What about mixed licensing? Main project becomes a commercial project (with expected enhancments, gui, stability) and feeds back into the pool after so long.
I've been thinking about a similar idea, but instead of mixed licensing, I'd keep the GPL/LGPL mix we're currently using, but sell a version that is wrapped into a friendly installer.
One of the big problems we currently have is that there are a variety of libraries the user requires. Some of these (like jDOM and jUSB) are Open Source, and we can include them. Others (like the Java Communications API) can be redistributed for some platforms, but not for others. Regardless, currently it is up to the users to find, download, and install these pre-requisites before running the jSyncManager. And for some users, this is quite a bit of effort.
I'm currently thinking of creating some pre-packaged installable versions that use platform-specific installers, that include all the libraries we pre-req that we can get free redistribution rights for. These packages could be sold with bundled priority e-mail technical support for a year (or somesuch).
RedHat and others seem to do well with this model in the Linux world, so it could work for us. Making it easier for users to get the jSyncManager running would certainly be an added benifit.
I really like this idea, but I'm not sure if the jSyncManager would necessarily qualify. We're not specifically a Linux project (although our nightly build system for the project is a Linux box, as is our web and CVS servers...:) ) -- we're a cross-platform Java project.
Sure, we run extremely well on Linux, but we don't have a single line of Linux-specific code (at least not yet -- I'm planning on writing a plug-in module to make us work better with visor.o for USB based synchronization. Currently we use jUSB, which while it has a Linux implementation has an issue where if you have hotplug enabled, the visor.o module will grab the USB bulk transport for the handheld dock before we get a chance to -- we detect the device connection and try to open the transports, but wind up with an exception because they're already exclusively locked. Our current solution is to tell users to either disable hotplug for visor.o, or to rename it to prevent it from being loaded -- both steps which IMO are a bit extreme).
Long story short -- I'm not completely sure we'd qualify.
It does make me think though -- perhaps Sun should put together a fund to sponsor Open Source Java projects. After all, they want to push Java, and so do Java-based Open Source projects like mine...;)
So, one avenue is to partner with a hardware maker, in the case of the PC to PDA sync, partner with an up-and-coming desktop hardware manufacturer, or a similar PDA maker.
I've been thinking along these lines, and approching someone like Palm or Handspring. Handheld companies have bene trying for a number of years to make more inroads into the corporate world, and the jSyncManager is an application/API/toolset that has been found to be extremely attractive within corporations because 1) it runs on whatever platforms the company has (which is particularily useful in mixed environments, as your plugins can be usuable on all your OS and hardware platforms, and as administration is significantly easier when you have the same tool on all systems), 2) it's in Java (which alot of companies use for internal development, particularily when communicating with DBMSs), 3) it's Open Source, and can thus be easily tailored to their needs, and 4) it's exceedingly modular (and heavily object-oriented), which makes the tailoring mentioned in #3 a whole lot easier.
Still, for all of our benifits, we do in a sense compete with Palm, which also produces data synchronization tools (albeit for Windows and MacOS only).
It's still something I'd like to explore. Thanks for your opinion!
Yaz.
Yaztromo Replies to Everyone at once :).
on
Funding Open Source?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Hi Everyone:
I'll probably try to get around to replying to many of your posts directly (will, the really useful ones at least:) ), but I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for their input thus far, and reply to some of the recurring ideas and themes.
The jSyncManager has, in fact, been around for quite a while. I started working on it back in 1997. It eventually became my thesis project. Shortly after graduating from Brock University, I joined up with IBM, working at their Toronto Software Lab.
At this time, the project was closed source (a bit of a mistake on my part). As with many big software firms, I had to sing the restrictive "IBM owns everything you develop" employment contract, which made continued work on the jSyncManager difficult (this was at a time when IBM was still formulating its rules for employees participating in Open Source projects).
As an in-between solution, I entered into an agreement with my local legal department to offer the jSyncManager through IBM in a co-copyrighted manner, where I retained the copyright to everything as it existed prior to joining IBM. Due to some problems IBM had with the name, it was changed to IBM ManplatoSync for Java. My original agreement was that the project was to be released as Open Source under the IBM Public License -- but while I kept working on the project (in my own time mind you, and for no money), the IBM lawyers kept passing the buck, and permission to actually release the project source to the public was never granted.
After leaving IBM early last year, I decided to dig up the pre-IBM source, fix it up somewhat, and make the jSyncManager Open Source myself.
In the time I've been working on the project, we've had several mentions in the press (Chapter 11 of O'Reilly's "Java Cookbook" mentions the jSyncManager in passing, the May 2000 issue of Java Pro reviewed us against Palm's own CDK for Java (very favourably I might add:) ), and we got a mention in "Assistants", an Australian publication for Chartered Accountants), and I've spoke about the jSyncManager at a few conferences (Wrox Wireless 2001 in Amsterdam, WarpStock 2001 in Toronto, and CASCON 2001 (sponsored by IBM and the National Research council of Canada), also in Toronto). Unfortunately, all of these happened before I released the jSyncManager as Open Source. Things since have been pretty dry (even though IMO we have a much better product now!).
So, we're in a good position to attract attention and funding -- we're a mature project that is rock-solid (we do have to work on our initial setup a bit, as getting end-users to grab all of the necessary third-party libraries we rely upon is curruntly an issue, but it's something we'll work on by creating installer versions that include the necessary libraries once we get closer to our next GA release), and has been received favourably in several communities.
(I do want to note that when I wrote up my story submission, I was quite aware of the potential marketing implications of getting such a story on Slashdot, as some readers here have observed. This wasn't really my intention, which is why I'm trying to ask generic questions to see what ideas every has -- I'm hoping other projects can benifit from this discussion as well. Getting our website/.'ed is an unintended side benifit:) ).
