Or maybe there is something other than relativity. Give me a puzzle, I'll come up with solutions that "ALMOST" solve it all day long.
Since GR was first introduced we've been making adjustments here and there, adding a constant here or there, adding new rules. Basically cooking the science to make it fit or establishing our facts based on it's principles. If our facts are only facts because they are proven by GR then they are not facts at all. And us using GR to prove them does qualify as proof of GR 20mins or 20yrs after the fact.
Most of what we've built on assumes GR is correct and testing against it. If you want to test GR, you have to throw away everything that determined within the GR system and compare observations of RAW data against the unmodifed, unadjusted, unconstant thrown in and correction factor GR.
We've been assuming GR is how things work for so long I doubt we can untwist it all.
Built in functions maybe, just adding a lib that someone has written to talk to bittorrent and claiming the language now supports something which anyone could have written a lib for at any time is pretty lame imho.
You could claim perl supports (take your pick, there is a prewritten module for EVERYTHING). But it would make more sense simply to say perl is a complete programming language (meaning if it's software, you can do it).
"he **AA and their cohorts trying to control the distribution and use of their material"
Herin lies the problem, for starters, there is no such thing as "their" material. Anything anyone produces that qualifies for copyright or patent belongs to the public. As a way of thanking them we give them copyright which gives them certain controls over DISTRIBUTION of a specific work WHICH IS OWNED BY THE PUBLIC. However at no point did we give them any say or control whatsoever in how that work is USED, except inso far as distribution is concerned.
No DRM is fair. I think we should either allow content producers to enjoy the privilages or copyright and in so doing be prevented from trying to exert control beyond what we've granted them with the copyright.
Or they may have their works in the public domain (which is the default) and protect it via whatever vigilante methods they choose.
Either the law protects their content, or they can fight us to see if they can keep us from what by default belongs to us.
Neither way do the content producers actually own any content and that's what people have forgotten, they merely hold a copyright we've chosen to give them, the content is public property.
Despite the name, a copyright doesn't even grant rights, it grants privilages and those privilages can be taken away...
Yes but how much worse are the laws going to become in the meantime and will the ones we have now, let alone the ones we have by then, ever be overturned.
The problem with that is, they blame the reduced sales on the filesharing that is the only thing keeping them in buisness (yeah that's right, it's the best advertising they are getting and I'd attribute it to more sales than radio or previews).
In turn this just makes them slam in more restrictive DRM.
Remember the boob tube and music are the least of the things this affects and the least significant. You may find physical activities more fulfilling but the MOST fulfilling activities are things like learning, reading, etc. Mental excerise takes the cake over physical activity any minute of the day and it mostly centers around books. Which though less talked about are certainly part of this.
I'm sure if given the choice most people with an IQ of at least 150 will take books over walking if they could only have one for the rest of their lives.
And most of the rest are the ones responsible for this mess, which is just one more reason to cull them from the breed. We've shown it works with cattle and sheep, and they are after all pretty much like sheep. Hell there is even a book about some guy 2000 yrs ago who called them all sheep and said he was the shepard, they happily agreed and have been mindlessly following for over 2000yrs!
If I've said it once, I've said it a million times, two actions will do a great deal toward solving all this nonsense.
1. Toss out the DMCA in it's entirity, this law made quite a few legitimate things illegal, everything illegitimate which is covered under the DMCA was illegal under existing copyright or other laws.
2. Give those filing for copyright a choice, either they can file and hold copyright, thus giving them protection under the law OR they can choose not to go the copyright route and go the default route. That route being your work is immediately in the public domain. If they go the default route then they can impose vigilante technical measures all day long.
However they MAY NOT use vigilante tatics if they wish to hold a copyright and any attempt to protect a copyrighted work outside the legal system results in the work immediately becoming part of the public domain.
This is good for a number of reasons, not the least of which is reminding everyone of the spirit in which copyright was first created and that the default is not copyright, but everything in the public domain. Those who first wrote the laws didn't think they needed to put this in there, it was self evident at the time.
There is a difference, if I purchase a cd. I have lots of rights and they don't have to be spelled out. However if I presently hold the copyright on the cd, since I have no rights without that copyright, it does in fact have to be explicitly spelled out.
