There have been previous abuses of the patent system and there still are some today. What many people consider one of the biggest abusers of the patent system is IBM. Since the patent office wasn't skilled enough to stop bad patents from going through is the problem.
If we can get rid of bad patents things would be much better. Every one also needs to be responsible about their patent filings. It only takes a few bad seeds to start a problem, then others tend to follow the same bad practices in order to protect themselves.
You make a good point but one that I can also apply to my argument. Not every idea that gets patented will be successful. That's why it's important to protect the ones that are successful. That's why R&D is so expensive. You need to find a way to pay for the ideas that never go anywhere because if you don't try new things that will be fruitful. It's like any job that involves sales. You have to account for the time spent on clients you don't get in the clients you do get.
Most great things are built on other great things. Bill Joys quote about publishing software research described it as standing on the shoulders of giants. Without patents, you would have to keep your ideas a secret to protect them, then other won't benefit from them. If others can build on your ideas shouldn't you be entitled to a peice of it if you wanted it?
"The fact that Sun is abandoning it for IPfilter indicates that don't think SunScreen is very good either."
I've only used SunScreen to play with and I don't have any real opinions. I'm still of the mindset that packets should be filtered before they get to the host. Also just because it didn't come with ipfilter doesn't mean you couldn't put it on there afterwards. Remember, you always had the choice, everything doesn't have to come bundled. What's good is that now Sun is making improvements to IP Filter in their Solaris IP Filter.
"How well has that worked for them?"
You'd have to ask someone at sun. The type of development I do doesn't really make that an issue for me. Though I've seen reports of where it has paid off for the customers. Especially in regards to compatability between workstations and their refridgerator sized servers. One account I read said that he took the drives out of his workstation and put them in an e15k i believe and everything worked perfectly. A lot of the big apps that run on solaris cost many thousands of dollars. Solaris then becomes a good investment for customers. You start out on solaris x, you buy some massive app for 25k, when solaris x+1 comes out and has much better performance you can upgrade the os and still have the app you spent 25k for running. Just like by default the root shell is the bourne shell. scripts written a long time ago will still work in an upgrade.
It's not for people that need to be on the cutting edge. When you look at most corporate development though, they care about stability. They spend millions of dollars building their application. They want a reliable platform to run their apps. The platform doesn't make them money, it's just a place to put what does. It should get better without out requiring them to to change their code.
"How about improving the pager (more)?
I don't care, I like less better.
"How about making sure the backspace key works?"
When does it not? I have some sparc boxes and one that runs solaris x86. I haven't had a problem with backspace. It might be the terminal software you're using. Or maybe it's the bourne shell. I like bash. It's been part of the supplemental software cd for a while, as have other shells. Since solaris 9 i beleive it's been installed though it may not be the default.
"So you're saying that patents are useless then? Because they'd 'do what they do' anyway."
Not really... I'm saying patents are good because it gives those people the time to do what they want to do without having to work at starbucks.
It's easy to take advantage of people like that that are happy to do what they love. The patent system should help protect them. Somewhere along the way, things went wrong. That doesn't mean patents are bad, the patent system needs major work.
"Why didn't Sun fix their tar utility to properly strip '/'? "
A lot of the times, sun doesn't fix stuff so that they can maintain compatability between different versions which is one of their strong selling points. If you don't need that kind of compatability you can use the GNU version.
"Why didn't Sun fix their tar utility to add on the fly compression (-j -z anyone?)?"
I wouldn't call that a "fix" that's a feature that they chose not to implement. Why put it in when people are happy to pipe the compression tools in themselves. It gives them more flexibility to choose the versions they want and it makes it easier for tar by not having to worry about those things. Each utility serves it's purpose and you can use them together. That doesn't mean they should be integrated. So I wouldn't call it broken.
"Why didn't Sun ever develop a useful packet filtering application instead of relying on the ipfilter whose releases can often be worse than beta quality?"
What about SunScreen? In Solaris 10, they're going to have Solaris IP Filter which they claim to be enterprise class. From what I've read there is some shared code between SunScreen and ipfilter. Not sure which way it goes. I read the ipfilter guy licensed code from sun but couldn't confirm it. Also, Sun's main deployment areas are corporate data centers, telco's and isp's. These people use seperate firewalls to secure all their servers. Looks like sun has been coming around to smaller deployment users since at least Solaris 9.