Something I've learned in the six years I've been developing the jSyncManager is that while I'm an excellent coder (well, at least I think so;) ), and a good project administrator, and while I don't mind blowing my own horn somewhat, I know that I am _not_ a sales/m
I actually ran through dig myself with the same queries to try to find out what might be going on, along with the whois output for the domain. That's why I was hoping that someone might have the IP cached somewhere (I'm assuming that the site is still online, and only that the domain isn't resolvable. I could be completely wrong about this, of course -- which is why I want to test that hypothesis:) ).
I've noted that the domain quoted in the article http://www.defacers-challenge.com doesn't appear to resolve to anything at the moment. Anyone have the IP address for the site?
Regardless, this is yet another challenge that won't produce much of anything useful. Too bad the people participating don't have anything more useful to put their idle time towards (what with so many Open Source projects needing help out there, you'd think these people could find lots of useful places to use their skills).
I'm off to backup the files for my website, just in case...
As an interface designer and technical writer, this has always been my personal mantra. It's finally nice to see that at least one engineer finally actually gets it!
He gets it, but he doesn't get it. To specifically quote what he wrote:
This is similar to the #1 project management lesson. The program should be fun to work with. There should be buttons and things that blink. The interface should be the first thing you do.
I agree that the UI is extremely important. It bugs me how many Open Source projects don't bother to employ the skills of someone well versed in HCI (although as an Open Source project administrator myself, I can say that finding such people can be difficult. I've been lucky to have attracted the attention of some people who have some interface design experience).
However, it shouldn't be the first thing you do. That's the top-down design paradigm, and it doesn't make for particularily maintainable code. You wind up with a pile of code that is so tightly coupled to the GUI that it's difficult to use the useful portions of the code for any other project.
It's much better to break the design into two parts -- the core "engine" code that actually does the work irrespective of interface, and the UI. Neither should be tightly coupled to the other, but both should be considered equally important.
The problem with many Open Source (and closed source for that matter...) projects is that the GUI becomes tightly coupled to the "engine" code. I've seen this happen in all sorts of poorly planned projects, wether the source is open or closed, but this sort of design seems to harm Open Source code moreso, because the useful bits become difficult to use in other Open Source projects.
Whatever you do, don't code the UI first. This makes it too easy to fall into traps that cause your engine code to become tightly coupled with the UI code, and difficult (or impossible) to use without your UI components. But when you do get to the UI, make sure you have your target audience in mind, take the time to design it for maximum usuability, and make sure it has all the bells and whistles your audience expects. It's how the user interfaces with your program, so it's going to be the biggest element in how they judge the usuability and usefulness of your project.
He disparages both C++ and Java as open source development languages, and I agree with his comments on those.
I don't -- at least not his comments concerning Java.
At one time (before they were bundled) people had to download a web browser if they wanted to view a website. I don't recall any webmasters who felt that they shouldn't work in HTML because people had to go and download a browser in order to view it.
Every software project has prerequisites. Some projects require external libraries, others require external runtime environments. If you code an Open Source project is Perl, I'm not going to be able to run it on my OS/2 systems without downloading the Perl runtimes, for example. The only way to avoid this is to statically compile everything you need into a native executable which, once again, isn't going to work for people running on a different platform(s) than what you're building for. Now they have to go through the pain of installing (and possibly paying for...) a compiler, and then modifying the code to make it compile on their platform of choice.
If your application does something useful that people can't otherwise do, they'll take the one-time hit and download the Java Runtime (or any other project prerequisite).
I think this is a non-issue. As the administrator of a Java-based Open Source project that targets client-side Java (The jSyncManager Project), I can say that using Java hasn't inhibited the growth of my project significantly, as it provides value that people can't get elsewhere (namely, a single application and plug-in architecture that can run on any Java-enabled system, which allows organizations in heterogeneous environments to run the same application on all their platforms, reducing maintenence costs). As such, people who need this sort of value have no problem taking the one-time hit in installing the proper prerequisites.
You ask a fair question. However, it's worth noting that "the courts" isn't necessarily a single entity. In this case, the lower courts have been finding against Microsoft with some interesting remedy solutions, after long and arduous trials that are both fair and impartial.
Then MS takes them to the appeals court, where anything punishing MS for their actions gets tossed.
I'm not one for vengence -- I don't believe it has any place in a system of justice. Still, justice must embrace the notion of "punishment" as a preventative measure. It's the stick society weilds against would-be law breakers.
Unfortunately, this notion appears to be lost on the appeals courts whenever MS is involved. Several times the appeals courts have upheld that MS has indeed broken the law -- but each time they've voided any punishments.
I wonder about a system that will put children, the mentally retarded, and foreign nationals who haven't been given the right to contact their consulates to death, but won't punish any corporations no matter how badly they behave. What's to stop MS or any othe rcompany from using such tactics if there aren't any punishments to doing so?
(Note: I'm not an American, so it isn't my courts doling out this brand of "justice").
Actually, I'm not wrong:). Microsoft was only enjoined from shipping an up-to-date Java because they were not complying with their contract with Sun. They broke the contract, and were adamant they wouldn't comply with it. What else could Sun do but find them in violation and cancel the contract?
And it was more than just extending Java on MSqs part. They completely left out all RMI support in their JVMs (although eventaully they offered it as some sort of "optional download -- but RMI is not an optional part of Java!).
This case was about anti-trust, however, and not the Sun/MS contract. Sun had to cancel the contract because MS wasn't complying with it. Not a whole lot you can do otherwise when it comes to the contract.
But the DOJ/MS trial brought out all sorts of documentation about how MS tried to illegally subvert Java -- and not by shipping an out-of-date JVM.
This case wasn't about MS having an out-of-date JVM. It was about anti-trust. Forcing MS to ship a compliant JVM was a remedy for past anti-trust abuses against Sun, not about getting them to ship current code for the sake of forcing them to be up-to-date.
I think it is time to jerk Microsoft up short - but they may have too much momentum.
Nonsense! No company can ever have more momentum that the society it services. If society, through its elected officials and the courts, wanted to apply the spirit of the law to Microsoft, they could. Several judges have found Microsoft guilty of a variety of anti-competitive acts and contract violations. Most of them have proposed broad reaching remedies.