It's not like a copyright holder owns the copyrighted work, he holds the copyright on a work owned by the public at the moment and that copyright extends to no degree more or less than it's explicit definition under the law.
As another poster already mentioned there are ntpl versions of 2.4 kernel out there, however the current stable kernel is 2.6.
As for starting up a kde or gnome app dialog, I see no visable delay even when using the opposite environment.
I don't even see a delay open a PERL TK gui app in gnome. I do however see a delay opening a java gui app. (all these comments respective to a simple hello world with an ok button).
2.4 is threaded btw, simply because they improved threading in 2.6 and redhat backported those improvements to 2.4 is no reason to say otherwise.
Also as said other poster pointed out, the sun runtime DOES support threading on linux.
I can see why people would want a gmail account. Porn, warez, etc. It's a gig of webspace on google's infinitely fast gigabit backbone linkS.
Toss in an autoresponder (or a script which has a web interface, logs into gmail, and sends attachment to other email addresses, or even just other gmail addresses) and you have a great warez, porn, or whatever you want distribution system, WITHOUT the kind of clauses that come with buying webspace against certain content. (If they tried making you agree to that, their admitting to reading private email and that would piss alot of people off.)
I know people who pay alot more than the $50 most of these are paying and who pay it monthly for a gig of storage on a fast server.
Another possible use, offsite backups, get enough gmail accounts to hold your critical data backups. Have an automated script that encrypts the data then emails it to your gmail account.
Here is the bad flipside to all this though, whether google wipes these accounts or not it doesn't matter. What do you think google is going to do when it finds out people are paying $50 just for a beta account? What do you think the odds are going to be of us getting free gmail after this?
"Hmmm.. you don't spend too much time reading the proceedings at jcp.org, do you"
I spend enough time to know that there nothing moving with the speed of industry going on there.
Simply because it exists, doesn't mean it's all that worthwhile.
And quite frankly I hate MS as much as the next guy, and I don't think they should be allowed to ship an intentionally crippled java. However I also don't think sun legitimately had any right to stop it.
Java gui (forget the network the other poster was talking about, talk local gui app) is slow as hell on at least 3 platforms. Windows (all versions, and yes it's slow WITH sun's java on all of them), Linux, and MacOS. Process, lets say you have a p4 3ghz. Double click on java app, WAIT(WTF) basic graphical dialog with hello world and an ok button pops up on screen.
Try it. Contrast with, for example, C, C++, hell even VB and I thought nothing could be slower than that, or perl + any gui toolkit you want. Double click on app, and there is dialog, note no visable wait.
Maybe were misunderstanding eachother, and maybe that's because of some difference in how it works here.
Here you essentially get no channels by default (maybe one or two if there are alot of local broadcasts but that's about it). So you have to buy a service package, be it cable, minidish, or bigdish satellite. Digitial cable or minidish will get about 100-200 channels but their crap and will cost you from $40-60/month.
If you want the good "premium" channels, HBO, Cinnemax, Showtime, Starz, Encore, etc which are generally commercial free and show better content, mostly movies, or aren't as censored (nudity, bad language, etc). Then lets assume your on minidish, they'll come in packages, you'll get maybe 6 HBO's for an additional $20/month that sort of thing. So when he said premium channels that's what I assumed he meant not the base service package but for an extra "good" channel.
Basically since the basic or extended package is mostly crap, you end up paying about $70/month for six channels which are sometimes worthwhile (although the movie channels will cycle the same 10 movies or so over and over for a month and then get a new set).
Well for the first post, I'd simply counter that there is an equal percentage or more of commerical output that is to cut the courtesy, utter garbage.
For the second, it's simple really. The job I was hired to do is NOT programming. I make quite clear anytime I do program that I am retaining the rights to the program I am writting.
It's only under very narrow circumstances that a client owns a program you write. What their paying for is a license to a program I write and own the copyright to, generally completely on my own time. If any of that time IS at work, my employer isn't paying me to write code, he is paying me to find a solution which fits the customer's needs, if that means writting it myself, so be it, he has already signed an agreement waiving any and all rights to any code I write there.
