Sooner or later, we will have manned space stations. But the ISS and shuttle fleet are a bottomless pit, draining resources from all the great things we should be doing for space exploration. Well, soon all of that is going to be eclipsed by something even worse: premature attempts at manned trips to Mars.
The article is pretty garbled. But what they appear to be saying is that this was a DNA vaccine, that it generated an immune response, and that people didn't get sick from it. None of that is particularly surprising. In fact, just about every AIDS vaccine ever tested has generated an immune response and hasn't made people sick. The problem is whether it's effective against the real virus, and, so far, no AIDS vaccine has been, and chances are this one won't be either.
But your body is full of symbiotic bacteria. Your health depends on those bacteria; without them, you'd be sick. Some phages attack those bacteria, and it appears that that can lead to disease.
However, it's very unlikely that a phage against a bacterium like this will start attacking your symbiotic bacteria; you're far more likely to pick up pathogenic phages from the environment.
Don't blame a commercial entity for not sharing its crown jewels (which in this case represent millions, and for all I know billions, of dollars of R&D investment) under your terms. Shees.
Yes, you're right: Sun is a commercial entity and they can do with their software whatever they damned well please. However, that doesn't deprive the rest of us to warn people that Sun is misprepresenting what they're doing and that Sun is trying to screw them over.
I can tell you that about the only thing Linux has over the competition is popularity, and I believe that is mostly due to historical accident
You're right on both counts. But that's still irrelevant: Linux is the open source kernel that the world has standardized on, and while it's no better than *BSD, Darwin, or Solaris, it also isn't any worse: they all suck.
See, you like Sun for the same reason I don't like them: they are attempting to fragment the open source community, and they are doing it by propping up your current pet project.
Unfortunately, I was too short sighted to realize that RMS/FSF were going to use future GPL versions
Just like you're too short-sighted now to see that Sun is screwing you over.
Recall NFS was designed in 1984. At the time it was a major innovation. [...] By the way, I suppose you'll hold up SMB/CIFS as a paragon of distributed filesystem design?
We're not discussing the merits of NFS for its own sake, we're discussing whether Sun has made useful contributions to open source. As long as NFS was hot, Sun kept it closed source. And that's pretty much a pattern with Sun: they usually open source stuff only once it's been reimplemented anyway and/or has become useless.
So I suppose OpenOffice is a totally useless contribution? Or the major contributions to Gnome? Or the work they did on Mozilla? I think you need to compare Sun with the alternatives.
As I was saying, OpenOffice is useful, but that's pretty much the only thing of significance I think they have ever done. I don't think Sun's contributions to Gnome or Mozilla have been particularly important.
Just because everyone doesn't buy in to RMS' idealism doesn't mean that they're out to ruin the open software community. [...] Its important that to note that just sticking everything under the planet under a GPL may not be a good idea -- Sun wants folks to be able to things with the code that, quite frankly, GPL is not well suited to.
This has nothing to do with idealism or RMS or the GPL (RMS doesn't even like open source), it has to do with choosing licenses that are useful to the community. The major open source kernel happens to be under GPL, that's just an unalterable fact. It was Sun management that has deliberately chosen to pick licenses that are incompatible with this kernel (they could have easily dual-licensed their stuff). That leads to fragmentation and it hurts users of open source software. Of course, this is no accident, it's in line with McNealy and Schwartz's philosophy: they have said as much as that they view of open source is as a free labor force that adds value to their proprietary products. The problem here is that Sun management isn't willing to take a pragmatic attitude and tries to push their philosophy on the world instead of making useful contributions. The religious zealots here is Sun management, not the open source community.
I note that you didn't provide any additional examples of useful contributions by Sun: a bunch of patches for Gnome and Mozilla and OpenOffice.
I wonder whether any of these "when will Linux be ready for the desktop" people have actually used it. Linux music players come pre-installed on all major distros and desktops, and, out of the box, can talk to iPod, and can even share music with iTunes. WTF else do people want?
While TiVo has come out with a good product at the right time, that doesn't mean they should own the market. Many people around that time were thinking of, and working on, DVRs, TiVo just happened to be the first.
This ruling isn't even good for TiVo, because they can now just rest on their laurels until the patent runs out, and history suggests that that's what they more or less will end up doing.