Unfortunately, the appeals court appears to fear the notion of "remedies". They appear to be more interested in preventing Microsoft from weilding its power again, as opposed to bringing in useful punishments to show the world that bad corporate behaviour won't be tolerated.
I'm all for capitalism and free enterprise -- but as with everything else, there has to be checks and balances. And right now, while some checks have been instituted to keep an eye on microsoft, there hav'nt been any "balances" to bring the pendulum back to centre.
As I mentioned, I'm all for free enterprise and capitalism -- but that support shouldn't be at the expense of the spirit of the legal system.
It looks like alot of people here are of the view that the courts shouldn't force one company to bundle the product of another. Fair enough.
However, at this juncture, the courts might as well tell Microsoft that they can be anti-competitive all they want, as there will never be any real punishments for their actions. Microsoft has benifitted from the fragmentation of Java, through their distribution of an outdated, poorly functional version. And prior to that, they benifitted from their attempts to prevent Java from being a write-once, run-anywhere language.
At some point, justice has to incorporate the ideal of punishing organizations for their past bahaviour, in order to reduce the benifits of undertaking that behaviour, and in order to curb others from undertaking the same behaviour in the future.
If I were to go on a spree killing my enemies in society (not that I have any enemies...;) ), the courts wouldn't haul me up and say "You are hereby enjoined from ever killing anybody ever again", and then setup a panel (that I get to select some of the members of) to make sure I don't. Instead, they'd take away my freedom to do whatever I want, and throw my sorry ass in jail.
You can't throw a whole company in jail, and in the MS case, nobody has directly died (I realize the extremity of my example:) ) due to MS's actions. But still, there has been zero accountability on their part up to this point. There has been nothing yet to aid the real victims of MS's anticompetitive acts, nor nothing that would really cause MS to want to avoid such acts in the future. Where is the justice in that for the companies who have had their intellictual property values eroded due to Microsoft's acts?
This was a chance for society to tell Microsoft (and other big computer software companies) that if they don't play fairly, there are consequences. Judge Mott gave a creative ruling that incorporated both punishment for past bad acts, while at the same time helping level and repair the playing field for Sun.
MS's come-uppance is long overdue. They've destroyed the value of new technologies from their competitors, and thus far, while techinically losing in the eyes of the courts, have gained from the experience. And you're not supposed to be able to gain when you violate the law -- but apparently MS has found that, in their industry, crime does pay.
In this case, I doubt he could close his source in a particularily useful way. The LRP diskette uses the Linux kernel, and a variety of other existing Linux GPL code.
He could close-source anything he's personally written, but I'm not completely certain how useful anyone would find that code without all the rest of the GPLed stuff from other projects that makes up the distro.
Thank-you very much for the details of the system. I was merely a user of the system back in the late 80's -- I was the school "expert" on the system, and even though the teachers came to me when something they didn't understand occurred on the system, for some reason they wouldn't let me take a screwdriver to it to see what was inside for myself:).
Interestingly enough, the first "IBM" was actually "IBM Canada Ltd.", the C-T-R Co. branch in Canada. Prior to that, C-T-R wasn't really "International" -- it was compltely US-based.
Shortly therafter, the rest of the company adopted the name of its Canadian subsidiary -- and everyone knows the rest from there;).
Yaz.
That would be the Unisys Icon, either series 1 or 2. They were _not_ dumb terminals however -- the Series 2 used an 80186 (you read that correctly) with 1MB of RAM. The "bulky black box" was the storage system (it had the hard disks and floppy drives) and handled network control. I don't recall what was in the series 1 hardware wise, but it was similar.
The systems used to be popular in Canadian schools because the OS was developed in Canada, as were most of the tools and applications (which were primarily by Watcom). Plus students generally weren't going to be able to install whatever gunk they brought from their DOS machines at home, nor were DOS based virii any sort of threat to these systems. They were easy to manage and maintain, and were good for teaching programming basics.
Do you prefer todays alternative of brainwashing students in The Microsoft Way(tm)?
I'm a Dvorak user. I made the switch about three years ago at both home and work. And while I found many of the usual benifits (increaded typing speed, better hand comfort, a decrease in typos), I discovered one very important additional benifit...
Nobody ever wanted to use my computer anymore!
At the time I mad ethe switch, I had one of the most powerful systems in my development group. People routinely wanted to use it for one thing or another, but all of that dried up soon after remapping all my keys to Dvorak. Joy!:)
At home, I have a number of systems that I run without monitor, keyboard, or mouse -- so I tend to have extra keyboards laying around. On the rare occassions where a guest needs to use a computer, I'll typically swap keyboards for them.
Some of us are geeky enough to use things that are based on sound research and engineering, and because of their degree of optimality, and couldn't care less about "what everyone else uses". It's why I use a Dvorak keyboard, why I don't run Windows at all, and why I learned to speak Esperanto.
(This same article appeared on CNN.com back in late March, but unfortunately I couldn't find a link to it through their search engine, but was able to find a copy from the Toronto Star).
Quote:
While the rules enacted by the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University weren't quite as strict, the combined Minnesota schools did suggest another tactic to avoid becoming the target of anti-American rhetoric -- one favoured for decades by U.S. students hoping to keep a low profile.
"We told them, if you're travelling or if you're out somewhere for the weekend, tell someone you're Canadian," said Stephen Burmeister-May, the director of international education.
So there you ago -- a US school that tells its students going overseas to tell people they're Canadian.
You pussies only have the option of not defending youerselves because your neighbors do it for you. If Iraq were your neighbor you wouldn't have lasted a day. Smug idiots.
Who has the US ever protected Canada from? When was the last time a nation tried to attack Canada?
I'll tell you -- it was the Fenian Raids (terrorist attacks) from the US back in the mid 1800's. Prior to that, it was the US again, during the War of 1812.
