All I want out of an ebook device is XHTML support, embedded SVG (for graphics), standard CF and SD card support, and a long battery life. The screen should be at least 320x480, but 640x480 or 800x600 would be better. Color is not necessary, and a transflective display would be preferred. Upon insertion of any card, it should display "index.htm" in the root directory of that card and don't do anything else.
Today Sun is thinking about opening up solaris, tommorow they could file a lawsuit against everybody who read the source code and then worked for another project.
I think it all comes down to licenses. Licenses like the SCL are unacceptable and open you up to lawsuits, so one shouldn't even download SCL'ed code. Licenses like the GPL are as well-tested as any license in this industry, so even when Sun or Microsoft release something under it, it's probably OK (with some precautions like documenting the release). With the CDDL, it all depends on whether it passes legal scrutiny.
You are playing word games, but it amounts to the same thing: you cannot trust businesses, you can only trust individual people. And since the people constituting a business can change overnight, you can't even trust a business based on the people that constitute it.
As a business owner and someone who has served as a corporation Chief Operating Officer and Director, let me state, catagorically, from experience:
Well, even as CEO, you then apparently never grasped the concept that the corporation is a legal person separate from its employees.
Sun isn't a person. They are neither nice nor naughty. They make cold, calculating decisions based on the business environment and based on maximizing profit. That's why they have released OpenOffice and are releasing Solaris under a FOSS license, and why they are not releasing Java under a FOSS license. That's all. Don't believe marketing hype that tries to make you look at any company as a person.
The implication here is that there's something bad about them not wanting to GPL their source.
Yes, there is something "bad" about it. It's not "bad" as in "badly behaved" or "bad dog" or "bad person", it's "bad" as in "bad idea" or "bad legal advice" or "bad business".
Why should they?
Because, presumably, they are open sourcing it in order to achieve something. If they pick a license that doesn't satisfy potential users, then they aren't going to achieve that goal.
Not having read their proposed license, I'm assuming it won't allow anyone to resell the code.
If it contained that restriction, then it wouldn't be an open source license.
And why should they?
Because if they put such a restriction in there, then only a fool would do anything with the code. Furthermore, it is also worthwhile pointing out again and again why only a fool would download, look at, and/or modify source code under non-OSI licenses. For example, you still don't seem to understand that.
That way we get to see it and potentially modify it for our own benefit.
If you don't have the right to redistribute modified code without restrictions, then the "source license" is very one-sided: you don't benefit much, but the company that gave you the source code benefits a lot. Such "source licenses" are worthless or even dangerous (the Java SCL is an example of that).
It looks like the CDDL may be a useful open source license (too bad it's on a product probably hardly anybody will want to use).
I don't see why couldn't go with one of the existing licenses: surely, among BSD, GPL, LGPL, MPL, CPL, and all the other already approved licenses, they could have found something. Based on Sun's history and relationship with open source, I would wait for a careful review: it is quite possible that Sun is trying to slip something in there.
(Of course, the license is only on Solaris, so it doesn't really matter that much anyway. If Sun used this for Java, it would matter more.)
These kinds of sliding block puzzles have been around for a long, long time. He just picked one of the many possible designs for his plastic version using a software program.
The computer versions of these puzzles have been around for a long time and come with many levels. His particular design seems like a fairly regular collection of blocks, and some computer version probably already includes it as a level.
Yes, there are only five pieces of software. But they are under an open source license and you can download them. That's all as it should be.
Yes, you have to go through paperwork in order to participate in the project. So what? Every open source effort has some gatekeepers that decide who can participate and what they can contribute. When it comes to government, you can't have a Linux or Theo just making decisions, you actually have to have paperwork, because we have open government that needs to be transparent, not a monarchy. See the connection? Democracy, openness, record keeping? Records and paperwork are the price we pay for openness. In most cases, that paperwork is not just a good idea, it is required because we, the people, passed laws to require it.
GOCC probably will not succeed in its current form. But people are at least interested and trying and that's a good thing. If you have good ideas and are interested, I'm sure you could find a way to participate.
Instead, of course, you are just using this effort as a soapbox to complain and whine. Ditto for Tom Adelstein, the author of the LJ piece, which is also full of tirades and platitudes, but empty of ideas and solutions.
