IF YAFFS was a commercial product and if there was a way for the company to make money on NOR, they would have ported it to NOR. You simply cannot state that a commercial vendor would have never ported it to NOR under any circumstance.
And he didn't state that. What he stated was that, in a closed source model, a third party could not have taken his code and modified it. Do you have a problem with that?
Simply because something can be done in the F/OSS world does not imply that it cannot be done anywhere else.
You're mincing words and avoiding the issue. Look at Microsoft and Longhorn: Bill Gates is trying to decide from the top down how the entire OS is going to look and he is screwing up badly. What they would need is dozens of competing projects, where the best one survives.
Unfortunately, there is a *lot* of software in the F/OSS world that is exactly like scratching an itch...
Utter nonsense. Just about all software packages that you might think of as "duplicating functionality" differ greatly: Gnome and KDE, Konqueror and Mozilla, AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer, etc. They are written in different languages, have different GUIs, use different libraries, etc. Those projects wouldn't survive side-by-side if they didn't serve someone's needs. And it is just this kind of diversity in the OSS community that makes it robust.
Unlike Gates, who has a good chance of getting it wrong, the OSS community has all its bases covered, and users pick what they need, want, and like. The price one pays for that is that users don't have simple answers: they actually have to make a deliberate choice among different offerings, while in the Microsoft world, one big, central organization makes the choice for them.
Neither M$ nor "open source" are particularly innovative.
Most open source software, like most proprietary software, is not innovative. But most innovative software comes from university researchers and it is first released in open source form. That's no accident--the scientific method strongly encourages it.
It is these open source releases of new ideas that commercial companies, including Microsoft, have built on, and learned from, in the past.
Open source has proven to be an essential part of innovation in the software business.
OSS is not "anti-corporate", as the article suggests. OSS is about the ability to create software and enhance it. OSS is ultimately about creating and maintaining free markets and competition. OSS comes in conflict with corporations only when those corporations try to interfere with the operations of the free market or when those corporations try to stifle competition, for example through the establishment of proprietary de-facto standards.
So, there is nothing strange about an alliance between the OSS community and IBM: IBM is demonstrating that corporations can prosper by embracing OSS and by offering services related to OSS.
From the various postings, a picture is emerging that Connolly hired a developer to add some functionality to Mambo. After finishing his job for Connolly, that same developer also implemented the same functionality for Mambo again.
If that's what happened, the developer behaved rather unprofessionally: if someone pays you good money to implement his idea, you don't re-implement it open source right away, whether you can legally do so or not, and whether you judge the idea to be "trivial" or not. Furthermore, Connolly may be right that his idea was under trade secret protection.
Where Connolly is wrong is trying to hold the Mambo project and its users responsible. It seems likely that the trade secret violation is only a matter between Connolly and the developer, in particular since Connolly also put the modified source code up on his own web site, and that Connolly has lost all trade secret protection (the idea may not have enjoyed trade secret protection anyway because it would have been obvious once he used it on his site). And once Connolly distributed the modified code, he accepted the terms of the GPL.
What should people do? Whether the Mambo project chooses to force the issue over the GPL is one decision. But it seems to me that the Mambo developer in question should return his payment to Connolly, whether he is legally obligated or not. The Mambo project should probably also just separate themselves from the developer, or at the very least make it crystal clear that he acted with poor judgement.
More generally, this is just another reminder that open source projects need to get their act together on doing the paperwork on accepting code contributions. And a specific policy (and possibly sample contracts) for core team members doing custom programming involving the project couldn't hurt either.
In the end, it seems to me that all three parties involved, Connolly, the Mambo project, and the developer, screwed up in various ways.
It's an either-or choice only with C: buffer overflow checks are expensive in C because of the kinds of constructs the C language provides. In other programming languages, the overhead of buffer overflow checks is negligible for real-world software.
Java is a bad example of a safe language, because, while it is safe, it also has a lot of other baggage that you really don't need, and because Java keeps you from doing unsafe things even when you ask nicely.
A safe systems programming language does not need to be noticeably different from C in terms of performance or programming style. Furthermore, a safe systems programming language shouldn't prevent you from doing unsafe things, it should just force you to make it explicit when you are doing unsafe things.
There are currently no safe systems programming languages that would appeal to a hardcore C user (D, Cyclone, and similar efforts are trying to do too much). But in the past, there have been some pretty straightforward Pascal and Modula dialects that combined being fairly simple with being efficient and suitable for systems programming. So, it is possible, someone just needs to do it in the C family of languages.
The flaw is that it is hard to get even a much less intrusive change, like SPF, working and adopted. Furthermore, what you propose is both less functional and more effort to implement.
In any case, for some external support and sales functions, many companies have stopped using E-mail. But after the initial contact, they do usually follow up using mail. And even that small move away from E-mail probably costs companies dearly already.
What you call a "pile of FUD" is an opinion. People have them, and they talk about them. Sorry if you don't understand the difference between, say, an opinion and some other kind of statement.