I routinely hear this type of rhetoric -- that the mighty US military machine is "protecting" Canada -- but never can anyone tell me who they're protecting Canada _from_. And indeed, they seem to convienently forget that the US's military forces have _benifitted_ from Canada's contributions to continental and international security -- everything from allowing US cruise missle tests in Canada, to committing troops to the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, to intelligence sharing, to giving the US access to Canadian mutition and military technology test facilities (ref: http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/focus/canada-us/agree _e.asp).
So before you spout such rhetoric again, just remember that a) the US hasn't really protected Canada _from_ anybody, and 2) the benifit has always been two-way.
The Charter also has an 'escape clause' for every one of the rights granted and an escape clase for the whole document. Just say "notwithstanding" and you can inflict freedom-of-speech violations on businesses in Quebec.
That's not completely correct. Section 33 of the Charter explicitly states:
(1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.
and...
(3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.
Thus you can't just say "notwithstanding" and override anything you want in the Charter. Only certain sections can be overrided (ie: you can't override the sections on Democratic Rights (section 3) or Mobility Rights (Section 6)), and even then only for a five year period, at which time the notwithstanding law must be reviewed.
Besides which, some could argue that Quebec's language laws don't prohibit free speech at all -- you can still say what you want on business signage, it simply requires that you do so in French (or, at least make the French predominant over any other language).
When Enterprise began, it had so much going for it (IMO). It had an interesting concept (pre TOS), and a good cast lineup. It also wasn't going up against an established and current Star Trek series, as DS9 d (started while TNG was at its best) and Voyager (started when DS9 was near its peak) did.
One thing I have to say about all post-TOS Star Trek: the first season or two usually wasn't indicitive of the quality of the series as a whole. TNG, DS9, and Voyager all had fairly poor first (and often second) seasons compared to what would come later. In TNG, the characters in the first season weren't fully developed, and differ greatly from subsequent seasons (Troi was bound up in those bad costumes with bad hairdos, Worf had very little personality, Wesley was annoying, Tasha Yar was still around (and also annoying), Jordi was just a helmsman, etc.). With DS9, they tried to make everyone at odds with each-other all the time -- the series didn't pickup until the characters settled down into a more Star Trek role (ie: Kira became pretty much a part of the crew, and no longer distrusted Star Fleet). Voyager had to have some crew and alien races shakeup before it got really good (lost the Kazon, took on 7 of 9, etc.).
Thus, when it started I was ready to give Enterprise a chance to have the characters grow into their roles. I feel that this could still happen, but that there is simply too much wrong with the series at the moment to have this fix its numerous problems.
The first episode of Enterprise was, IMO, extremely good, and setup a vast universe of possibilities that the writers could have taken advantage of. Trek fans have long taken the Federation and Starfleet as a given, with only extremely cursory glimpses at how it was formed, and where it came from. We know from First Contact and TOS that Zefram Cochrane invented the first warp drive, and his first flight attracted the attention of the Vulcans, who then made first contact. But we're left with a big gap -- how did we get from that to forming Starfleet, and a Federation of Planets with Vulcan? Enterprise has the opportunity to explore the politics and mechanics of this, but has thus far only done so in a very cursory manner. As it stands now, we went from Cochrane's flight, to having a Starfleet, with nothing on its formation.
Next, we have the "energy-cloud-du-jour" already being added as a major plot device -- the "temporal cold war". Time travel has always been a tricky thing in Star Trek, and has usually been used a bit sparingly. The concept behind Star Trek has always been to explore space, with the exploration in time usually being more along the lines of studying history. Every Trek series has used time travel to a certain extent, but it was generally as a plot device for individual stories, not as a major plot device for the entire series. Humanity makes its first steps into a vast universe, and before it encounters some of the most basic species to the Trek mythology, everyone is suddenly using time travel. It's tired, it's been done better in other Trek series, and it's a way to avoid having to actually write compelling stories.
Then we have the Vulcans, whose history as we know it appears that it's being rewritten. From TOS and the movies, things like the Vulcan mind-meld are made out to be ages-old practices that the Vulcan people have always procticed. Now we're supposed to believe that these ancient abilities didn't exist during the Enterprise era.
Next, we have the extremely fast evolution from torpedo-based weapon technology to energy weapons. One episode in the very first season they don't have phasors, the next they pretty much invent them on their own. Yeah, right.
Next, we have a major race that has never before been introduce in the Star Trek universe, the Suliban. A race that uses time travel, but that somehow disappears by the time TOS comes around. Perhaps they'll come up with a good explaination of why they aren't a pain in the rear to future Federation ships
It will work if you're logged in as root in your SSH session (either by logging in as root, or su'ing over to root). I generally don't use my root account for such things, so when I tried it last, it was as a regular user.
I would have expected, however, that if you were logged in at the console as the same user you were logged into via SSH, that there wouldn't be any console access issues. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work in practice -- I get the same error as if I had attempted to start a video while not logged into the console.
If you're not worried about potential security issues, then you should be able to log in as root and initiate the video playback without any hassles. HTH!
You don't need to specify a DISPLAY environment variable if you're using SDL. That is only required for X. You should be able to start an X session through SSH -- just make sure that DISPLAY is set to the proper value (probably:0.0, unless you've been fiddling with your XFree86 setup to make it something else), and type "startx".
As for running the MPEG player without X, just install all the SDL libraries from http://www.playstation2-linux.com, and run "plaympeg". You'll have to do this while logged into the PS2 at its console, however (you won't be able to activate this properly via an SSH or Telnet session). I usually pass it the "-s 640x480" parameter to force it to scale the video to fullscreen (the --fullscreen parameter doesn't seem to woky right on my setup), but that should be the only setup you need to do (beyond installing the SDL RPMs, that is).
Slashdot Mirror
What about mixed licensing? Main project becomes a commercial project (with expected enhancments, gui, stability) and feeds back into the pool after so long.
I've been thinking about a similar idea, but instead of mixed licensing, I'd keep the GPL/LGPL mix we're currently using, but sell a version that is wrapped into a friendly installer.