The open source movements needs contributors, not whiners. If have ideas for how to improve GOCC or build something similar with less bureaucracy, present them. Even better, get involved in the project: talk to your local government, run for office, get something on the ballot, etc. Government really is no different from an open source project: things only change if you contribute. Whining and complaining will just piss people off, and if there is too much of it, you endanger the entire project.
I think there is an even greater opportunity for individuals to interject their personal opinions into things that many people believe as the truth.
Don't believe for a moment that the NYT or FOX are "unbiased" or "credible": they all have their biases. In fact, just failing to present what they consider "biased views" constitutes a bias in itself.
Wikinews can probably be improved technologically, but in the end, it should present to you the full spectrum of views and interpretations of an event. And that is far less biased than anything any of the commercial news outlets give you.
However, part of modern journalism is the credibility of the reporter.
I think people overrate the "credibility" of professional reporters: many of them seem to follow a "code of conduct" and operate in an environment that pretty much guarantees bias and inaccurate reporting; they just dress it up nicely.
I can understand that there's not much need to recognize authorship in something like a science textbook, but for a news site, it is essential.
These days, it is completely unnecessary and highly irresponsible to judge the credibility of news stories based on who wrote them; you can evaluate the facts behind almost all news stories yourself, using official data, on-line eyewitness reports, digital media, etc.
What's the "undistorted" view? Your view? What FOX presents you? What the NYT presents you? When the NYT creates the impression that there is a single "neutral" view of an issue, or (when they are making a feeble attempt to be balanced) present only two moderate, opposing views, that in itself represents a serious distortion of the issue. In fact, every major news organization distorts the news in that way. That's in addition to the way in which major news organizations distort the news in order to "protect" us (like not releasing raw statistical data or not releasing data that they fear might be "misinterpreted").
Thanks, but I prefer to see what different "trolling factions" think about an issue. Wikipedia perhaps could perhaps do something to improve the ability of people to keep track of the different views, but the fact that those different "trolling factions" can all edit is a good thing.
Transparency and shadowing are not 3D features. In fact, there is little in OS X that requires 3D support, and OS X uses only a small part of OpenGL. So, a card with good 2D support, antialiasing, and transparency would be just great for desktop use. (Incidentally, while people keep talking about these features as OS X features, OS X wasn't the first to have them.)
A comparable graphics card costs $10 if you can even find it these days.
So, tell me, where can I buy a $10 card with a Xilinx Spartan III 1500 FPGA hooked up to a DVI-I output? Please let me know because I would really like to have one.
Get the hardware out quickly; if you wait too long, it will be obsolete before you ship.
Create a basic development platform (gcc, loader, etc.) and a basic framework with at least a little bit of useful functionality (2D acceleration, minimal 3D); it can be quite incomplete, but it should make it easy for contributors to add functionality one small piece at a time.
You can charge a little more than a comparable regular graphics card, but not a lot more. If this becomes a premium custom hardware product, it's dead on arrival.
They're clearly not the world's experts on public policy.
Those people have spent more time in Washington than many politicians, trying to lobby for money and support.
they seem to think that scientific funding must be a zero-sum game
I don't know what that is supposed to mean; the term "zero-sum game" doesn't apply here. What they think is the following.
For the foreseeable future, the scientific return from every dollar we spend on unmanned travel is going to be much higher than the scientific return on the same dollar we spend on manned space travel. So, even if the president were to quadruple NASA's budget, spending any of it on manned space travel would still be a waste from a scientific point of view.
Still, NASA can still be tasked with making astronautic joy rides a reality. But the scientists are also pointing out that the president's numbers are unrealistically low. Therefore, either he needs to increase the overall NASA budget or scientifically valuable programs will get cut. You can bet that everybody at NASA is working hard trying to lobby for more money so that the current science programs can be continued.
But how is the president supposed to finance that, given that he doesn't want to raise taxes and that he is already borrowing $500bn per year? Where is all that extra money supposed to come from?