Customers are simpler, in most all cases a contracted programmer doesn't fall within the contract for hire category that would give the customer contracting you IP. If I write a simple custom inventory tracking system for instance. I might charge the customer $500-$2000 for that program license depending on the details... they don't mind paying because it didn't exist before they asked for it and they have the full source code with the right to modify it and carry on if I die tommorow.
If they actually wanted to OWN the copyright on that program it would cost them at least $10,000-$20,000. A custom gps tracking system I'd rate about the same (and have).
It may also work in my favor that we are in a reasonably small area. We mostly have a monopoly on computer work of any sort in Central Illinois (at least south of Champaign Urbana). The only dedicated programming outfits here work like you do and they charge through the roof.
The companies I'm working with are generally small enough that it's the owner of the buisness I'm dealing with rather than a team of lawyers. And the owner of the buisness tends to like the idea of spending less dollars to get exactly what HE needs especially when he figures the competition is going to get what they need either way.
I think the biggest difference though, is I'm not approaching them as a programmer they are looking to hire. I'm approaching them as the technician who built their systems, configured all their software and who is johnny on the spot anytime their hurting and gets them back up and running again.
They are usually quite thrilled to find out when and if the time comes that there isn't an existing solution that does what they need, that I don't stop working there, I'll go as far as to actually make it exist for them.
Look, administrating 20 servers in one organization is easy. Try administrating 20 servers in 20 different organizations each with their own unique setup and remember all the details of all their setups. Now crankup the volume to about 500+ organizations among 4 techs.
In a 24hr period I have to personally maintain 16 linux servers, we share the maintainence of the rest. Then there are the windows servers, dear god let us pray we can get more linux servers out there. Keep over 3000 desktops of different configurations running and up to date. Keep myself up to date on new technology, learning new tricks, tips, languages, tools, etc. And spend 3-4hrs coding (I'm human like the rest of us, I generally can only average about 100 lines of debugged code an hour). Although I do manage to faithfully squeeze in 30min a day on slashdot during the weekend;)
Our customers know I'll get them an answer and don't have time to worry about licensing, if selling them a gpl license at a cheaper price will save me a few billion lines potential time and them as much wait and money their all for it.
I'm pulling in more like $25k/yr with basically no benefits, welcome to life outside the valley.
"Any company that makes their money selling customized hardware, support and software the way Sun does would still need to invest in their operating system. It's too risky not to. Somebody has to be there to fix things when they break -- you certainly can't go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!""
I highly disagree, there is no reason for sun to maintain their own operating system. Linux is a great operating system, and would be stronger yet if the features of solaris were incorporated. The source is open, anyone can become a "vendor" level expert in the system if they take some time to study it. Nobody knows more about windows than Microsoft, because they have the code. Nobody knows more about linux than anybody who takes the time to study the code because EVERYONE has the code.
Sun would likely have their own distribution, but the kernel (aka operating system) would be linux.
It would benefit them to open source as much of their own distro as they can because then they gain the benefit of having the community work contribute and fix the code instead of having to pay for all this themselves.
It's not like they'll magically know less about the system, or lose the ability to custom tailor it to their needs. They'll be able to provide the same level of support with less development expense.
"go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!""
No it's "We're going to eschew supporting and paying out the arse to develop our own operating system, cut costs by 90% and support our own linux distribution that's as easy or easier to support and gives our customers better value instead!"
I seriously doubt the licensing gains on solaris could compare to the development, support, etc costs they'd cut going this route. Remember a sun specific distro is Linux and open source utils that someone else does all the work on with a couple sun preconfigurations and a few sun developed apps sitting on top.
That was my first thought too. However on examination I realized this. Solaris on intel support is fairly pathetic, it's more than a little pathetic, it's alot pathetic.
I seriously doubt this will be a rebirth of extremely high priced sparc hardware. People aren't dropping solaris because of license costs, people are dropping solaris because there is a viable *nix running on intel boxes and intel boxes have become both powerful and cheap.
What I see coming down the road if sun does this, there will be two major efforts... taking sun's code and integrating everything good solaris has to offer into linux (unlikely a major undertaking all in all, by the time the next kernel version comes rolling around it would be done). And the other camp beefing up solaris on intel hardware. Either is a significant but quite doable project... what's the deciding factor? (There's also improving linux sparc support, I guess someone will care about this and it will just kind of happen.)