One of the big problems we currently have is that there are a variety of libraries the user requires. Some of these (like jDOM and jUSB) are Open Source, and we can include them. Others (like the Java Communications API) can be redistributed for some platforms, but not for others. Regardless, currently it is up to the users to find, download, and install these pre-requisites before running the jSyncManager. And for some users, this is quite a bit of effort.
I'm currently thinking of creating some pre-packaged installable versions that use platform-specific installers, that include all the libraries we pre-req that we can get free redistribution rights for. These packages could be sold with bundled priority e-mail technical support for a year (or somesuch).
RedHat and others seem to do well with this model in the Linux world, so it could work for us. Making it easier for users to get the jSyncManager running would certainly be an added benifit.
Yaz.
I really like this idea, but I'm not sure if the jSyncManager would necessarily qualify. We're not specifically a Linux project (although our nightly build system for the project is a Linux box, as is our web and CVS servers... :) ) -- we're a cross-platform Java project.
Sure, we run extremely well on Linux, but we don't have a single line of Linux-specific code (at least not yet -- I'm planning on writing a plug-in module to make us work better with visor.o for USB based synchronization. Currently we use jUSB, which while it has a Linux implementation has an issue where if you have hotplug enabled, the visor.o module will grab the USB bulk transport for the handheld dock before we get a chance to -- we detect the device connection and try to open the transports, but wind up with an exception because they're already exclusively locked. Our current solution is to tell users to either disable hotplug for visor.o, or to rename it to prevent it from being loaded -- both steps which IMO are a bit extreme).
Long story short -- I'm not completely sure we'd qualify.
It does make me think though -- perhaps Sun should put together a fund to sponsor Open Source Java projects. After all, they want to push Java, and so do Java-based Open Source projects like mine... ;)
Yaz.
So, one avenue is to partner with a hardware maker, in the case of the PC to PDA sync, partner with an up-and-coming desktop hardware manufacturer, or a similar PDA maker.
I've been thinking along these lines, and approching someone like Palm or Handspring. Handheld companies have bene trying for a number of years to make more inroads into the corporate world, and the jSyncManager is an application/API/toolset that has been found to be extremely attractive within corporations because 1) it runs on whatever platforms the company has (which is particularily useful in mixed environments, as your plugins can be usuable on all your OS and hardware platforms, and as administration is significantly easier when you have the same tool on all systems), 2) it's in Java (which alot of companies use for internal development, particularily when communicating with DBMSs), 3) it's Open Source, and can thus be easily tailored to their needs, and 4) it's exceedingly modular (and heavily object-oriented), which makes the tailoring mentioned in #3 a whole lot easier.
Still, for all of our benifits, we do in a sense compete with Palm, which also produces data synchronization tools (albeit for Windows and MacOS only).
It's still something I'd like to explore. Thanks for your opinion!
Yaz.
Hi Everyone:
I'll probably try to get around to replying to many of your posts directly (will, the really useful ones at least :) ), but I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for their input thus far, and reply to some of the recurring ideas and themes.
The jSyncManager has, in fact, been around for quite a while. I started working on it back in 1997. It eventually became my thesis project. Shortly after graduating from Brock University, I joined up with IBM, working at their Toronto Software Lab.
At this time, the project was closed source (a bit of a mistake on my part). As with many big software firms, I had to sing the restrictive "IBM owns everything you develop" employment contract, which made continued work on the jSyncManager difficult (this was at a time when IBM was still formulating its rules for employees participating in Open Source projects).
As an in-between solution, I entered into an agreement with my local legal department to offer the jSyncManager through IBM in a co-copyrighted manner, where I retained the copyright to everything as it existed prior to joining IBM. Due to some problems IBM had with the name, it was changed to IBM ManplatoSync for Java. My original agreement was that the project was to be released as Open Source under the IBM Public License -- but while I kept working on the project (in my own time mind you, and for no money), the IBM lawyers kept passing the buck, and permission to actually release the project source to the public was never granted.
After leaving IBM early last year, I decided to dig up the pre-IBM source, fix it up somewhat, and make the jSyncManager Open Source myself.
In the time I've been working on the project, we've had several mentions in the press (Chapter 11 of O'Reilly's "Java Cookbook" mentions the jSyncManager in passing, the May 2000 issue of Java Pro reviewed us against Palm's own CDK for Java (very favourably I might add :) ), and we got a mention in "Assistants", an Australian publication for Chartered Accountants), and I've spoke about the jSyncManager at a few conferences (Wrox Wireless 2001 in Amsterdam, WarpStock 2001 in Toronto, and CASCON 2001 (sponsored by IBM and the National Research council of Canada), also in Toronto). Unfortunately, all of these happened before I released the jSyncManager as Open Source. Things since have been pretty dry (even though IMO we have a much better product now!).
So, we're in a good position to attract attention and funding -- we're a mature project that is rock-solid (we do have to work on our initial setup a bit, as getting end-users to grab all of the necessary third-party libraries we rely upon is curruntly an issue, but it's something we'll work on by creating installer versions that include the necessary libraries once we get closer to our next GA release), and has been received favourably in several communities.
(I do want to note that when I wrote up my story submission, I was quite aware of the potential marketing implications of getting such a story on Slashdot, as some readers here have observed. This wasn't really my intention, which is why I'm trying to ask generic questions to see what ideas every has -- I'm hoping other projects can benifit from this discussion as well. Getting our website /.'ed is an unintended side benifit :) ).
Something I've learned in the six years I've been developing the jSyncManager is that while I'm an excellent coder (well, at least I think so ;) ), and a good project administrator, and while I don't mind blowing my own horn somewhat, I know that I am _not_ a sales/m
I'd be more interested in the 9% of people who said the suit *is* affecting their decisions.
Hey, maybe they're planning on installing *more* Linux, you know, to replace all those SCO servers they're now too embarrassed to run ;).
Yaz.
