might get better service than if all your calls were routed through the public network? It doesn't happen, and the FCC doesn't have the authority to do so.
What the FCC does have authority to do is to make telephone companies treat the customers of the "public" network on a fair and equitable basis. Fair and equitable doesn't mean no expedited service, rather it means that (1) all parties can purchase expedited service on comparable rates and terms, (2) expedited service does not degrade non-expedited service, and (3) the provider does not arbitrarily discriminate against parties or applications, even if they are in direct competition.
If Google wants to pay Verizon to establish dedicated "lanes" that do not degrade the performance of other traffic, that is unequivocally a good thing. For one thing, it would keep Youtube traffic from crowding the general purpose links.
If an accusation were made that you were publicly sharing copyrighted works,do you believe that your ISP would fight the legal battle on your behalf to protect your right to share files
It doesn't matter, as long as they are not held liable for your actions, they have no reason to interfere with your traffic.
Do the terms of "common carrier" regarding non-discriminatory packet delivery cover internet "packet" data or do they only apply to voice "packet" data?
The term "common carrier" applies to any kind of traffic, including physical items like freight. The FCC's authority is limited to communications traffic of course. Voice or data doesn't matter, as long as it is _traffic_. Hosting providers are regulated by different laws, and strictly speaking not by the FCC at all.
Any form of cost based pricing is not against common carrier principles. The problem comes when a carrier wants to charge different rates (or block or degrade traffic) by criteria other than cost. If senders want to pay more to get higher quality of service for some of their traffic, that is not a problem, as long as all are allowed the same opportunity on a comparable cost basis. No charging extra or degrading traffic because the packets are destined to or from a competitor or a less or more profitable business.
If Verizon owns the bandwidth lines leading to your community (or to the specific site you're attempting to access), it doesn't matter who your end ISP winds up being.
That is like saying if Verizon owns the telephone lines leading to your community it doesn't matter who your bank ends up being. Telephone companies are legally prohibited from doing things like arbitrarily charging one bank more than another if they want the privilege of receiving incoming calls, let alone listening in on the conversation and charging both parties more if a high value transaction was performed.
The whole net neutrality debate is about extending the non-discrimination rules that apply to common carriers like telephone companies to common carriers like internet access providers. I say "common carrier" advisedly. Unless the law is changed the FCC has ample legal justification to regulate internet access providers as common carriers, under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 as amended.
The key phrase is "large amounts of traffic", as in hundreds of megabits per second. Examining the URLs customers visit for other than network management purposes is probably illegal, by the way.
You are making a mountain out of a mole hill. "Lawful" means "not illegal". ISPs have no desire to police what is lawful or not, it just creates more work for them. ISPs do have an obligation not to aid and abet illegal activity if they have actual knowledge of the same.
This obligation applies primarily to hosting providers. ISPs are not held legally accountable if traffic pertaining to illegal activity traverses their networks, for the same reason that common carriers like telephone companies are not held accountable if two people discuss a bank robbery over the phone.
"Lawful" arises in the context of net neutrality merely by stating that _end users_ should have the right to engage in lawful communications with anyone they want, without ISPs blocking or purposely degrading communication with some sites in a discriminatory manner (i.e. for economic advantage).
ISPs (and common carriers in general) are not _required_ to pass traffic generated by illegal activity. They just have no incentive to even attempt to make that determination, especially since if treated like common carriers the may find themselves at the end of a lawsuit if they make that determination incorrectly.
With NN you cannot make routing choices based on the cost, high or low
On a public, multi-provider, packet switched network, short of getting connections from multiple providers, generally speaking you (the end user) cannot make routing choices at all.
Thats not going to happen as the return on investment isn't there.
The only reason why the return on investment isn't there is because customers don't know enough to care. That and the fact that the big Internet access providers are predatory government supported monopolies of course.
If google is getting premium internet service because they're paying more money, that's not neutral, period.
I am afraid you don't understand what network neutrality is all about, namely acting like a common carrier. Tiered or other special services offered at the same rates to all comers is perfectly neutral. Singling out a customer (or even worse a non-customer) and deciding they should pay you more money because they have a successful business model is not.
Without affecting net-neutrality, Google could easily put bigger cables towards Verizon centers and accomplish exactly the same thing, namely, not so much
Assuming Verizon is willing to interconnect with them at those points, yes. This is probably more economical, however.
(1) Because it is illegal
(2) Because the Internet has always operated on the end points pay their provider, providers use part of that revenue to pay interconnection costs principle, just like (wait for it) every telephone network in the country. The word is "common carrier".
Or acceptance that, sooner or later, the FCC will be in a position to enforce net neutrality
The FCC already is in a position to enforce network neutrality. The question at this point is whether Congress is going to take that right away, by exempting Internet access providers from existing laws.