Yes, Windows has caught up in terms of stability and Linux has caught up in the UI and usability department. So, where does that leave us? An expensive operating system with proprietary APIs, limited functionality, expensive application software and a free, standards-compliant operating system with open APIs and thousands of applications out of the box. Which one do you think is better?
April Fool's day semiannual now? No, wait, that doesn't work out right either.
I think someone is conceptualizing Mars wrong. It's a whole PLANET. It costs billions of dollars to send a single probe. We aren't going to be littering it any time soon, nor are we going to land humans on it any time soon.
What we should worry about is not contaminating it with terrestrial microorganisms.
"you're a bunch of self-serving, near-sighted idiots who seem to think that scientific funding *has to be* a zero-sum game
These "idiots", as you call them, are the world's experts on space travel, both manned and unmanned.
Do you realize that in the minds of many people, the bucks for probes is in part justfied by the Buck Rogers of manned space flight?
Yes, and who puts those ideas there? Political advisors who like to take the focus off domestic and terrestrial problems. It's far easier to manipulate public opinion than to govern well.
Do you understand how much more fruitful it would be for planetologists to actually get to study the moon, Mars, etc. *in situ*?
Maybe you should read the study that the NASA "idiots" wrote, because they address this issue.
Windows hatred is simply the modern equivalent of the hatred the Cobol and Fortran camps had of C. The future really hurts when it threatens to make your own skills obsolete.
I think the analogy is apt, but backwards. The Cobol/Fortran and C camps had mutual dislike. Cobol/Fortran represented entrenched, well-paid, proprietary interests. It was the analog of Microsoft today. C represented the slightly chaotic, open, non-proprietary alternative, like Linux today. And today, the dislike between Microsoft developers and OSS is also mutual.
Microsoft hatred is all about protecting the value of guild crafts and nothing about principle.
Yes, and that sums it up: people are tired of paying a premium for the Microsoft guild crafts, in particular since VB/VC++/.NET developers in general just aren't very skilled technically. That is why OSS has taken off. And OSS will beat Microsoft Windows and.NET for the same reason C/C++ effectively beat Cobol/Fortran.
On Java it was Sun who were being the evil proprietary monopolists. Their objective was to reduce every platform to the level of Solaris, leveling down, not up. Suns approach was "If you dare do anything that I can't I'll sue you."
Java could have been the future of computing but there is no way that any company, let alone a declining company like Sun can be trusted with the complete control they demand. The chances of Sun ending up in a SCO like position in five years time are significant.
I fully agree with those points. I think Sun is worse than Microsoft: Microsoft represents a particular approach forcefully, but at least they are honest about it (wrong, and doomed to failure, but honest). Sun, on the other hand, is just misleading people about what they are doing. And I also see the danger of an SCO-like meltdown. However, I think people are wising up to the threat and Java is becoming less and less popular for OSS.
We aren't talking about what great things Sun has done for open source in the past, I was making a comment about Sun's motivations.
Sun management must be asking themselves: where are we going to be five years from now? I think they see their hardware business failing, they don't control OpenOffice anymore, and they realize that few people care about Solaris. In fact, if StarOffice/OpenOffice showed them anything, it showed them that when they release something as open source, they won't be able to keep up with a proprietary version of it or make any money off it (duh!). So, what product is the money going to come from? What does Sun still own that people will want?
Well, basically only Java. And that's the reason they aren't giving up control over the standard or open sourcing their implementation. If they did, Java would immediately be snapped up by an open source consortium involving IBM and a few other companies, who would fork it, beat it into shape, and release a version that was so compellingly better than Sun's that Sun would lose control.
By holding on to Java, they at least have the illusion that they can somehow build a business around it if they only think hard enough about it.
I'm sure this has been discussed to death up until now, but how does open-sourcing an API work?
Up to now, very few APIs have been proprietary. Sun has broken new ground by successfully asserting a high level of control over the Java APIs (not just their implementation).
If there is a fork, doesn't that present huge problems for the development community?
Languages like C, C++, Fortran, Perl, shell, and Python have all thrived in the absence of the level of control that Sun is trying to exercise. The reason is simple market economics: implementations that don't provide the features that users want disappear on their own.