Hey TCM:
I actually ran through dig myself with the same queries to try to find out what might be going on, along with the whois output for the domain. That's why I was hoping that someone might have the IP cached somewhere (I'm assuming that the site is still online, and only that the domain isn't resolvable. I could be completely wrong about this, of course -- which is why I want to test that hypothesis :) ).
Yaz.
I've noted that the domain quoted in the article http://www.defacers-challenge.com doesn't appear to resolve to anything at the moment. Anyone have the IP address for the site?
Regardless, this is yet another challenge that won't produce much of anything useful. Too bad the people participating don't have anything more useful to put their idle time towards (what with so many Open Source projects needing help out there, you'd think these people could find lots of useful places to use their skills).
I'm off to backup the files for my website, just in case...
Yaz.
As an interface designer and technical writer, this has always been my personal mantra. It's finally nice to see that at least one engineer finally actually gets it!
He gets it, but he doesn't get it. To specifically quote what he wrote:
I agree that the UI is extremely important. It bugs me how many Open Source projects don't bother to employ the skills of someone well versed in HCI (although as an Open Source project administrator myself, I can say that finding such people can be difficult. I've been lucky to have attracted the attention of some people who have some interface design experience).
However, it shouldn't be the first thing you do. That's the top-down design paradigm, and it doesn't make for particularily maintainable code. You wind up with a pile of code that is so tightly coupled to the GUI that it's difficult to use the useful portions of the code for any other project.
It's much better to break the design into two parts -- the core "engine" code that actually does the work irrespective of interface, and the UI. Neither should be tightly coupled to the other, but both should be considered equally important.
The problem with many Open Source (and closed source for that matter...) projects is that the GUI becomes tightly coupled to the "engine" code. I've seen this happen in all sorts of poorly planned projects, wether the source is open or closed, but this sort of design seems to harm Open Source code moreso, because the useful bits become difficult to use in other Open Source projects.
Whatever you do, don't code the UI first. This makes it too easy to fall into traps that cause your engine code to become tightly coupled with the UI code, and difficult (or impossible) to use without your UI components. But when you do get to the UI, make sure you have your target audience in mind, take the time to design it for maximum usuability, and make sure it has all the bells and whistles your audience expects. It's how the user interfaces with your program, so it's going to be the biggest element in how they judge the usuability and usefulness of your project.
Yaz.
He disparages both C++ and Java as open source development languages, and I agree with his comments on those.
I don't -- at least not his comments concerning Java.
At one time (before they were bundled) people had to download a web browser if they wanted to view a website. I don't recall any webmasters who felt that they shouldn't work in HTML because people had to go and download a browser in order to view it.
Every software project has prerequisites. Some projects require external libraries, others require external runtime environments. If you code an Open Source project is Perl, I'm not going to be able to run it on my OS/2 systems without downloading the Perl runtimes, for example. The only way to avoid this is to statically compile everything you need into a native executable which, once again, isn't going to work for people running on a different platform(s) than what you're building for. Now they have to go through the pain of installing (and possibly paying for...) a compiler, and then modifying the code to make it compile on their platform of choice.
If your application does something useful that people can't otherwise do, they'll take the one-time hit and download the Java Runtime (or any other project prerequisite).
I think this is a non-issue. As the administrator of a Java-based Open Source project that targets client-side Java (The jSyncManager Project), I can say that using Java hasn't inhibited the growth of my project significantly, as it provides value that people can't get elsewhere (namely, a single application and plug-in architecture that can run on any Java-enabled system, which allows organizations in heterogeneous environments to run the same application on all their platforms, reducing maintenence costs). As such, people who need this sort of value have no problem taking the one-time hit in installing the proper prerequisites.
Yaz.
Wonder away :).
You ask a fair question. However, it's worth noting that "the courts" isn't necessarily a single entity. In this case, the lower courts have been finding against Microsoft with some interesting remedy solutions, after long and arduous trials that are both fair and impartial.
Then MS takes them to the appeals court, where anything punishing MS for their actions gets tossed.
I'm not one for vengence -- I don't believe it has any place in a system of justice. Still, justice must embrace the notion of "punishment" as a preventative measure. It's the stick society weilds against would-be law breakers.
Unfortunately, this notion appears to be lost on the appeals courts whenever MS is involved. Several times the appeals courts have upheld that MS has indeed broken the law -- but each time they've voided any punishments.
I wonder about a system that will put children, the mentally retarded, and foreign nationals who haven't been given the right to contact their consulates to death, but won't punish any corporations no matter how badly they behave. What's to stop MS or any othe rcompany from using such tactics if there aren't any punishments to doing so?
(Note: I'm not an American, so it isn't my courts doling out this brand of "justice").
Yaz.
Hey Osty:
Actually, I'm not wrong :). Microsoft was only enjoined from shipping an up-to-date Java because they were not complying with their contract with Sun. They broke the contract, and were adamant they wouldn't comply with it. What else could Sun do but find them in violation and cancel the contract?
And it was more than just extending Java on MSqs part. They completely left out all RMI support in their JVMs (although eventaully they offered it as some sort of "optional download -- but RMI is not an optional part of Java!).
This case was about anti-trust, however, and not the Sun/MS contract. Sun had to cancel the contract because MS wasn't complying with it. Not a whole lot you can do otherwise when it comes to the contract.
But the DOJ/MS trial brought out all sorts of documentation about how MS tried to illegally subvert Java -- and not by shipping an out-of-date JVM.
This case wasn't about MS having an out-of-date JVM. It was about anti-trust. Forcing MS to ship a compliant JVM was a remedy for past anti-trust abuses against Sun, not about getting them to ship current code for the sake of forcing them to be up-to-date.
Yaz.
I think it is time to jerk Microsoft up short - but they may have too much momentum.
Nonsense! No company can ever have more momentum that the society it services. If society, through its elected officials and the courts, wanted to apply the spirit of the law to Microsoft, they could. Several judges have found Microsoft guilty of a variety of anti-competitive acts and contract violations. Most of them have proposed broad reaching remedies.