Well linux already has alot going for it that solaris does not, mainly in applications and Desktop stuff as you've said, but also in other applications with poor solaris support. If solaris just needed the drivers it'd be a different story, but it needs more than that. All this work is already done on linux. Linux would just need a couple things like ACL's from solaris (and improved sparc support) before it was ready to roll with everything solaris has to offer.
In the end both would end up viable systems and great choices and development on either would feed into the other. Much like linux and BSD co-exist today, instead it would be linux, *BSD, and Solaris. It would be a great thing. But what's critical to remember here is that *BSD is pretty much dead, linux has momentum and linux would have solaris' features first, thus the linux momentum would continue and I doubt solaris would take the field.
As much as I'd like to agree it's often not the case that you can take one rpm for a given architecture and install as is on all the different rpm based distros.
One of the big problems is hardcoded dependencies, redhat will call an rpm one thing, and another distro will call the same damn thing another. One example is core packages in Redhat vs Mandrake, NONE of them have the same universal names, mandrake has renamed them all. As a result basically no redhat rpms with deps will install on Mandrake and vice versa.
If you have the SRPM and know how to fix the spec file this isn't an issue, but if your a software vendor your looking for an answer a bit easier to deal with than that when it comes to end users.
The FSF already has control over billions worth of development (if the software were sold as commercial instead of free that is) in the sense you speak of. I've yet to see any abuse there.
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Now now, if you go on like that he'll get a big head. You should have said his IQ -COULD- be in the teens! ;)
Or maybe there is something other than relativity. Give me a puzzle, I'll come up with solutions that "ALMOST" solve it all day long.
Since GR was first introduced we've been making adjustments here and there, adding a constant here or there, adding new rules. Basically cooking the science to make it fit or establishing our facts based on it's principles. If our facts are only facts because they are proven by GR then they are not facts at all. And us using GR to prove them does qualify as proof of GR 20mins or 20yrs after the fact.
Most of what we've built on assumes GR is correct and testing against it. If you want to test GR, you have to throw away everything that determined within the GR system and compare observations of RAW data against the unmodifed, unadjusted, unconstant thrown in and correction factor GR.
We've been assuming GR is how things work for so long I doubt we can untwist it all.
"which, as far as we know is not happening to the Universe."
While that statement is true, you neglect to mention that we really wouldn't have the slightest clue if it were.
We can't even claim with a straight face we have more than almost zero fact based imaginings we are even aware of the size of the Universe.
We can't even see all that we ARE aware of at present.
And the last thing we can do is claim that there isn't mass being introduced somewhere.
Built in functions maybe, just adding a lib that someone has written to talk to bittorrent and claiming the language now supports something which anyone could have written a lib for at any time is pretty lame imho.
You could claim perl supports (take your pick, there is a prewritten module for EVERYTHING). But it would make more sense simply to say perl is a complete programming language (meaning if it's software, you can do it).
"he **AA and their cohorts trying to control the distribution and use of their material"
Herin lies the problem, for starters, there is no such thing as "their" material. Anything anyone produces that qualifies for copyright or patent belongs to the public. As a way of thanking them we give them copyright which gives them certain controls over DISTRIBUTION of a specific work WHICH IS OWNED BY THE PUBLIC. However at no point did we give them any say or control whatsoever in how that work is USED, except inso far as distribution is concerned.
No DRM is fair. I think we should either allow content producers to enjoy the privilages or copyright and in so doing be prevented from trying to exert control beyond what we've granted them with the copyright.
Or they may have their works in the public domain (which is the default) and protect it via whatever vigilante methods they choose.
Either the law protects their content, or they can fight us to see if they can keep us from what by default belongs to us.
Neither way do the content producers actually own any content and that's what people have forgotten, they merely hold a copyright we've chosen to give them, the content is public property.
Despite the name, a copyright doesn't even grant rights, it grants privilages and those privilages can be taken away...
Yes but how much worse are the laws going to become in the meantime and will the ones we have now, let alone the ones we have by then, ever be overturned.