As for the term "FUD", give me a break. The term "FUD" refers to a sales technique by which big, established companies try to cast doubt on the viability of a new competitor. I couldn't "FUD" if I wanted to because I'm not a company and I don't have a product to push. Sun sales force has learned well from IBM and Microsoft, however, and Sun employees are masters of FUD: they are trying to cast fear, uncertainty, and doubt on everything that competes with their proprietary offerings: open source projects, on open source desktops, on IBM's Java efforts, on C#, on Linux, on IBM's Power processor, etc. Schwartz's uncalled-for rant against IBM and Power is just another example of Sun's FUDding.
You do realize that Niagara is for the LOW END don't you? These are not going to be expensive machines, in fact, they are more like alternatives for racks of commodity (x86) hardware.
We used to buy Suns, but Sun hasn't been able to produce a machine with a price/performance ratio that would interest us in years. Furthermore, the fact that they are not x86 compatible and that they will (apparently) be using Solaris as their OS are two more big strikes against them because what "LOW END" customer is going to have the expertise to manage those machines or the software to run on them?
WTF!!! Are you saying that you can post whatever unsupported bullshit you like but it's other peoples responsibility to point that out?
First of all, you are missing the point. We are discussing design, not quantifiable parameters. It is Sun marketing, not me, that keeps harping on how wonderful all the new functionality is they put into the Solaris kernel. That's the wrong direction in kernel design. (And, incidentally, Sun is spending millions of dollars to publish that sort of "unsubstantiated bullshit" in the form of marketing materials.)
Second, yes, if you want to change the discussion into one about quantifiable criteria (rather than design attitudes), the burden is on you to define the criteria you want to discuss first.
If that's what he meant, maybe he should have said that instead.
The meaning of his statement seemed clear enough to me. But, then, mathematics professors assume a certain minimal degree of intelligence on the part of their audience. As you demonstrate, that requirement isn't necessarily satisfied by everyone in their audience.
Why, because an unknown mathematician and an anonymous coward say so?
He was restating an idea expressed by someone else. It is up to you to make up your mind whether you agree with that idea.
Yes, difficult as that may be to believe, even you yourself have the potential for independent thought; try exercising it for a change.
All this is telling me is that the cost of wind is HEAVILY subsidized right now, which is complete stupidity.
The use of fossil fuels is heavily subsidized (use of public lands, keeping shipping lanes open, military presence in oil producing nations, security for refineries, environmental costs, medical costs, etc.).
Fossil fuels are probably far more heavily subsidized than wind energy at this point.
While it is theoretically possible to produce enough energy from wind turbines to supply all our needs, it's not technically feasible at present. This is because wind is an "intermittent" resource, i.e., the wind doesn't blow all the time. Since electricity can't be stored in large amounts
But it can--that's one of the main reasons behind the push for hydrogen. It's nowhere near 100% efficient, but it's a good way of storing and transporting large amounts of energy safely. Hydrogen is what makes "alternative" environmentally energy sources, which tend to be intermittent, practical.
Or do you also believe people shouldn't want faster CPUs?
It's all an engineering and cost tradeoff.
But you're being silly if you think Firewire doesn't have a reason to exist. It has much better performance, sustained performance, and for stuff like video work (camcorder and hard drives) and other high performance activities, more performance is better.
Not at any cost. USB2 is fast enough for hard drives. It's also so cheap that people generally just plug each high-speed device into its own controller. It would be fast enough for video work; it's just for historical reasons that devices generally use Firewire for that (that's changing, though).
you've provided absolutely no evidence supporting your claim that the Linux kernel is "leaner" than the Solaris and WinNT kernels.
Nor have you provided evidence to the contrary.
In any case, Sun itself likes to brag about all the enterprise features Solaris has relative to Linux and that's why high-end users should all be using Solaris. Are you saying Sun is not telling us the truth?
No. Many parts of Sun's implementation of Java are patented and proprietary.
The patents look essential to building compliant Java implementations. If you try to work around them, your implementation will probably not pass the certification tests. But the burden of proof here is on Sun: if Sun wants to show that Java is an open platform, they have to demonstrate that it can be implemented without violating their patents.
Java is not single vendor - that is its huge strength. I can get it from IBM, HP, Sun, SGI and many others.
Java does come from a single vendor; IBM, HP, SGI, Blackdown, and all the other compliant Java implementations all rely on code licensed from Sun. That means Java stands and falls with Sun--if Sun decides it's bad for their business to ship, say, on Linux, they can kill Java on Linux.
And yes, I have read the licences. I just honestly disagree with you.
The very fact that there are licenses on the specifications means that your claim that the specs have been "published" and "anyone can implement them freely" are false. So, you admit that I'm right, you just choose to ignore that fact because it doesn't fit into your Sun-friendly world view.
As for quoting RMS - as much as I admire him, he has his own political axes to grind, and his own definitions. He was not the first to coin the term 'open'.