Unfortunately, the appeals court appears to fear the notion of "remedies". They appear to be more interested in preventing Microsoft from weilding its power again, as opposed to bringing in useful punishments to show the world that bad corporate behaviour won't be tolerated.
I'm all for capitalism and free enterprise -- but as with everything else, there has to be checks and balances. And right now, while some checks have been instituted to keep an eye on microsoft, there hav'nt been any "balances" to bring the pendulum back to centre.
As I mentioned, I'm all for free enterprise and capitalism -- but that support shouldn't be at the expense of the spirit of the legal system.
Yaz.
I'm going to take the contrarian view here. :).
It looks like alot of people here are of the view that the courts shouldn't force one company to bundle the product of another. Fair enough.
However, at this juncture, the courts might as well tell Microsoft that they can be anti-competitive all they want, as there will never be any real punishments for their actions. Microsoft has benifitted from the fragmentation of Java, through their distribution of an outdated, poorly functional version. And prior to that, they benifitted from their attempts to prevent Java from being a write-once, run-anywhere language.
At some point, justice has to incorporate the ideal of punishing organizations for their past bahaviour, in order to reduce the benifits of undertaking that behaviour, and in order to curb others from undertaking the same behaviour in the future.
If I were to go on a spree killing my enemies in society (not that I have any enemies... ;) ), the courts wouldn't haul me up and say "You are hereby enjoined from ever killing anybody ever again", and then setup a panel (that I get to select some of the members of) to make sure I don't. Instead, they'd take away my freedom to do whatever I want, and throw my sorry ass in jail.
You can't throw a whole company in jail, and in the MS case, nobody has directly died (I realize the extremity of my example :) ) due to MS's actions. But still, there has been zero accountability on their part up to this point. There has been nothing yet to aid the real victims of MS's anticompetitive acts, nor nothing that would really cause MS to want to avoid such acts in the future. Where is the justice in that for the companies who have had their intellictual property values eroded due to Microsoft's acts?
This was a chance for society to tell Microsoft (and other big computer software companies) that if they don't play fairly, there are consequences. Judge Mott gave a creative ruling that incorporated both punishment for past bad acts, while at the same time helping level and repair the playing field for Sun.
MS's come-uppance is long overdue. They've destroyed the value of new technologies from their competitors, and thus far, while techinically losing in the eyes of the courts, have gained from the experience. And you're not supposed to be able to gain when you violate the law -- but apparently MS has found that, in their industry, crime does pay.
Yaz.
In this case, I doubt he could close his source in a particularily useful way. The LRP diskette uses the Linux kernel, and a variety of other existing Linux GPL code.
He could close-source anything he's personally written, but I'm not completely certain how useful anyone would find that code without all the rest of the GPLed stuff from other projects that makes up the distro.
Yaz.
Thank-you very much for the details of the system. I was merely a user of the system back in the late 80's -- I was the school "expert" on the system, and even though the teachers came to me when something they didn't understand occurred on the system, for some reason they wouldn't let me take a screwdriver to it to see what was inside for myself :).
Yaz.
Interestingly enough, the first "IBM" was actually "IBM Canada Ltd.", the C-T-R Co. branch in Canada. Prior to that, C-T-R wasn't really "International" -- it was compltely US-based. Shortly therafter, the rest of the company adopted the name of its Canadian subsidiary -- and everyone knows the rest from there ;).
Yaz.
That would be the Unisys Icon, either series 1 or 2. They were _not_ dumb terminals however -- the Series 2 used an 80186 (you read that correctly) with 1MB of RAM. The "bulky black box" was the storage system (it had the hard disks and floppy drives) and handled network control. I don't recall what was in the series 1 hardware wise, but it was similar.
The systems used to be popular in Canadian schools because the OS was developed in Canada, as were most of the tools and applications (which were primarily by Watcom). Plus students generally weren't going to be able to install whatever gunk they brought from their DOS machines at home, nor were DOS based virii any sort of threat to these systems. They were easy to manage and maintain, and were good for teaching programming basics.
Do you prefer todays alternative of brainwashing students in The Microsoft Way(tm)?
Yaz.
What does that leave for SCO to claim they "own"?
Variable names? ;)
Yaz.
I'm a Dvorak user. I made the switch about three years ago at both home and work. And while I found many of the usual benifits (increaded typing speed, better hand comfort, a decrease in typos), I discovered one very important additional benifit...
Nobody ever wanted to use my computer anymore!
At the time I mad ethe switch, I had one of the most powerful systems in my development group. People routinely wanted to use it for one thing or another, but all of that dried up soon after remapping all my keys to Dvorak. Joy! :)
At home, I have a number of systems that I run without monitor, keyboard, or mouse -- so I tend to have extra keyboards laying around. On the rare occassions where a guest needs to use a computer, I'll typically swap keyboards for them.
Some of us are geeky enough to use things that are based on sound research and engineering, and because of their degree of optimality, and couldn't care less about "what everyone else uses". It's why I use a Dvorak keyboard, why I don't run Windows at all, and why I learned to speak Esperanto.
Yaz.
How about Americans visiting other countries? Better pretended to be Canadians.
This is a very common Canadian myth. I think they teach it in the schools up there.
It's no myth. See:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?GXH C_gx_session_id_=77a03ed5c97203e3&pagename=thestar /Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035780008763& call_pageid=968332188492&col=968705899037
(This same article appeared on CNN.com back in late March, but unfortunately I couldn't find a link to it through their search engine, but was able to find a copy from the Toronto Star).
Quote:
So there you ago -- a US school that tells its students going overseas to tell people they're Canadian.
Yaz.
You pussies only have the option of not defending youerselves because your neighbors do it for you. If Iraq were your neighbor you wouldn't have lasted a day. Smug idiots.
Who has the US ever protected Canada from? When was the last time a nation tried to attack Canada?
