When I was in fifth and sixth grades, I loved the Tripods trilogy, by John Christopher. "The White Mountains", "The City of Gold and Lead", and "The Pool of Fire" are beautiful, powerful novels for children, but I was surprised how moving I found them when i reread them a couple years ago. (It's safe to skip the prequel, "When the Tripods Came", which was written 20 years later. It's not bad, but not up to the standard the others set.)
They're not "hard" science fiction; the science is sketchy at best. But they have a great postapocalyptic setting and a delightfully creepy vibe.
And Microsoft must have gotten something in return or they have not acted in the interest of their shareholders. What they got is the mystery.
I don't think it's such a mystery; the article explains it in the very next sentence. "And Microsoft holds a right to be the first to negotiate with Intentional Software if the company comes up for sale."
Microsoft has apparently decided that Intentional Programming isn't worth pursuing; they've dropped the project. So as things stood, they weren't going to see much return on the work they paid for. But Simonyi wants to pursue it as a private venture. Great! Let him fund further work, because he's a true believer. And if it starts to look more successful than they thought, they can go buy it back.
(Besides, it doesn't say they signed over the rights to the patent; it just says that he "has left Microsoft with the right to use" the stuff. So essentially they've just given him a free license to his own patent.)
You alluded to this, but I know slashdot, and it's worth being explicit about it to avoid all the flames:
This is not how mail is actually stored on disk in Plan 9. The "real" mail storage is just mbox files. What rpeppe has described is the view that the mail storage system provides to clients.
I agree it's very sweet, but the question is primarily dealing with the actual storage format.
The article What is Software Design makes a good case that the program source code is the best, most natural expression of the design of a system. It's not just for the computer.
... if it were sensibly implemented. Many of the objections here (and elsewhere) mention the danger of stupid abuses that any sensible micropayment system disallows.
My favorite example of a site that needs micropayments is The Oxford English Dictionary. It was and is hugely expensive to reproduce, and if it can't generate revenue, it will die. As a dictionary of the English language, it stands head and shoulders above anything else. If I had access to it, I would look up words in it by default; nothing else comes close.
But I don't have access. Currently you can gain access to the online edition by paying an annual subscription fee of $550! Who's going to do that? Academics and a few professional writers and editors. At that price, it's useless to me and most of the other people who might use it. Worse (and more to the point), it could be generating a lot more revenue if it were available to a larger audience through micropayments.
This story reminds me of something the late
Mark Weiser
spoke about during his keynote at the Winter 1995
Usenix. Apparently someone at PARC had built a
little box that they mounted on the ceiling in the
corner of the office. It was attached to the LAN,
and it had a little servomotor that would rotate
one quarter turn every time a packet went by on
the LAN. Attached to the motor, a little
off-center, was a string about three feet long.
When the network was being lightly used, the
string would twitch lazily in the corner of the
office. Typically, it would whirl in a nice
spiral. When the network was being hit hard,
it would sing so loudly you could hear it across
the hall.
I've wanted a "dangling string ethernet monitor"
ever since.
Occasionally, contractors are brought in to do work without any actual contract. It's weird, but it can happen. After it happened to us once (my consulting firm billed four to six people to a client for nearly two years without a contract... and they paid us regularly!) we looked into the law. In such circumstances, the "contractors" retain ownership of the code they've developed, although the customer can usually claim the right to a license to use the software for a reasonable period.
Also, it's not that uncommon for contracts to explicitly allow for the developers to retain ownership.
This is actually one of the cool things about Bluetooth. They did their homework and chose a frequency band that was available for consumer electronics nearly everywhere, and actually built some frequency switching into the design so that it could be used worldwide.
From reading these responses, you'd think the Internet began three years ago.
Of course a lot of the early RFCs fit the bill, but here's my nomination for one of the really significant documents that was not an RFC: the paper End-to-End Arguments in System Design. This paper laid out the basic principles that drove the design of most of the Internet protocols. One of the authors, Dave Clark, was the "Internet Architect" during the 80s when the basic protocols were designed and put in place.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in fifth and sixth grades, I loved the Tripods trilogy, by John Christopher. "The White Mountains", "The City of Gold and Lead", and "The Pool of Fire" are beautiful, powerful novels for children, but I was surprised how moving I found them when i reread them a couple years ago. (It's safe to skip the prequel, "When the Tripods Came", which was written 20 years later. It's not bad, but not up to the standard the others set.)
They're not "hard" science fiction; the science is sketchy at best. But they have a great postapocalyptic setting and a delightfully creepy vibe.
Did I read that right?
I don't think it's such a mystery; the article explains it in the very next sentence. "And Microsoft holds a right to be the first to negotiate with Intentional Software if the company comes up for sale."
Microsoft has apparently decided that Intentional Programming isn't worth pursuing; they've dropped the project. So as things stood, they weren't going to see much return on the work they paid for. But Simonyi wants to pursue it as a private venture. Great! Let him fund further work, because he's a true believer. And if it starts to look more successful than they thought, they can go buy it back.
(Besides, it doesn't say they signed over the rights to the patent; it just says that he "has left Microsoft with the right to use" the stuff. So essentially they've just given him a free license to his own patent.)
This is not how mail is actually stored on disk in Plan 9. The "real" mail storage is just mbox files. What rpeppe has described is the view that the mail storage system provides to clients.
I agree it's very sweet, but the question is primarily dealing with the actual storage format.
The article What is Software Design makes a good case that the program source code is the best, most natural expression of the design of a system. It's not just for the computer.
My favorite example of a site that needs micropayments is The Oxford English Dictionary. It was and is hugely expensive to reproduce, and if it can't generate revenue, it will die. As a dictionary of the English language, it stands head and shoulders above anything else. If I had access to it, I would look up words in it by default; nothing else comes close.
But I don't have access. Currently you can gain access to the online edition by paying an annual subscription fee of $550! Who's going to do that? Academics and a few professional writers and editors. At that price, it's useless to me and most of the other people who might use it. Worse (and more to the point), it could be generating a lot more revenue if it were available to a larger audience through micropayments.
If you believe (as I do) that programming is more a craft than it is an art or a science, then the apprenticeship model makes a lot of sense.
When the network was being lightly used, the string would twitch lazily in the corner of the office. Typically, it would whirl in a nice spiral. When the network was being hit hard, it would sing so loudly you could hear it across the hall.
I've wanted a "dangling string ethernet monitor" ever since.
Occasionally, contractors are brought in to do work without any actual contract. It's weird, but it can happen. After it happened to us once (my consulting firm billed four to six people to a client for nearly two years without a contract ... and they paid us regularly!) we looked into the law. In such circumstances, the "contractors" retain ownership of the code they've developed, although the customer can usually claim the right to a license to use the software for a reasonable period.
Also, it's not that uncommon for contracts to explicitly allow for the developers to retain ownership.
This is actually one of the cool things about
Bluetooth. They did their homework and chose a
frequency band that was available for consumer electronics nearly
everywhere, and actually built some frequency
switching into the design so that it could be used
worldwide.
Of course a lot of the early RFCs fit the bill, but here's my nomination for one of the really significant documents that was not an RFC: the paper End-to-End Arguments in System Design. This paper laid out the basic principles that drove the design of most of the Internet protocols. One of the authors, Dave Clark, was the "Internet Architect" during the 80s when the basic protocols were designed and put in place.
If you can't read PDF, you can find the paper in several other formats at http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/ww w/publications/pubs.html