And Sun has a political axe to grind, too: they want to maximize profit by any legal means available to them, and one great way of doing that is to tie users to their proprietary platforms. And Sun invests millions of dollars in crafting PR messages, which right now happen to be centered around being "open source friendly" and "the alternative to Microsoft". In fact, Sun has taken more than a page out of Microsoft's playbook.
So, we have a financially disinterested third party (RMS) plus our own eyes when looking at Sun's actual licenses, and we have a company (Sun) whose financial future depends on owning some piece of proprietary technology and getting it to be widely adopted by whatever legal means they have. I trust RMS and my own eyes a lot more than I trust Sun's self-serving PR messages.
Its not people who claim that you are free to implement your own VM - its Sun - James Gosling, for example.
What Gosling says is not legally binding on Sun. In fact, it is a huge problem that Schwartz and Gosling and people like them say one thing ("Java is open", "you can implement it", etc.) and their lawyers write something rather different into their license agreements and go off patenting one piece of Java after another.
"it is of little help for companies or open source projects stuck with millions of LOC based on a proprietary platform."
I don't understand the use of 'stuck with' here. It implies some sort of problem, as if the lines of code will suddenly vanish or stop working.
Yes, they will: when Sun stops shipping Java for my platform or starts charging an arm and a leg for it, I will have no other runtime to run my code on.
Furthermore, users have no control over what Sun actually puts in their implementations. Look at Sun's own bug parade: Sun just isn't responsive to user feedback or wishes. On more than one occasion, a new JRE release has seriously broken Java software we have developed.
That is not the point. The point is that companies can implement Java-like languages without legal problems.
Of course, people can implement "Java-like languages"; after all, it's technology that predates Java by many years. But implementing a "Java-like language" does not solve the problem that the only way you can run Java is by using a Sun proprietary Java implementation.
Actually, it does. That's why they did it. That is why there are several clean-room implementations of the VM (e.g. Kaffe) and the libraries (e.g. GNU Classpath). [...] You can even write a Java VM if you like.
You can also rob a bank, and you may even get away with it. But the fact that you can do it doesn't demonstrate that it is legal to do so.
HP has implemented a clean-room VM. They either have to have patent licenses from Sun to do so, or their implementation is not fully compatible, or they are infringing Sun's patents. Kaffe and Classpath probably violate both Sun's license agreement for the specifications and Sun's patents (Sun just has chosen not to sue them for now--Kaffe is no threat to them because it works so poorly and a lawsuit would be a PR nightmare for Sun, destroying Sun's carefully crafted myth of openness and friendliness towards open source).
If an 'open' platform turns up that has the same degree of power, range of deployment platforms, and multi-vendor support, I would be happy to use that too.
I have no problem with you using a proprietary platform if it serves your needs. What I have a problem with is when you and others (in particular, Sun representatives) falsely claim that Java is "open" or that it can be "freely implemented". In addition to Sun's ownership of the Java trademark (which is mostly harmless), Java is covered by patents, and the Java specifications can only be implemented under specific licenses (which you can find at the beginning of each specification).
No you don't. You are free to implement your own VM (as many have - HPs VM is clean room). If Sun 'stopped' Java, many companies would continue with the development of the language, but it could not be called 'Java' - that's all (unless, as would be likely, IBM bought it).
People keep claiming that, but it is just not true. Sun's ownership of Java is not just ownership of the name. Sun's specs are available only under specific licenses, and, in addition to their ownership of the specs, Sun has patents covering aspects of Java implementations.
HP's clean-room implementation of a JVM (and just a JVM!) tells you nothing about whether their JVM is entangled in Sun patents or licenses.
After all, that's more or less what Microsoft have done with C# - its nothing more or less than MS 'Java',
Yes, but while C# looks and works like Java, it is not Java compatible, so it is of little help for companies or open source projects stuck with millions of LOC based on a proprietary platform.
However, in the long run, we can hope that Java source code translators or on-the-fly bytecode translators can avoid Sun's patents and licenses while still allowing people to migrate their legacy Java code to an open platform.
Java 'Highly proprietary'? Ah - I guess that is why the spec is published,
The Java spec isn't "published", it is available only under license. It just happens to be the case that it is dangerously easy to accept the license conditions. But the license is printed for you to read on Sun's Java specs, as well as the specs produced under the Java Community Process, and it states that the spec is owned by Sun and that you cannot implement it unless you meet specific conditions.
and why GNU can implement Java;
You can read what the GNU folks have to say about Java here. It's no accident that RMS calls Java "a trap". Besides, GNU hasn't really implemented Java, and just because they haven't been sued yet by Sun doesn't mean that they aren't in violation of lots of licenses, copyrights, and patents.
why Java is the most in-demand language for IT jobs,
So? Is Windows "open" because there are lots of job postings for it?
There is nothing proprietary about Java, only the name, which you must pass compatibility tests to use.