"Why are there so many different bin directories that the environment never pointed to (e.g./usr/ucb/bin)?"
Again, this is for compatability reasons./usr/bin is the Sun versions,/usr/bin is the berkley tools,/usr/local/bin is usually where the gnu tools go. One of the best things about sun is their commitment to binary compatability. You can develop on your workstation and deploy on a e25k without making any changes. You can also deploy most applications written for prior versions on new os versions. To facilitate that and still allow people to use other tools, they set up different directories. They're not pointed to because you should only point to them if you need to.
"Sed, Awk, and Vi all had room for improvement. Why did they do nothing?"
Beats me. But you can download the gnu versions of them if you need them. Those three things have never been a bother to me in any work I've done on sun servers.
"But SOMEBODY has to promote it to pay the rent. Usually, the work of practically-implementing a software idea and then doing all the marketing, sales, fulfillment, and customer-support is more effort and more important than coming up with the idea. So why should YOU be allowed to leech off those hard-working people?"
Those people could just be the people that license my idea. It's not leaching. It's mutually beneficial. They're good at marketing promoting and selling or maybe implementing my idea with theirs. They make money, I make money, we're all happy. Let's say I'm a chemist. After long hours of toiling in the lab, I develop a process to make synthetic pulp that can be used for paper. The means to develop a wide scale production facility to make it cheap enough to put it into use is beyond me. As well as my interest is in working in my lab, not managing the distribution of that. Some takes my idea and runs with it and pays me for using my invention. That seems fair doesn't it? This is probably the closest thing I can come to to software patents. This isn't some tangible product like a pot that drains your spaghetti. It's a formula to mix some chemicals under certain conditions.
What I don't get is how most software developers don't put a value to their ideas.
"Alternatively, if your patent was a very profitable one, it allows you to relax for 21 years and count money without needing to do any more innovation at all."
The people I've met that have come up with really great ideas aren't the types that sit around and do nothing. They're driven to do what they do.
try here on the first page the majority are about the risks of patents not actual patent litigation.
"Remember, patents exist to promote innovation -- to allow inventors to spend their time working on inventions that wouldn't be possible if you couldn't prevent others from copying it. What kind of software innovation is only possible thanks to software patents?"
Easy, I come up with some great idea based in software. My patent allows me the opportunity to make money off of that idea. I can focus on my next idea since I don't have to worry about promoting my last idea to pay the rent. My patent allows me to inovate.
As to the first point you made, I agree, there needs to be serious reform in the patent system, I just don't think the whole concept is flawed.
The more *nix Software the better
on
Linux Apps On Solaris
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· Score: 5, Interesting
When linux first came out they had a Solaris emulation to be able to run apps made for Solaris. These days that are a lot more apps written for linux than there were back when linux first came out (not sure on the ration of software for linux vs solaris just linux then and now).
Open Source Software isn't just Linux and the GNU userland software. It covers a wide range of different software including software that runs on Linux. In the whole sea of OSS, Linux is just a one small part. This is good for OSS projects because they now have the potential for being run on a wider range of platforms without porting issues.
Solaris has always been a good operating system. You can tell the kernel devs know this as well because searching the mailing list you'll see that solaris is referenced more than any other commercial unix. There are comparisons of how the current kernel compares to the solaris kernel as well as trying to figure out how solaris does things.
Solaris 10 is going to have a lot of improvements to it as well. There are a lot of sun hardware out there and still a lot of sun hardware being sold so it helps OSS projects reach further with less work.
For the people that see open source software as only being about Linux, I don't think they'll respond as favorably.
I think it's always good to look at the other side. Yes it makes it stiffles the market for open source software but it gives the person that came up with the idea a fair shot of making money out of it.
The problem isn't software patents. The problem is that some software patents are just rediculous and they should be given to someone that at least tries to implement the idea.
Just imagine, you spend years coming up with something that ou think is great. Some big company sees it and copies it. They have the money to promote it and they corner the market. You've wasted a couple of years without any return.
Most of the patent litigation that gets reported on slashdot is usually the other way around, heck most of it is just the potential of a patent to be used in a bad way, but there are cases where the little guy that poured his heart and soul into something was able to prevent a bigger company from ripping him off.
Granted, if you're just someone who doesn't innovate, just copies other ideas, then you don't want software patents.
Sometimes I think Sun could announce they found an affordable and easily accessible cure for cancer and the slashdot crowd would harp on them for contributing to the overpopulation problem.