The problem with that is, they blame the reduced sales on the filesharing that is the only thing keeping them in buisness (yeah that's right, it's the best advertising they are getting and I'd attribute it to more sales than radio or previews).
In turn this just makes them slam in more restrictive DRM.
Remember the boob tube and music are the least of the things this affects and the least significant. You may find physical activities more fulfilling but the MOST fulfilling activities are things like learning, reading, etc. Mental excerise takes the cake over physical activity any minute of the day and it mostly centers around books. Which though less talked about are certainly part of this.
I'm sure if given the choice most people with an IQ of at least 150 will take books over walking if they could only have one for the rest of their lives.
And most of the rest are the ones responsible for this mess, which is just one more reason to cull them from the breed. We've shown it works with cattle and sheep, and they are after all pretty much like sheep. Hell there is even a book about some guy 2000 yrs ago who called them all sheep and said he was the shepard, they happily agreed and have been mindlessly following for over 2000yrs!
If I've said it once, I've said it a million times, two actions will do a great deal toward solving all this nonsense.
1. Toss out the DMCA in it's entirity, this law made quite a few legitimate things illegal, everything illegitimate which is covered under the DMCA was illegal under existing copyright or other laws.
2. Give those filing for copyright a choice, either they can file and hold copyright, thus giving them protection under the law OR they can choose not to go the copyright route and go the default route. That route being your work is immediately in the public domain. If they go the default route then they can impose vigilante technical measures all day long.
However they MAY NOT use vigilante tatics if they wish to hold a copyright and any attempt to protect a copyrighted work outside the legal system results in the work immediately becoming part of the public domain.
This is good for a number of reasons, not the least of which is reminding everyone of the spirit in which copyright was first created and that the default is not copyright, but everything in the public domain. Those who first wrote the laws didn't think they needed to put this in there, it was self evident at the time.
"Copyright is for a limited time (for now anyway)"
Sadly it isn't anymore, it simply has to be extended every 20yrs. And can in fact be extended in such a manner indefinately.
There is a difference, if I purchase a cd. I have lots of rights and they don't have to be spelled out. However if I presently hold the copyright on the cd, since I have no rights without that copyright, it does in fact have to be explicitly spelled out.
It's not like a copyright holder owns the copyrighted work, he holds the copyright on a work owned by the public at the moment and that copyright extends to no degree more or less than it's explicit definition under the law.
Actually no, they don't really expire anymore. They just have to be extended every 20yrs indefinately.
As another poster already mentioned there are ntpl versions of 2.4 kernel out there, however the current stable kernel is 2.6.
As for starting up a kde or gnome app dialog, I see no visable delay even when using the opposite environment.
I don't even see a delay open a PERL TK gui app in gnome. I do however see a delay opening a java gui app. (all these comments respective to a simple hello world with an ok button).
2.4 is threaded btw, simply because they improved threading in 2.6 and redhat backported those improvements to 2.4 is no reason to say otherwise.
Also as said other poster pointed out, the sun runtime DOES support threading on linux.
I can see why people would want a gmail account. Porn, warez, etc. It's a gig of webspace on google's infinitely fast gigabit backbone linkS.
Toss in an autoresponder (or a script which has a web interface, logs into gmail, and sends attachment to other email addresses, or even just other gmail addresses) and you have a great warez, porn, or whatever you want distribution system, WITHOUT the kind of clauses that come with buying webspace against certain content. (If they tried making you agree to that, their admitting to reading private email and that would piss alot of people off.)
I know people who pay alot more than the $50 most of these are paying and who pay it monthly for a gig of storage on a fast server.
Another possible use, offsite backups, get enough gmail accounts to hold your critical data backups. Have an automated script that encrypts the data then emails it to your gmail account.
Here is the bad flipside to all this though, whether google wipes these accounts or not it doesn't matter. What do you think google is going to do when it finds out people are paying $50 just for a beta account? What do you think the odds are going to be of us getting free gmail after this?
Not when google finds out people are paying $50/each for the damn beta accounts it won't be.
"Hmmm.. you don't spend too much time reading the proceedings at jcp.org, do you"
I spend enough time to know that there nothing moving with the speed of industry going on there.