Many Java specs are proprietary and available only under license, and in addition Sun has lots of patents on parts of Java. That makes the Java platform proprietary.
Without these compatibility tests, Java would have fragmented years ago.
The irony is that Java is not only proprietary, it is already fragmented. One dialect of Java, namely C#, is just different enough to try to work around all of Sun's license requirements and patents. And all the attempts at open source implementations are wildly incompatible.
Basically, with people like you, I can't figure out whether you are just too lazy to read Sun's licenses, or whether you have a stake in Java and are lying through your teeth. But the truth is easy enough for anybody to see: just read the licenses at the beginning of the Java and JCP specs and search on the USPTO site for Sun patents related to Java. Or just read RMS's article.
Use Java if you like. But don't keep pretending that it's an "open" platform. Using Java is just like using Windows: you are using a single-vendor, proprietary platform.
However, it's hard for me to understand how a chip can have bloat? The bigger and faster and more the chip does, the better! Right?
One of the biggest bottlenecks in computers is the interface between the CPU and memory. It makes little sense to make the CPU so fast that it requires data faster than the memory system can provide it. So, 32-way CPU may, in fact, not be much faster than a single or dual core CPU when you build a real computer running real applications around it. Even if it turns out to be significantly faster, there may be other, simpler, cheaper ways of achieving the same speedup.
Based on the presentation in the blog, Niagara sounds just like more of Sun's "bigger is better" attitude, as opposed to sound cost/benefit tradeoffs. Keep in mind that the blog brags about the fact that Niagara is "32-way", not that it were faster than the best PowerPC chip.
Whether Sun's chip actually delivers good bang for the buck remains to be seen. I don't think any of Sun's recent machines have delivered good bang for the buck, so I won't be holding my breath (we used to be a big Sun customer but haven't bought any Sun hardware for several years now).
Even most main stream linux distros are bloated compared to a few years ago.
Linux distros, yes. The Linux kernel is still being kept fairly lean feature-wise relative to Solaris or NT (it just has lots of drivers and loadable add-ons).
Does Johnathan not get it, or is he playing the FUD game?
He is playing the FUD game, and it's nothing new. For example, he has referred to Gnome as "open source crap" that supposedly requires the genius and brillians of Sun's GUI designers to put right (CRN article). He has also tried to portray Linux as a kind of low-quality entry-level UNIX that isn't enterprise ready, with Solaris being the high-performance choice.
The most annoying and dangerous thing about Schwartz is that he keeps trying to redefine the meaning of "open" and "open source" in order to get Sun's highly proprietary platforms and products (e.g., Java) to be more widely accepted.
Why is Schwartz doing this? Because he must know that Sun is basically finished as a company: their hardware is uninteresting and Solaris is uninteresting. The only piece of software they own that anybody cares about is Java, but as soon as Sun tried to use their legal control of Java to extract any significant amount of revenue from it (and, make no mistake: Sun has tighter legal ownership of Java than Microsoft has of any of their platforms), they would have a rebellion on their hands.
These guys are trying to do things big and correctly.
I think "big" and "correctly" are themselves contradictions in terms these days. Solaris is bloated, Java is bloated, and now they are producing a bloated CPU chip.
None of this will stop commodity hardware and open source from kicking Sun's butt and driving them out of business, because ultimately, people don't want "big", they want manageable and cost-effective. And that Sun isn't delivering anymore.
Ahhh... to be 38 and be this guy. President of Sun at 38 years old... what a life.
I'm sure he is well paid, but so are lots of other jobs. Other than that, I would imagine his job is causing him ulcers because deep down, he must know that his company is in deep trouble.
Why do you have a computer with a 4 pin Firewire port? You could have chosen one with 6 pin, too.
But why would he have wanted to? He doesn't want Firewire in the first place, there are far more USB 2.0 devices out there than Firewire devices, USB 2.0 is faster and more widely available, and there is a much wider range of machines available that don't have 6 pin Firewire. And for the only function that most normal people use Firewire for, hooking up a camcorder, 4 pin is more than enough.
Furthermore, there is a simple reason designers don't put powered Firewire ports on laptops more often: Firewire devices can demand much more power from the laptop than USB, and that's not a good thing on a laptop.
Still, neat to see. Now if we could just lose the 4 pin FW ports. The connectors are bad enough on their own. Redesign it, and and power to it.
FW is spec'ed to supply much more power to devices than USB. That's probably the reason why designers don't like to put powered FW ports on laptops in the first place, and that's only going to get worse as laptops get lighter and more power efficient.
Lots of patents are TRIVIAL, but that doesn't mean that they can't come back to haunt you.
In this case, the trivial patent has lots of trivial alternatives. It is probably prudent just to pick one of those alternatives. That way, you eliminate the potential hassles of getting sued.
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IF YAFFS was a commercial product and if there was a way for the company to make money on NOR, they would have ported it to NOR. You simply cannot state that a commercial vendor would have never ported it to NOR under any circumstance.