They have 5-6 years to work on this whole idea. Every once in a while, people have to go into completely different directions. The engineers at sun are not idiots. Do the people on here actually believe that they're not going to deal with these types of problems that are mentioned here?
One of the nice things is hot desking. In a demo, I've seen someone pull a smart card out of one sun ray, stick it in another and his desktop was just how he left it. The sun ray clients also don't need much configuration, unlike other solutions that need windows cd to be installed and configured. There some claims in the real world of one administrator to around 1,000 users.
"Novell, Sun, nor anybody else can kill Mono. It's open source."
I think you need to look around the open source landscape a little closer these days. How many big open source projects can you think of that aren't funded in some way? That don't have full time, salaried programmers?
The 'in my spare time' type of open source projects don't really approach that scale any more. The free open source developers generally just provide patches and bug fixes while the hard core programming is done by salaried employees.
So if sun buys novelle, people on here are saying that Suse can be forked and continue free of Sun. These same people also say that Sun doesn't have to worry about Java being forked if they open source it.
Sun has also anounced their Soft Ray thin client solutions as well. This allows users to turn their laptop or desktop into a thinray client without buying a Sun Ray NC.
If you've looked into Sun's Sun Ray Technology it's pretty neat. It offers a lot of features that similar windows technology does not.
It's not only about owning the Linux that IBM is using. When Novell bought SuSE, with the help of IBM, Sun's JDS didn't seem to get the SuSE support that they used to. Novell is in IBM's pocket. Sun is working on doing some neat things with JDS and is doing a good job of selling it to corporate clients. IBM isn't too happy about that and I'm sure that 50 million dollars they gave to Novell will help them keep their lap dogs in line.
There was a bit of sarcasm in what I was saying. IBM is a big part of the Java Community Process, as well as other big Java vendors. IBM does have a say in what goes on with Java.
IBM also pays Sun quite a bit in relation to Java. Their servlet engine is based on Sun's reference implementation (they paid for the code for that), so is Tomcat. Other peices of ibm java code are based on Sun's implementations for which IBM has paid sun for the code or licensing.
I think Sun buying Novell, and having Suse would be a better deal that if IBM buys Novell. While IBM does a lot in regards to the linux kernel, I wouldn't trust them owning one of the major linux distros. Plus it goes against the whole reason IBM helped Novell buy linux. They wanted to make sure RedHat wasn't the Microsoft of Linux. Owning Suse would put IBM in a weird situation.
It's so hard to take PJ seriously with everything she says.
Linux zealots have gone from complaining about FUD to spreading it themselves in all directions, including the open source community.
Sun has bought enough Unix licensing that they can indemnify their users against many claims. They do so to people that buy RedHat or Suse from them. If Sun buys Novell, they can indemnify all Suse users. This would put a definate damper on PJ's plans to have linux users pay her $150,000 for linux indemnification.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn I've been violating this patent for years.
If we can get rid of bad patents things would be much better. Every one also needs to be responsible about their patent filings. It only takes a few bad seeds to start a problem, then others tend to follow the same bad practices in order to protect themselves.
Most great things are built on other great things. Bill Joys quote about publishing software research described it as standing on the shoulders of giants. Without patents, you would have to keep your ideas a secret to protect them, then other won't benefit from them. If others can build on your ideas shouldn't you be entitled to a peice of it if you wanted it?
I've only used SunScreen to play with and I don't have any real opinions. I'm still of the mindset that packets should be filtered before they get to the host. Also just because it didn't come with ipfilter doesn't mean you couldn't put it on there afterwards. Remember, you always had the choice, everything doesn't have to come bundled. What's good is that now Sun is making improvements to IP Filter in their Solaris IP Filter.
"How well has that worked for them?"
You'd have to ask someone at sun. The type of development I do doesn't really make that an issue for me. Though I've seen reports of where it has paid off for the customers. Especially in regards to compatability between workstations and their refridgerator sized servers. One account I read said that he took the drives out of his workstation and put them in an e15k i believe and everything worked perfectly. A lot of the big apps that run on solaris cost many thousands of dollars. Solaris then becomes a good investment for customers. You start out on solaris x, you buy some massive app for 25k, when solaris x+1 comes out and has much better performance you can upgrade the os and still have the app you spent 25k for running. Just like by default the root shell is the bourne shell. scripts written a long time ago will still work in an upgrade.