Simply because it exists, doesn't mean it's all that worthwhile.
And quite frankly I hate MS as much as the next guy, and I don't think they should be allowed to ship an intentionally crippled java. However I also don't think sun legitimately had any right to stop it.
Java gui (forget the network the other poster was talking about, talk local gui app) is slow as hell on at least 3 platforms. Windows (all versions, and yes it's slow WITH sun's java on all of them), Linux, and MacOS. Process, lets say you have a p4 3ghz. Double click on java app, WAIT(WTF) basic graphical dialog with hello world and an ok button pops up on screen.
Try it. Contrast with, for example, C, C++, hell even VB and I thought nothing could be slower than that, or perl + any gui toolkit you want. Double click on app, and there is dialog, note no visable wait.
Maybe were misunderstanding eachother, and maybe that's because of some difference in how it works here.
Here you essentially get no channels by default (maybe one or two if there are alot of local broadcasts but that's about it). So you have to buy a service package, be it cable, minidish, or bigdish satellite. Digitial cable or minidish will get about 100-200 channels but their crap and will cost you from $40-60/month.
If you want the good "premium" channels, HBO, Cinnemax, Showtime, Starz, Encore, etc which are generally commercial free and show better content, mostly movies, or aren't as censored (nudity, bad language, etc). Then lets assume your on minidish, they'll come in packages, you'll get maybe 6 HBO's for an additional $20/month that sort of thing. So when he said premium channels that's what I assumed he meant not the base service package but for an extra "good" channel.
Basically since the basic or extended package is mostly crap, you end up paying about $70/month for six channels which are sometimes worthwhile (although the movie channels will cycle the same 10 movies or so over and over for a month and then get a new set).
Well for the first post, I'd simply counter that there is an equal percentage or more of commerical output that is to cut the courtesy, utter garbage.
;)
For the second, it's simple really. The job I was hired to do is NOT programming. I make quite clear anytime I do program that I am retaining the rights to the program I am writting.
It's only under very narrow circumstances that a client owns a program you write. What their paying for is a license to a program I write and own the copyright to, generally completely on my own time. If any of that time IS at work, my employer isn't paying me to write code, he is paying me to find a solution which fits the customer's needs, if that means writting it myself, so be it, he has already signed an agreement waiving any and all rights to any code I write there.
Customers are simpler, in most all cases a contracted programmer doesn't fall within the contract for hire category that would give the customer contracting you IP. If I write a simple custom inventory tracking system for instance. I might charge the customer $500-$2000 for that program license depending on the details... they don't mind paying because it didn't exist before they asked for it and they have the full source code with the right to modify it and carry on if I die tommorow.
If they actually wanted to OWN the copyright on that program it would cost them at least $10,000-$20,000. A custom gps tracking system I'd rate about the same (and have).
It may also work in my favor that we are in a reasonably small area. We mostly have a monopoly on computer work of any sort in Central Illinois (at least south of Champaign Urbana). The only dedicated programming outfits here work like you do and they charge through the roof.
The companies I'm working with are generally small enough that it's the owner of the buisness I'm dealing with rather than a team of lawyers. And the owner of the buisness tends to like the idea of spending less dollars to get exactly what HE needs especially when he figures the competition is going to get what they need either way.
I think the biggest difference though, is I'm not approaching them as a programmer they are looking to hire. I'm approaching them as the technician who built their systems, configured all their software and who is johnny on the spot anytime their hurting and gets them back up and running again.
They are usually quite thrilled to find out when and if the time comes that there isn't an existing solution that does what they need, that I don't stop working there, I'll go as far as to actually make it exist for them.
Look, administrating 20 servers in one organization is easy. Try administrating 20 servers in 20 different organizations each with their own unique setup and remember all the details of all their setups. Now crankup the volume to about 500+ organizations among 4 techs.
In a 24hr period I have to personally maintain 16 linux servers, we share the maintainence of the rest. Then there are the windows servers, dear god let us pray we can get more linux servers out there. Keep over 3000 desktops of different configurations running and up to date. Keep myself up to date on new technology, learning new tricks, tips, languages, tools, etc. And spend 3-4hrs coding (I'm human like the rest of us, I generally can only average about 100 lines of debugged code an hour). Although I do manage to faithfully squeeze in 30min a day on slashdot during the weekend
Our customers know I'll get them an answer and don't have time to worry about licensing, if selling them a gpl license at a cheaper price will save me a few billion lines potential time and them as much wait and money their all for it.