And he didn't state that. What he stated was that, in a closed source model, a third party could not have taken his code and modified it. Do you have a problem with that?
Simply because something can be done in the F/OSS world does not imply that it cannot be done anywhere else.
You're mincing words and avoiding the issue. Look at Microsoft and Longhorn: Bill Gates is trying to decide from the top down how the entire OS is going to look and he is screwing up badly. What they would need is dozens of competing projects, where the best one survives.
Unfortunately, there is a *lot* of software in the F/OSS world that is exactly like scratching an itch...
Utter nonsense. Just about all software packages that you might think of as "duplicating functionality" differ greatly: Gnome and KDE, Konqueror and Mozilla, AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer, etc. They are written in different languages, have different GUIs, use different libraries, etc. Those projects wouldn't survive side-by-side if they didn't serve someone's needs. And it is just this kind of diversity in the OSS community that makes it robust.
Unlike Gates, who has a good chance of getting it wrong, the OSS community has all its bases covered, and users pick what they need, want, and like. The price one pays for that is that users don't have simple answers: they actually have to make a deliberate choice among different offerings, while in the Microsoft world, one big, central organization makes the choice for them.
Neither M$ nor "open source" are particularly innovative.
Most open source software, like most proprietary software, is not innovative. But most innovative software comes from university researchers and it is first released in open source form. That's no accident--the scientific method strongly encourages it.
It is these open source releases of new ideas that commercial companies, including Microsoft, have built on, and learned from, in the past.
Open source has proven to be an essential part of innovation in the software business.
OSS is not "anti-corporate", as the article suggests. OSS is about the ability to create software and enhance it. OSS is ultimately about creating and maintaining free markets and competition. OSS comes in conflict with corporations only when those corporations try to interfere with the operations of the free market or when those corporations try to stifle competition, for example through the establishment of proprietary de-facto standards.
So, there is nothing strange about an alliance between the OSS community and IBM: IBM is demonstrating that corporations can prosper by embracing OSS and by offering services related to OSS.
From the various postings, a picture is emerging that Connolly hired a developer to add some functionality to Mambo. After finishing his job for Connolly, that same developer also implemented the same functionality for Mambo again.
If that's what happened, the developer behaved rather unprofessionally: if someone pays you good money to implement his idea, you don't re-implement it open source right away, whether you can legally do so or not, and whether you judge the idea to be "trivial" or not. Furthermore, Connolly may be right that his idea was under trade secret protection.
Where Connolly is wrong is trying to hold the Mambo project and its users responsible. It seems likely that the trade secret violation is only a matter between Connolly and the developer, in particular since Connolly also put the modified source code up on his own web site, and that Connolly has lost all trade secret protection (the idea may not have enjoyed trade secret protection anyway because it would have been obvious once he used it on his site). And once Connolly distributed the modified code, he accepted the terms of the GPL.
What should people do? Whether the Mambo project chooses to force the issue over the GPL is one decision. But it seems to me that the Mambo developer in question should return his payment to Connolly, whether he is legally obligated or not. The Mambo project should probably also just separate themselves from the developer, or at the very least make it crystal clear that he acted with poor judgement.
More generally, this is just another reminder that open source projects need to get their act together on doing the paperwork on accepting code contributions. And a specific policy (and possibly sample contracts) for core team members doing custom programming involving the project couldn't hurt either.
In the end, it seems to me that all three parties involved, Connolly, the Mambo project, and the developer, screwed up in various ways.
It's an either-or choice only with C: buffer overflow checks are expensive in C because of the kinds of constructs the C language provides. In other programming languages, the overhead of buffer overflow checks is negligible for real-world software.
Java is a bad example of a safe language, because, while it is safe, it also has a lot of other baggage that you really don't need, and because Java keeps you from doing unsafe things even when you ask nicely.
A safe systems programming language does not need to be noticeably different from C in terms of performance or programming style. Furthermore, a safe systems programming language shouldn't prevent you from doing unsafe things, it should just force you to make it explicit when you are doing unsafe things.
There are currently no safe systems programming languages that would appeal to a hardcore C user (D, Cyclone, and similar efforts are trying to do too much). But in the past, there have been some pretty straightforward Pascal and Modula dialects that combined being fairly simple with being efficient and suitable for systems programming. So, it is possible, someone just needs to do it in the C family of languages.
where are the flaws in this reasoning?
The flaw is that it is hard to get even a much less intrusive change, like SPF, working and adopted. Furthermore, what you propose is both less functional and more effort to implement.
In any case, for some external support and sales functions, many companies have stopped using E-mail. But after the initial contact, they do usually follow up using mail. And even that small move away from E-mail probably costs companies dearly already.
You didn't post this complete pile of FUD?
What you call a "pile of FUD" is an opinion. People have them, and they talk about them. Sorry if you don't understand the difference between, say, an opinion and some other kind of statement.