It's not for people that need to be on the cutting edge. When you look at most corporate development though, they care about stability. They spend millions of dollars building their application. They want a reliable platform to run their apps. The platform doesn't make them money, it's just a place to put what does. It should get better without out requiring them to to change their code.
"How about improving the pager (more)?
I don't care, I like less better. "How about making sure the backspace key works?"
When does it not? I have some sparc boxes and one that runs solaris x86. I haven't had a problem with backspace. It might be the terminal software you're using. Or maybe it's the bourne shell. I like bash. It's been part of the supplemental software cd for a while, as have other shells. Since solaris 9 i beleive it's been installed though it may not be the default.
Not really... I'm saying patents are good because it gives those people the time to do what they want to do without having to work at starbucks.
It's easy to take advantage of people like that that are happy to do what they love. The patent system should help protect them. Somewhere along the way, things went wrong. That doesn't mean patents are bad, the patent system needs major work.
A lot of the times, sun doesn't fix stuff so that they can maintain compatability between different versions which is one of their strong selling points. If you don't need that kind of compatability you can use the GNU version.
"Why didn't Sun fix their tar utility to add on the fly compression (-j -z anyone?)?"
I wouldn't call that a "fix" that's a feature that they chose not to implement. Why put it in when people are happy to pipe the compression tools in themselves. It gives them more flexibility to choose the versions they want and it makes it easier for tar by not having to worry about those things. Each utility serves it's purpose and you can use them together. That doesn't mean they should be integrated. So I wouldn't call it broken.
"Why didn't Sun ever develop a useful packet filtering application instead of relying on the ipfilter whose releases can often be worse than beta quality?"
What about SunScreen? In Solaris 10, they're going to have Solaris IP Filter which they claim to be enterprise class. From what I've read there is some shared code between SunScreen and ipfilter. Not sure which way it goes. I read the ipfilter guy licensed code from sun but couldn't confirm it. Also, Sun's main deployment areas are corporate data centers, telco's and isp's. These people use seperate firewalls to secure all their servers. Looks like sun has been coming around to smaller deployment users since at least Solaris 9.
"Why are there so many different bin directories that the environment never pointed to (e.g. /usr/ucb/bin)?"
Again, this is for compatability reasons. /usr/bin is the Sun versions, /usr/bin is the berkley tools, /usr/local/bin is usually where the gnu tools go. One of the best things about sun is their commitment to binary compatability. You can develop on your workstation and deploy on a e25k without making any changes. You can also deploy most applications written for prior versions on new os versions. To facilitate that and still allow people to use other tools, they set up different directories. They're not pointed to because you should only point to them if you need to.
"Sed, Awk, and Vi all had room for improvement. Why did they do nothing?"
Beats me. But you can download the gnu versions of them if you need them. Those three things have never been a bother to me in any work I've done on sun servers.
Those people could just be the people that license my idea. It's not leaching. It's mutually beneficial. They're good at marketing promoting and selling or maybe implementing my idea with theirs. They make money, I make money, we're all happy. Let's say I'm a chemist. After long hours of toiling in the lab, I develop a process to make synthetic pulp that can be used for paper. The means to develop a wide scale production facility to make it cheap enough to put it into use is beyond me. As well as my interest is in working in my lab, not managing the distribution of that. Some takes my idea and runs with it and pays me for using my invention. That seems fair doesn't it? This is probably the closest thing I can come to to software patents. This isn't some tangible product like a pot that drains your spaghetti. It's a formula to mix some chemicals under certain conditions.
What I don't get is how most software developers don't put a value to their ideas.
"Alternatively, if your patent was a very profitable one, it allows you to relax for 21 years and count money without needing to do any more innovation at all."
The people I've met that have come up with really great ideas aren't the types that sit around and do nothing. They're driven to do what they do.
Actually, solaris seems to be cheaper than the Enterprise branded linux distributions. In some cases WAY cheaper.
try here on the first page the majority are about the risks of patents not actual patent litigation.
"Remember, patents exist to promote innovation -- to allow inventors to spend their time working on inventions that wouldn't be possible if you couldn't prevent others from copying it. What kind of software innovation is only possible thanks to software patents?"
Easy, I come up with some great idea based in software. My patent allows me the opportunity to make money off of that idea. I can focus on my next idea since I don't have to worry about promoting my last idea to pay the rent. My patent allows me to inovate.
As to the first point you made, I agree, there needs to be serious reform in the patent system, I just don't think the whole concept is flawed.