Sun is trying to substitute their own interests for the wisdom and preferences of their end users. They are churning out one API after another, but users have no choice but to build on what Sun ships; even if there were alternative implementations, users would still be forced to accept whatever garbage Sun and the JCP dream up.
At least with C, you have the benefit of compiling. With Java, you are compiling to java bytecode, which is still interpretted, and still prone to problems between the forks.
Modern C programs have numerous shared library dependencies; Java's byte-code based system would, if anything, be more robust.
I guess you kind of experience this problem with shared libraries under *NIX, but at least you have the possibility for static compiling. You are stuck with the JRE for Java, no?
You are only stuck with the JRE for Java because Sun keeps you from having a choice. If Java were an open standard, there would be dozens of different implementations, and those implementations would work out amongst themselves what features were important core features and what features were vendor-specific extensions.
This is exactly the kind of semantic pissing contest that turns people off of open source people. Don't give this thing the wings it so richly doesn't deserve.
Sun is trying to market their products by taking advantage of the good will and trust that open source licenses have and misrepresenting their proprietary products as being associated with open source, and you blame "open source people" for it? You should be blaming Sun marketing and management. Their behavior has been reprehensible.
Open source people have better things to do than to worry about every single proprietary product out there. Get Schwartz and Sun to shut up about open source and cathedrals and bazaars and nobody will waste a second thought on Sun anymore. But as long as Sun keeps misleading people, open source advocates will respond because Sun's behavior is threatening the future of the open source movement.
If there are two sides to this at all, the two sides are proprietary control over software and the freedom to modify software. While Sun has done some good for the OSS community in the past, wtih Java, Sun is firmly on the same side as Microsoft, since Java is under complete proprietary control. That's also no accident, since Java is the only major software product Sun has that is still of any relevance to the market.
Sun likes to cast these issues as "Sun+OSS vs. Microsoft" because it's good marketing, but that is an illusion and a lie. Sun helps OSS in some areas (which is nice), but with Sun Java, they have attempted an assault on open source and open standards. But Sun's assault is failing. The "cathedral" model under which Java is being developed is failing in the same way cathedral models have failed before: it's resulting in a bloated mess.
I didn't say it should be mandatory, merely that businesses should use them when sending messages where authenticity matters. In particular, any message your bank sends to you should be signed. And any financial information they send to you, even by mail, should be encrypted.
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All I want out of an ebook device is XHTML support, embedded SVG (for graphics), standard CF and SD card support, and a long battery life. The screen should be at least 320x480, but 640x480 or 800x600 would be better. Color is not necessary, and a transflective display would be preferred. Upon insertion of any card, it should display "index.htm" in the root directory of that card and don't do anything else.
Today Sun is thinking about opening up solaris, tommorow they could file a lawsuit against everybody who read the source code and then worked for another project.
I think it all comes down to licenses. Licenses like the SCL are unacceptable and open you up to lawsuits, so one shouldn't even download SCL'ed code. Licenses like the GPL are as well-tested as any license in this industry, so even when Sun or Microsoft release something under it, it's probably OK (with some precautions like documenting the release). With the CDDL, it all depends on whether it passes legal scrutiny.
Businesses do not make decisions. People do.
You are playing word games, but it amounts to the same thing: you cannot trust businesses, you can only trust individual people. And since the people constituting a business can change overnight, you can't even trust a business based on the people that constitute it.
As a business owner and someone who has served as a corporation Chief Operating Officer and Director, let me state, catagorically, from experience:
Well, even as CEO, you then apparently never grasped the concept that the corporation is a legal person separate from its employees.
Sun isn't a person. They are neither nice nor naughty. They make cold, calculating decisions based on the business environment and based on maximizing profit. That's why they have released OpenOffice and are releasing Solaris under a FOSS license, and why they are not releasing Java under a FOSS license. That's all. Don't believe marketing hype that tries to make you look at any company as a person.
The implication here is that there's something bad about them not wanting to GPL their source.
Yes, there is something "bad" about it. It's not "bad" as in "badly behaved" or "bad dog" or "bad person", it's "bad" as in "bad idea" or "bad legal advice" or "bad business".
Why should they?
Because, presumably, they are open sourcing it in order to achieve something. If they pick a license that doesn't satisfy potential users, then they aren't going to achieve that goal.