I'm pulling in more like $25k/yr with basically no benefits, welcome to life outside the valley.
This is simply a clarification for it's own sake. It doesn't change the license which and I think most would agree that it's a non-issue anyway.
It's a pretty damn far stretch to claim that talking to an api makes you a derivative work.
Not true, there is nothing preventing sun from loading drivers in a fashion similar to linux module loading.
"Any company that makes their money selling customized hardware, support and software the way Sun does would still need to invest in their operating system. It's too risky not to. Somebody has to be there to fix things when they break -- you certainly can't go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!""
I highly disagree, there is no reason for sun to maintain their own operating system. Linux is a great operating system, and would be stronger yet if the features of solaris were incorporated. The source is open, anyone can become a "vendor" level expert in the system if they take some time to study it. Nobody knows more about windows than Microsoft, because they have the code. Nobody knows more about linux than anybody who takes the time to study the code because EVERYONE has the code.
Sun would likely have their own distribution, but the kernel (aka operating system) would be linux.
It would benefit them to open source as much of their own distro as they can because then they gain the benefit of having the community work contribute and fix the code instead of having to pay for all this themselves.
It's not like they'll magically know less about the system, or lose the ability to custom tailor it to their needs. They'll be able to provide the same level of support with less development expense.
"go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!""
No it's "We're going to eschew supporting and paying out the arse to develop our own operating system, cut costs by 90% and support our own linux distribution that's as easy or easier to support and gives our customers better value instead!"
I seriously doubt the licensing gains on solaris could compare to the development, support, etc costs they'd cut going this route. Remember a sun specific distro is Linux and open source utils that someone else does all the work on with a couple sun preconfigurations and a few sun developed apps sitting on top.
"This could be disaster for linux"
That was my first thought too. However on examination I realized this. Solaris on intel support is fairly pathetic, it's more than a little pathetic, it's alot pathetic.
I seriously doubt this will be a rebirth of extremely high priced sparc hardware. People aren't dropping solaris because of license costs, people are dropping solaris because there is a viable *nix running on intel boxes and intel boxes have become both powerful and cheap.
What I see coming down the road if sun does this, there will be two major efforts... taking sun's code and integrating everything good solaris has to offer into linux (unlikely a major undertaking all in all, by the time the next kernel version comes rolling around it would be done). And the other camp beefing up solaris on intel hardware. Either is a significant but quite doable project... what's the deciding factor? (There's also improving linux sparc support, I guess someone will care about this and it will just kind of happen.)
Well linux already has alot going for it that solaris does not, mainly in applications and Desktop stuff as you've said, but also in other applications with poor solaris support. If solaris just needed the drivers it'd be a different story, but it needs more than that. All this work is already done on linux. Linux would just need a couple things like ACL's from solaris (and improved sparc support) before it was ready to roll with everything solaris has to offer.
In the end both would end up viable systems and great choices and development on either would feed into the other. Much like linux and BSD co-exist today, instead it would be linux, *BSD, and Solaris. It would be a great thing. But what's critical to remember here is that *BSD is pretty much dead, linux has momentum and linux would have solaris' features first, thus the linux momentum would continue and I doubt solaris would take the field.
As much as I'd like to agree it's often not the case that you can take one rpm for a given architecture and install as is on all the different rpm based distros.
One of the big problems is hardcoded dependencies, redhat will call an rpm one thing, and another distro will call the same damn thing another. One example is core packages in Redhat vs Mandrake, NONE of them have the same universal names, mandrake has renamed them all. As a result basically no redhat rpms with deps will install on Mandrake and vice versa.
If you have the SRPM and know how to fix the spec file this isn't an issue, but if your a software vendor your looking for an answer a bit easier to deal with than that when it comes to end users.
The FSF already has control over billions worth of development (if the software were sold as commercial instead of free that is) in the sense you speak of. I've yet to see any abuse there.