As for the term "FUD", give me a break. The term "FUD" refers to a sales technique by which big, established companies try to cast doubt on the viability of a new competitor. I couldn't "FUD" if I wanted to because I'm not a company and I don't have a product to push. Sun sales force has learned well from IBM and Microsoft, however, and Sun employees are masters of FUD: they are trying to cast fear, uncertainty, and doubt on everything that competes with their proprietary offerings: open source projects, on open source desktops, on IBM's Java efforts, on C#, on Linux, on IBM's Power processor, etc. Schwartz's uncalled-for rant against IBM and Power is just another example of Sun's FUDding.
You do realize that Niagara is for the LOW END don't you? These are not going to be expensive machines, in fact, they are more like alternatives for racks of commodity (x86) hardware.
We used to buy Suns, but Sun hasn't been able to produce a machine with a price/performance ratio that would interest us in years. Furthermore, the fact that they are not x86 compatible and that they will (apparently) be using Solaris as their OS are two more big strikes against them because what "LOW END" customer is going to have the expertise to manage those machines or the software to run on them?
WTF!!! Are you saying that you can post whatever unsupported bullshit you like but it's other peoples responsibility to point that out?
First of all, you are missing the point. We are discussing design, not quantifiable parameters. It is Sun marketing, not me, that keeps harping on how wonderful all the new functionality is they put into the Solaris kernel. That's the wrong direction in kernel design. (And, incidentally, Sun is spending millions of dollars to publish that sort of "unsubstantiated bullshit" in the form of marketing materials.)
Second, yes, if you want to change the discussion into one about quantifiable criteria (rather than design attitudes), the burden is on you to define the criteria you want to discuss first.
If that's what he meant, maybe he should have said that instead.
The meaning of his statement seemed clear enough to me. But, then, mathematics professors assume a certain minimal degree of intelligence on the part of their audience. As you demonstrate, that requirement isn't necessarily satisfied by everyone in their audience.
Why, because an unknown mathematician and an anonymous coward say so?
He was restating an idea expressed by someone else. It is up to you to make up your mind whether you agree with that idea.
Yes, difficult as that may be to believe, even you yourself have the potential for independent thought; try exercising it for a change.
All this is telling me is that the cost of wind is HEAVILY subsidized right now, which is complete stupidity.
The use of fossil fuels is heavily subsidized (use of public lands, keeping shipping lanes open, military presence in oil producing nations, security for refineries, environmental costs, medical costs, etc.).
Fossil fuels are probably far more heavily subsidized than wind energy at this point.
While it is theoretically possible to produce enough energy from wind turbines to supply all our needs, it's not technically feasible at present. This is because wind is an "intermittent" resource, i.e., the wind doesn't blow all the time. Since electricity can't be stored in large amounts
But it can--that's one of the main reasons behind the push for hydrogen. It's nowhere near 100% efficient, but it's a good way of storing and transporting large amounts of energy safely. Hydrogen is what makes "alternative" environmentally energy sources, which tend to be intermittent, practical.
Or do you also believe people shouldn't want faster CPUs?
It's all an engineering and cost tradeoff.
But you're being silly if you think Firewire doesn't have a reason to exist. It has much better performance, sustained performance, and for stuff like video work (camcorder and hard drives) and other high performance activities, more performance is better.
Not at any cost. USB2 is fast enough for hard drives. It's also so cheap that people generally just plug each high-speed device into its own controller. It would be fast enough for video work; it's just for historical reasons that devices generally use Firewire for that (that's changing, though).
you've provided absolutely no evidence supporting your claim that the Linux kernel is "leaner" than the Solaris and WinNT kernels.
Nor have you provided evidence to the contrary.
In any case, Sun itself likes to brag about all the enterprise features Solaris has relative to Linux and that's why high-end users should all be using Solaris. Are you saying Sun is not telling us the truth?
No. Many parts of Sun's implementation of Java are patented and proprietary.
The patents look essential to building compliant Java implementations. If you try to work around them, your implementation will probably not pass the certification tests. But the burden of proof here is on Sun: if Sun wants to show that Java is an open platform, they have to demonstrate that it can be implemented without violating their patents.
Java is not single vendor - that is its huge strength. I can get it from IBM, HP, Sun, SGI and many others.
Java does come from a single vendor; IBM, HP, SGI, Blackdown, and all the other compliant Java implementations all rely on code licensed from Sun. That means Java stands and falls with Sun--if Sun decides it's bad for their business to ship, say, on Linux, they can kill Java on Linux.
And yes, I have read the licences. I just honestly disagree with you.
The very fact that there are licenses on the specifications means that your claim that the specs have been "published" and "anyone can implement them freely" are false. So, you admit that I'm right, you just choose to ignore that fact because it doesn't fit into your Sun-friendly world view.
As for quoting RMS - as much as I admire him, he has his own political axes to grind, and his own definitions. He was not the first to coin the term 'open'.