Not having read their proposed license, I'm assuming it won't allow anyone to resell the code.
If it contained that restriction, then it wouldn't be an open source license.
And why should they?
Because if they put such a restriction in there, then only a fool would do anything with the code. Furthermore, it is also worthwhile pointing out again and again why only a fool would download, look at, and/or modify source code under non-OSI licenses. For example, you still don't seem to understand that.
That way we get to see it and potentially modify it for our own benefit.
If you don't have the right to redistribute modified code without restrictions, then the "source license" is very one-sided: you don't benefit much, but the company that gave you the source code benefits a lot. Such "source licenses" are worthless or even dangerous (the Java SCL is an example of that).
It looks like the CDDL may be a useful open source license (too bad it's on a product probably hardly anybody will want to use).
I don't see why couldn't go with one of the existing licenses: surely, among BSD, GPL, LGPL, MPL, CPL, and all the other already approved licenses, they could have found something. Based on Sun's history and relationship with open source, I would wait for a careful review: it is quite possible that Sun is trying to slip something in there.
(Of course, the license is only on Solaris, so it doesn't really matter that much anyway. If Sun used this for Java, it would matter more.)
These kinds of sliding block puzzles have been around for a long, long time. He just picked one of the many possible designs for his plastic version using a software program.
The computer versions of these puzzles have been around for a long time and come with many levels. His particular design seems like a fairly regular collection of blocks, and some computer version probably already includes it as a level.
Yes, there are only five pieces of software. But they are under an open source license and you can download them. That's all as it should be.
Yes, you have to go through paperwork in order to participate in the project. So what? Every open source effort has some gatekeepers that decide who can participate and what they can contribute. When it comes to government, you can't have a Linux or Theo just making decisions, you actually have to have paperwork, because we have open government that needs to be transparent, not a monarchy. See the connection? Democracy, openness, record keeping? Records and paperwork are the price we pay for openness. In most cases, that paperwork is not just a good idea, it is required because we, the people, passed laws to require it.
GOCC probably will not succeed in its current form. But people are at least interested and trying and that's a good thing. If you have good ideas and are interested, I'm sure you could find a way to participate.
Instead, of course, you are just using this effort as a soapbox to complain and whine. Ditto for Tom Adelstein, the author of the LJ piece, which is also full of tirades and platitudes, but empty of ideas and solutions.
The open source movements needs contributors, not whiners. If have ideas for how to improve GOCC or build something similar with less bureaucracy, present them. Even better, get involved in the project: talk to your local government, run for office, get something on the ballot, etc. Government really is no different from an open source project: things only change if you contribute. Whining and complaining will just piss people off, and if there is too much of it, you endanger the entire project.
I think there is an even greater opportunity for individuals to interject their personal opinions into things that many people believe as the truth.
Don't believe for a moment that the NYT or FOX are "unbiased" or "credible": they all have their biases. In fact, just failing to present what they consider "biased views" constitutes a bias in itself.
Wikinews can probably be improved technologically, but in the end, it should present to you the full spectrum of views and interpretations of an event. And that is far less biased than anything any of the commercial news outlets give you.
However, part of modern journalism is the credibility of the reporter.
I think people overrate the "credibility" of professional reporters: many of them seem to follow a "code of conduct" and operate in an environment that pretty much guarantees bias and inaccurate reporting; they just dress it up nicely.
I can understand that there's not much need to recognize authorship in something like a science textbook, but for a news site, it is essential.
These days, it is completely unnecessary and highly irresponsible to judge the credibility of news stories based on who wrote them; you can evaluate the facts behind almost all news stories yourself, using official data, on-line eyewitness reports, digital media, etc.
What's the "undistorted" view? Your view? What FOX presents you? What the NYT presents you? When the NYT creates the impression that there is a single "neutral" view of an issue, or (when they are making a feeble attempt to be balanced) present only two moderate, opposing views, that in itself represents a serious distortion of the issue. In fact, every major news organization distorts the news in that way. That's in addition to the way in which major news organizations distort the news in order to "protect" us (like not releasing raw statistical data or not releasing data that they fear might be "misinterpreted").