Open Source Software isn't just Linux and the GNU userland software. It covers a wide range of different software including software that runs on Linux. In the whole sea of OSS, Linux is just a one small part. This is good for OSS projects because they now have the potential for being run on a wider range of platforms without porting issues.
Solaris has always been a good operating system. You can tell the kernel devs know this as well because searching the mailing list you'll see that solaris is referenced more than any other commercial unix. There are comparisons of how the current kernel compares to the solaris kernel as well as trying to figure out how solaris does things.
Solaris 10 is going to have a lot of improvements to it as well. There are a lot of sun hardware out there and still a lot of sun hardware being sold so it helps OSS projects reach further with less work.
For the people that see open source software as only being about Linux, I don't think they'll respond as favorably.
The problem isn't software patents. The problem is that some software patents are just rediculous and they should be given to someone that at least tries to implement the idea.
Just imagine, you spend years coming up with something that ou think is great. Some big company sees it and copies it. They have the money to promote it and they corner the market. You've wasted a couple of years without any return.
Most of the patent litigation that gets reported on slashdot is usually the other way around, heck most of it is just the potential of a patent to be used in a bad way, but there are cases where the little guy that poured his heart and soul into something was able to prevent a bigger company from ripping him off.
Granted, if you're just someone who doesn't innovate, just copies other ideas, then you don't want software patents.
Now Sun won't have to buy them, they can just fork them :)
They have 5-6 years to work on this whole idea. Every once in a while, people have to go into completely different directions. The engineers at sun are not idiots. Do the people on here actually believe that they're not going to deal with these types of problems that are mentioned here?
One of the nice things is hot desking. In a demo, I've seen someone pull a smart card out of one sun ray, stick it in another and his desktop was just how he left it. The sun ray clients also don't need much configuration, unlike other solutions that need windows cd to be installed and configured. There some claims in the real world of one administrator to around 1,000 users.
I think you need to look around the open source landscape a little closer these days. How many big open source projects can you think of that aren't funded in some way? That don't have full time, salaried programmers?
The 'in my spare time' type of open source projects don't really approach that scale any more. The free open source developers generally just provide patches and bug fixes while the hard core programming is done by salaried employees.
So if sun buys novelle, people on here are saying that Suse can be forked and continue free of Sun. These same people also say that Sun doesn't have to worry about Java being forked if they open source it.
If you've looked into Sun's Sun Ray Technology it's pretty neat. It offers a lot of features that similar windows technology does not.
It's not only about owning the Linux that IBM is using. When Novell bought SuSE, with the help of IBM, Sun's JDS didn't seem to get the SuSE support that they used to. Novell is in IBM's pocket. Sun is working on doing some neat things with JDS and is doing a good job of selling it to corporate clients. IBM isn't too happy about that and I'm sure that 50 million dollars they gave to Novell will help them keep their lap dogs in line.
Also don't forget, SuSE wasn't doing too well until Novell (and IBM) bailed them out.
I didn't realize companies were not users.
IBM also pays Sun quite a bit in relation to Java. Their servlet engine is based on Sun's reference implementation (they paid for the code for that), so is Tomcat. Other peices of ibm java code are based on Sun's implementations for which IBM has paid sun for the code or licensing.
I think Sun buying Novell, and having Suse would be a better deal that if IBM buys Novell. While IBM does a lot in regards to the linux kernel, I wouldn't trust them owning one of the major linux distros. Plus it goes against the whole reason IBM helped Novell buy linux. They wanted to make sure RedHat wasn't the Microsoft of Linux. Owning Suse would put IBM in a weird situation.
Linux zealots have gone from complaining about FUD to spreading it themselves in all directions, including the open source community.
Sun has bought enough Unix licensing that they can indemnify their users against many claims. They do so to people that buy RedHat or Suse from them. If Sun buys Novell, they can indemnify all Suse users. This would put a definate damper on PJ's plans to have linux users pay her $150,000 for linux indemnification.
I can see why she wouldn't like the idea.
Yeah, just like IBM isn't dependant on Sun for Java... oh wait.
Yep, their so good, even the failure was replicated!
Damn I misread it. I got my hopes up thinking there was a futurama movie coming out
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 01:47:28 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.49 (Unix) mod_python/3.1.3 Python/2.3.3 Last-Modified: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 04:52:20 GMT
Earlier when I checked it said redhat.