And Sun has a political axe to grind, too: they want to maximize profit by any legal means available to them, and one great way of doing that is to tie users to their proprietary platforms. And Sun invests millions of dollars in crafting PR messages, which right now happen to be centered around being "open source friendly" and "the alternative to Microsoft". In fact, Sun has taken more than a page out of Microsoft's playbook.
So, we have a financially disinterested third party (RMS) plus our own eyes when looking at Sun's actual licenses, and we have a company (Sun) whose financial future depends on owning some piece of proprietary technology and getting it to be widely adopted by whatever legal means they have. I trust RMS and my own eyes a lot more than I trust Sun's self-serving PR messages.
Its not people who claim that you are free to implement your own VM - its Sun - James Gosling, for example.
What Gosling says is not legally binding on Sun. In fact, it is a huge problem that Schwartz and Gosling and people like them say one thing ("Java is open", "you can implement it", etc.) and their lawyers write something rather different into their license agreements and go off patenting one piece of Java after another.
"it is of little help for companies or open source projects stuck with millions of LOC based on a proprietary platform."
I don't understand the use of 'stuck with' here. It implies some sort of problem, as if the lines of code will suddenly vanish or stop working.
Yes, they will: when Sun stops shipping Java for my platform or starts charging an arm and a leg for it, I will have no other runtime to run my code on.
Furthermore, users have no control over what Sun actually puts in their implementations. Look at Sun's own bug parade: Sun just isn't responsive to user feedback or wishes. On more than one occasion, a new JRE release has seriously broken Java software we have developed.
That is not the point. The point is that companies can implement Java-like languages without legal problems.
Of course, people can implement "Java-like languages"; after all, it's technology that predates Java by many years. But implementing a "Java-like language" does not solve the problem that the only way you can run Java is by using a Sun proprietary Java implementation.
Actually, it does. That's why they did it. That is why there are several clean-room implementations of the VM (e.g. Kaffe) and the libraries (e.g. GNU Classpath). [...] You can even write a Java VM if you like.
You can also rob a bank, and you may even get away with it. But the fact that you can do it doesn't demonstrate that it is legal to do so.
HP has implemented a clean-room VM. They either have to have patent licenses from Sun to do so, or their implementation is not fully compatible, or they are infringing Sun's patents. Kaffe and Classpath probably violate both Sun's license agreement for the specifications and Sun's patents (Sun just has chosen not to sue them for now--Kaffe is no threat to them because it works so poorly and a lawsuit would be a PR nightmare for Sun, destroying Sun's carefully crafted myth of openness and friendliness towards open source).
If an 'open' platform turns up that has the same degree of power, range of deployment platforms, and multi-vendor support, I would be happy to use that too.
I have no problem with you using a proprietary platform if it serves your needs. What I have a problem with is when you and others (in particular, Sun representatives) falsely claim that Java is "open" or that it can be "freely implemented". In addition to Sun's ownership of the Java trademark (which is mostly harmless), Java is covered by patents, and the Java specifications can only be implemented under specific licenses (which you can find at the beginning of each specification).
The Solaris kernel is modular as well.
I made no claims about modularity. What does modularity have to do with being bloated?
Do you have any basis for claiming that the Solaris kernel is bloated?
Sun proudly proclaims so themselves; just look at feature lists.
No you don't. You are free to implement your own VM (as many have - HPs VM is clean room). If Sun 'stopped' Java, many companies would continue with the development of the language, but it could not be called 'Java' - that's all (unless, as would be likely, IBM bought it).
People keep claiming that, but it is just not true. Sun's ownership of Java is not just ownership of the name. Sun's specs are available only under specific licenses, and, in addition to their ownership of the specs, Sun has patents covering aspects of Java implementations.
HP's clean-room implementation of a JVM (and just a JVM!) tells you nothing about whether their JVM is entangled in Sun patents or licenses.
After all, that's more or less what Microsoft have done with C# - its nothing more or less than MS 'Java',
Yes, but while C# looks and works like Java, it is not Java compatible, so it is of little help for companies or open source projects stuck with millions of LOC based on a proprietary platform.
However, in the long run, we can hope that Java source code translators or on-the-fly bytecode translators can avoid Sun's patents and licenses while still allowing people to migrate their legacy Java code to an open platform.
Java 'Highly proprietary'? Ah - I guess that is why the spec is published,
The Java spec isn't "published", it is available only under license. It just happens to be the case that it is dangerously easy to accept the license conditions. But the license is printed for you to read on Sun's Java specs, as well as the specs produced under the Java Community Process, and it states that the spec is owned by Sun and that you cannot implement it unless you meet specific conditions.
and why GNU can implement Java;
You can read what the GNU folks have to say about Java here. It's no accident that RMS calls Java "a trap". Besides, GNU hasn't really implemented Java, and just because they haven't been sued yet by Sun doesn't mean that they aren't in violation of lots of licenses, copyrights, and patents.
why Java is the most in-demand language for IT jobs,
So? Is Windows "open" because there are lots of job postings for it?