Thanks, but I prefer to see what different "trolling factions" think about an issue. Wikipedia perhaps could perhaps do something to improve the ability of people to keep track of the different views, but the fact that those different "trolling factions" can all edit is a good thing.
Transparency and shadowing are not 3D features. In fact, there is little in OS X that requires 3D support, and OS X uses only a small part of OpenGL. So, a card with good 2D support, antialiasing, and transparency would be just great for desktop use. (Incidentally, while people keep talking about these features as OS X features, OS X wasn't the first to have them.)
A comparable graphics card costs $10 if you can even find it these days.
So, tell me, where can I buy a $10 card with a Xilinx Spartan III 1500 FPGA hooked up to a DVI-I output? Please let me know because I would really like to have one.
They're clearly not the world's experts on public policy.
Those people have spent more time in Washington than many politicians, trying to lobby for money and support.
they seem to think that scientific funding must be a zero-sum game
I don't know what that is supposed to mean; the term "zero-sum game" doesn't apply here. What they think is the following.
For the foreseeable future, the scientific return from every dollar we spend on unmanned travel is going to be much higher than the scientific return on the same dollar we spend on manned space travel. So, even if the president were to quadruple NASA's budget, spending any of it on manned space travel would still be a waste from a scientific point of view.
Still, NASA can still be tasked with making astronautic joy rides a reality. But the scientists are also pointing out that the president's numbers are unrealistically low. Therefore, either he needs to increase the overall NASA budget or scientifically valuable programs will get cut. You can bet that everybody at NASA is working hard trying to lobby for more money so that the current science programs can be continued.
But how is the president supposed to finance that, given that he doesn't want to raise taxes and that he is already borrowing $500bn per year? Where is all that extra money supposed to come from?
Yes, Windows has caught up in terms of stability and Linux has caught up in the UI and usability department. So, where does that leave us? An expensive operating system with proprietary APIs, limited functionality, expensive application software and a free, standards-compliant operating system with open APIs and thousands of applications out of the box. Which one do you think is better?
April Fool's day semiannual now? No, wait, that doesn't work out right either.
I think someone is conceptualizing Mars wrong. It's a whole PLANET. It costs billions of dollars to send a single probe. We aren't going to be littering it any time soon, nor are we going to land humans on it any time soon.
What we should worry about is not contaminating it with terrestrial microorganisms.
"you're a bunch of self-serving, near-sighted idiots who seem to think that scientific funding *has to be* a zero-sum game
These "idiots", as you call them, are the world's experts on space travel, both manned and unmanned.
Do you realize that in the minds of many people, the bucks for probes is in part justfied by the Buck Rogers of manned space flight?
Yes, and who puts those ideas there? Political advisors who like to take the focus off domestic and terrestrial problems. It's far easier to manipulate public opinion than to govern well.
Do you understand how much more fruitful it would be for planetologists to actually get to study the moon, Mars, etc. *in situ*?
Maybe you should read the study that the NASA "idiots" wrote, because they address this issue.
Windows hatred is simply the modern equivalent of the hatred the Cobol and Fortran camps had of C. The future really hurts when it threatens to make your own skills obsolete.
.NET for the same reason C/C++ effectively beat Cobol/Fortran.
I think the analogy is apt, but backwards. The Cobol/Fortran and C camps had mutual dislike. Cobol/Fortran represented entrenched, well-paid, proprietary interests. It was the analog of Microsoft today. C represented the slightly chaotic, open, non-proprietary alternative, like Linux today. And today, the dislike between Microsoft developers and OSS is also mutual.
Microsoft hatred is all about protecting the value of guild crafts and nothing about principle.
Yes, and that sums it up: people are tired of paying a premium for the Microsoft guild crafts, in particular since VB/VC++/.NET developers in general just aren't very skilled technically. That is why OSS has taken off. And OSS will beat Microsoft Windows and
On Java it was Sun who were being the evil proprietary monopolists. Their objective was to reduce every platform to the level of Solaris, leveling down, not up. Suns approach was "If you dare do anything that I can't I'll sue you."
Java could have been the future of computing but there is no way that any company, let alone a declining company like Sun can be trusted with the complete control they demand. The chances of Sun ending up in a SCO like position in five years time are significant.