I'll tell you -- it was the Fenian Raids (terrorist attacks) from the US back in the mid 1800's. Prior to that, it was the US again, during the War of 1812.
I routinely hear this type of rhetoric -- that the mighty US military machine is "protecting" Canada -- but never can anyone tell me who they're protecting Canada _from_. And indeed, they seem to convienently forget that the US's military forces have _benifitted_ from Canada's contributions to continental and international security -- everything from allowing US cruise missle tests in Canada, to committing troops to the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, to intelligence sharing, to giving the US access to Canadian mutition and military technology test facilities (ref: http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/focus/canada-us/agree _e.asp).
So before you spout such rhetoric again, just remember that a) the US hasn't really protected Canada _from_ anybody, and 2) the benifit has always been two-way.
Yaz.
The Charter also has an 'escape clause' for every one of the rights granted and an escape clase for the whole document. Just say "notwithstanding" and you can inflict freedom-of-speech violations on businesses in Quebec.
That's not completely correct. Section 33 of the Charter explicitly states:
and...
Thus you can't just say "notwithstanding" and override anything you want in the Charter. Only certain sections can be overrided (ie: you can't override the sections on Democratic Rights (section 3) or Mobility Rights (Section 6)), and even then only for a five year period, at which time the notwithstanding law must be reviewed.
Besides which, some could argue that Quebec's language laws don't prohibit free speech at all -- you can still say what you want on business signage, it simply requires that you do so in French (or, at least make the French predominant over any other language).
Yaz.
When Enterprise began, it had so much going for it (IMO). It had an interesting concept (pre TOS), and a good cast lineup. It also wasn't going up against an established and current Star Trek series, as DS9 d (started while TNG was at its best) and Voyager (started when DS9 was near its peak) did.
One thing I have to say about all post-TOS Star Trek: the first season or two usually wasn't indicitive of the quality of the series as a whole. TNG, DS9, and Voyager all had fairly poor first (and often second) seasons compared to what would come later. In TNG, the characters in the first season weren't fully developed, and differ greatly from subsequent seasons (Troi was bound up in those bad costumes with bad hairdos, Worf had very little personality, Wesley was annoying, Tasha Yar was still around (and also annoying), Jordi was just a helmsman, etc.). With DS9, they tried to make everyone at odds with each-other all the time -- the series didn't pickup until the characters settled down into a more Star Trek role (ie: Kira became pretty much a part of the crew, and no longer distrusted Star Fleet). Voyager had to have some crew and alien races shakeup before it got really good (lost the Kazon, took on 7 of 9, etc.).
Thus, when it started I was ready to give Enterprise a chance to have the characters grow into their roles. I feel that this could still happen, but that there is simply too much wrong with the series at the moment to have this fix its numerous problems.
The first episode of Enterprise was, IMO, extremely good, and setup a vast universe of possibilities that the writers could have taken advantage of. Trek fans have long taken the Federation and Starfleet as a given, with only extremely cursory glimpses at how it was formed, and where it came from. We know from First Contact and TOS that Zefram Cochrane invented the first warp drive, and his first flight attracted the attention of the Vulcans, who then made first contact. But we're left with a big gap -- how did we get from that to forming Starfleet, and a Federation of Planets with Vulcan? Enterprise has the opportunity to explore the politics and mechanics of this, but has thus far only done so in a very cursory manner. As it stands now, we went from Cochrane's flight, to having a Starfleet, with nothing on its formation.
Next, we have the "energy-cloud-du-jour" already being added as a major plot device -- the "temporal cold war". Time travel has always been a tricky thing in Star Trek, and has usually been used a bit sparingly. The concept behind Star Trek has always been to explore space, with the exploration in time usually being more along the lines of studying history. Every Trek series has used time travel to a certain extent, but it was generally as a plot device for individual stories, not as a major plot device for the entire series. Humanity makes its first steps into a vast universe, and before it encounters some of the most basic species to the Trek mythology, everyone is suddenly using time travel. It's tired, it's been done better in other Trek series, and it's a way to avoid having to actually write compelling stories.
Then we have the Vulcans, whose history as we know it appears that it's being rewritten. From TOS and the movies, things like the Vulcan mind-meld are made out to be ages-old practices that the Vulcan people have always procticed. Now we're supposed to believe that these ancient abilities didn't exist during the Enterprise era.
Next, we have the extremely fast evolution from torpedo-based weapon technology to energy weapons. One episode in the very first season they don't have phasors, the next they pretty much invent them on their own. Yeah, right.
Next, we have a major race that has never before been introduce in the Star Trek universe, the Suliban. A race that uses time travel, but that somehow disappears by the time TOS comes around. Perhaps they'll come up with a good explaination of why they aren't a pain in the rear to future Federation ships
I partially retract my previous statement :).
It will work if you're logged in as root in your SSH session (either by logging in as root, or su'ing over to root). I generally don't use my root account for such things, so when I tried it last, it was as a regular user.
I would have expected, however, that if you were logged in at the console as the same user you were logged into via SSH, that there wouldn't be any console access issues. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work in practice -- I get the same error as if I had attempted to start a video while not logged into the console.
If you're not worried about potential security issues, then you should be able to log in as root and initiate the video playback without any hassles. HTH!
Yaztromo.
You don't need to specify a DISPLAY environment variable if you're using SDL. That is only required for X. You should be able to start an X session through SSH -- just make sure that DISPLAY is set to the proper value (probably :0.0, unless you've been fiddling with your XFree86 setup to make it something else), and type "startx".
As for running the MPEG player without X, just install all the SDL libraries from http://www.playstation2-linux.com, and run "plaympeg". You'll have to do this while logged into the PS2 at its console, however (you won't be able to activate this properly via an SSH or Telnet session). I usually pass it the "-s 640x480" parameter to force it to scale the video to fullscreen (the --fullscreen parameter doesn't seem to woky right on my setup), but that should be the only setup you need to do (beyond installing the SDL RPMs, that is).
Hope this helps!
Yaztromo.