There is nothing proprietary about Java, only the name, which you must pass compatibility tests to use.
Many Java specs are proprietary and available only under license, and in addition Sun has lots of patents on parts of Java. That makes the Java platform proprietary.
Without these compatibility tests, Java would have fragmented years ago.
The irony is that Java is not only proprietary, it is already fragmented. One dialect of Java, namely C#, is just different enough to try to work around all of Sun's license requirements and patents. And all the attempts at open source implementations are wildly incompatible.
Basically, with people like you, I can't figure out whether you are just too lazy to read Sun's licenses, or whether you have a stake in Java and are lying through your teeth. But the truth is easy enough for anybody to see: just read the licenses at the beginning of the Java and JCP specs and search on the USPTO site for Sun patents related to Java. Or just read RMS's article.
Use Java if you like. But don't keep pretending that it's an "open" platform. Using Java is just like using Windows: you are using a single-vendor, proprietary platform.
However, it's hard for me to understand how a chip can have bloat? The bigger and faster and more the chip does, the better! Right?
One of the biggest bottlenecks in computers is the interface between the CPU and memory. It makes little sense to make the CPU so fast that it requires data faster than the memory system can provide it. So, 32-way CPU may, in fact, not be much faster than a single or dual core CPU when you build a real computer running real applications around it. Even if it turns out to be significantly faster, there may be other, simpler, cheaper ways of achieving the same speedup.
Based on the presentation in the blog, Niagara sounds just like more of Sun's "bigger is better" attitude, as opposed to sound cost/benefit tradeoffs. Keep in mind that the blog brags about the fact that Niagara is "32-way", not that it were faster than the best PowerPC chip.
Whether Sun's chip actually delivers good bang for the buck remains to be seen. I don't think any of Sun's recent machines have delivered good bang for the buck, so I won't be holding my breath (we used to be a big Sun customer but haven't bought any Sun hardware for several years now).
Even most main stream linux distros are bloated compared to a few years ago.
Linux distros, yes. The Linux kernel is still being kept fairly lean feature-wise relative to Solaris or NT (it just has lots of drivers and loadable add-ons).
Does Johnathan not get it, or is he playing the FUD game?
He is playing the FUD game, and it's nothing new. For example, he has referred to Gnome as "open source crap" that supposedly requires the genius and brillians of Sun's GUI designers to put right (CRN article). He has also tried to portray Linux as a kind of low-quality entry-level UNIX that isn't enterprise ready, with Solaris being the high-performance choice.
The most annoying and dangerous thing about Schwartz is that he keeps trying to redefine the meaning of "open" and "open source" in order to get Sun's highly proprietary platforms and products (e.g., Java) to be more widely accepted.
Why is Schwartz doing this? Because he must know that Sun is basically finished as a company: their hardware is uninteresting and Solaris is uninteresting. The only piece of software they own that anybody cares about is Java, but as soon as Sun tried to use their legal control of Java to extract any significant amount of revenue from it (and, make no mistake: Sun has tighter legal ownership of Java than Microsoft has of any of their platforms), they would have a rebellion on their hands.
These guys are trying to do things big and correctly.
I think "big" and "correctly" are themselves contradictions in terms these days. Solaris is bloated, Java is bloated, and now they are producing a bloated CPU chip.
None of this will stop commodity hardware and open source from kicking Sun's butt and driving them out of business, because ultimately, people don't want "big", they want manageable and cost-effective. And that Sun isn't delivering anymore.
Ahhh... to be 38 and be this guy. President of Sun at 38 years old... what a life.
I'm sure he is well paid, but so are lots of other jobs. Other than that, I would imagine his job is causing him ulcers because deep down, he must know that his company is in deep trouble.
Why do you have a computer with a 4 pin Firewire port? You could have chosen one with 6 pin, too.
But why would he have wanted to? He doesn't want Firewire in the first place, there are far more USB 2.0 devices out there than Firewire devices, USB 2.0 is faster and more widely available, and there is a much wider range of machines available that don't have 6 pin Firewire. And for the only function that most normal people use Firewire for, hooking up a camcorder, 4 pin is more than enough.
Furthermore, there is a simple reason designers don't put powered Firewire ports on laptops more often: Firewire devices can demand much more power from the laptop than USB, and that's not a good thing on a laptop.
Still, neat to see. Now if we could just lose the 4 pin FW ports. The connectors are bad enough on their own. Redesign it, and and power to it.
FW is spec'ed to supply much more power to devices than USB. That's probably the reason why designers don't like to put powered FW ports on laptops in the first place, and that's only going to get worse as laptops get lighter and more power efficient.
Lots of patents are TRIVIAL, but that doesn't mean that they can't come back to haunt you.
In this case, the trivial patent has lots of trivial alternatives. It is probably prudent just to pick one of those alternatives. That way, you eliminate the potential hassles of getting sued.