I fully agree with those points. I think Sun is worse than Microsoft: Microsoft represents a particular approach forcefully, but at least they are honest about it (wrong, and doomed to failure, but honest). Sun, on the other hand, is just misleading people about what they are doing. And I also see the danger of an SCO-like meltdown. However, I think people are wising up to the threat and Java is becoming less and less popular for OSS.
We aren't talking about what great things Sun has done for open source in the past, I was making a comment about Sun's motivations.
Sun management must be asking themselves: where are we going to be five years from now? I think they see their hardware business failing, they don't control OpenOffice anymore, and they realize that few people care about Solaris. In fact, if StarOffice/OpenOffice showed them anything, it showed them that when they release something as open source, they won't be able to keep up with a proprietary version of it or make any money off it (duh!). So, what product is the money going to come from? What does Sun still own that people will want?
Well, basically only Java. And that's the reason they aren't giving up control over the standard or open sourcing their implementation. If they did, Java would immediately be snapped up by an open source consortium involving IBM and a few other companies, who would fork it, beat it into shape, and release a version that was so compellingly better than Sun's that Sun would lose control.
By holding on to Java, they at least have the illusion that they can somehow build a business around it if they only think hard enough about it.
I'm sure this has been discussed to death up until now, but how does open-sourcing an API work?
Up to now, very few APIs have been proprietary. Sun has broken new ground by successfully asserting a high level of control over the Java APIs (not just their implementation).
If there is a fork, doesn't that present huge problems for the development community?
Languages like C, C++, Fortran, Perl, shell, and Python have all thrived in the absence of the level of control that Sun is trying to exercise. The reason is simple market economics: implementations that don't provide the features that users want disappear on their own.
Sun is trying to substitute their own interests for the wisdom and preferences of their end users. They are churning out one API after another, but users have no choice but to build on what Sun ships; even if there were alternative implementations, users would still be forced to accept whatever garbage Sun and the JCP dream up.
At least with C, you have the benefit of compiling. With Java, you are compiling to java bytecode, which is still interpretted, and still prone to problems between the forks.
Modern C programs have numerous shared library dependencies; Java's byte-code based system would, if anything, be more robust.
I guess you kind of experience this problem with shared libraries under *NIX, but at least you have the possibility for static compiling. You are stuck with the JRE for Java, no?
You are only stuck with the JRE for Java because Sun keeps you from having a choice. If Java were an open standard, there would be dozens of different implementations, and those implementations would work out amongst themselves what features were important core features and what features were vendor-specific extensions.
This is exactly the kind of semantic pissing contest that turns people off of open source people. Don't give this thing the wings it so richly doesn't deserve.
Sun is trying to market their products by taking advantage of the good will and trust that open source licenses have and misrepresenting their proprietary products as being associated with open source, and you blame "open source people" for it? You should be blaming Sun marketing and management. Their behavior has been reprehensible.
Open source people have better things to do than to worry about every single proprietary product out there. Get Schwartz and Sun to shut up about open source and cathedrals and bazaars and nobody will waste a second thought on Sun anymore. But as long as Sun keeps misleading people, open source advocates will respond because Sun's behavior is threatening the future of the open source movement.
If there are two sides to this at all, the two sides are proprietary control over software and the freedom to modify software. While Sun has done some good for the OSS community in the past, wtih Java, Sun is firmly on the same side as Microsoft, since Java is under complete proprietary control. That's also no accident, since Java is the only major software product Sun has that is still of any relevance to the market.
Sun likes to cast these issues as "Sun+OSS vs. Microsoft" because it's good marketing, but that is an illusion and a lie. Sun helps OSS in some areas (which is nice), but with Sun Java, they have attempted an assault on open source and open standards. But Sun's assault is failing. The "cathedral" model under which Java is being developed is failing in the same way cathedral models have failed before: it's resulting in a bloated mess.
At what level is a chimera 'too' human?
/. perhaps?
I dunno--when it starts posting to
I didn't say it should be mandatory, merely that businesses should use them when sending messages where authenticity matters. In particular, any message your bank sends to you should be signed. And any financial information they send to you, even by mail, should be encrypted.