NFS was developed in 1984. Long before Linux even existed. It was engineered from the get-go to be open-standard (not necessarily open-source). [...] At the time, the _implementation_ was proprietary. Sun espoused the ideals of open standards and private implementation
Well, yes, we agree on those facts. The question is why anybody in their right mind would consider that a "contribution to open source". Open source projects implemented NFS because they had to for interoperability; as a network file system standard, there would have been much better choices. And Sun only open sourced NFS once everybody had done their own implementation anyway (a pattern they are now repeating with Java). Those aren't "contributions".
In fact, not even the design of NFS can be counted a "contribution"; NFS has poor performance, poor security, poor manageability. The value of NFS was as a prototype, to show what was possible, but it should have been replaced by something else long ago. NFS is a typical Sun effort: the occasionally good insight into the market, crappy design, and proprietary implementation.
By the way, did you know that Sun is the single largest contributor of open source to the community, surpassing even UC Berkeley?
Sun may or may not be the corporate entity that has released the largest number of LOCs under what they consider an open source license, but that doesn't make them a "contributor". A "contributor" contributes stuff that is actually useful and that supports the community. Dumping millions of lines of code that doesn't solve an important problem, or actually actively trying to compete with established open source projects for no good reason, is not a "contribution".
In fact, Sun is trying to do to the FOSS world of what they are always accusing Microsoft of trying to do to Java: Sun is trying to fragment FOSS by introducing new, incompatible standards (NFSv4, ZFS, DTrace, etc.) and new, incompatible licenses; the fact that their fragmentation attempts involve some open source licenses is not out of the goodness of their hearts, it's because that's what it takes to fragment open source.
NFS, ZFS, DTrace (coming to an Apple near you soon), T1 chip (GPL),...
The question is not whether Sun releases stuff under open source licenses, the question is whether they are making contributions.
Let's take NFS. NFS source code remained proprietary and Sun was getting licensing fees. The open source community eventually had to create their own, independent NFS implementation. I don't know whether NFS v1-3 ever was open sourced by Sun--it certainly isn't being used by most open source desktops or servers.
As for recent releases, NFSv4, ZFS, and DTrace, they all have a bunch of things in common: they are unproven designs, they are not established standards, they come under licenses that make incorporation into Solaris competitors difficult, and Sun controls them tightly. In short, they aren't "contributions", they are simply trial balloons.
Yes, your examples adequately sum up Sun's open source "contributions": too late, entirely self-serving, and useless.
As I was saying that's pretty much the only contribution Sun has made. (Of course, it wasn't actually written by Sun, Sun open sourced it for a specific business purpose and conflict with Microsoft, and they are still having trouble letting go).
Java - Gone
Sun didn't contribute Java to the open source world; in fact, they have been trying hard to prevent open source implementations. The Java implementations that run on my Debian box were painstakingly developed clean-room implementations, and there is no significant client or server code that relies on it.
RPC - Gone
First of all, Linux's implementation of RPC isn't based on Sun's. Second, RPC and NFS are horrible standards./etc/shadow - Gone/etc/shadow isn't a Sun contribution, it's a convention.
PAM - Gone
There are no Sun contributions in Linux-PAM that I can see.
Much of Gnome - Gone
"Much of Gnome"? Where is your evidence? I don't remember the last time I have seen a Sun copyright on a piece of Gnome software.
Not a very usable box anymore and this is only a very small set of examples.
Yes, and your small set of examples is typical. You keep listing things where Sun made decisions for their proprietary UNIX systems and open source then had to reimplement those decisions (sometimes against Sun's objections and usually without help from Sun) because that was the pragmatic thing to do.
If we went by your reasoning, that copying of a proprietary feature by an open source project contributes a "contribution" by the proprietary vendor, then Microsoft would be an even bigger contributor to Linux--after all, according to your reasoning, Microsoft "contributed" OpenOffice, Wine, Samba, and most of Gnome.
The real kicker is that that, not only did Sun fail to contribute most of the things you say they did, many of the standards they set for the UNIX world have been crap.
How open-sourcing something can go against open source really does defy logic.
Open sourcing AIX would fragment the open source UNIX world because it would add yet another UNIX-like OS to the open source world. It would also place more of an obligation and burden on IBM to contribute to it, when they'd much rather focus on Linux.
Maybe you don't remember, but the reason why UNIX was having such problems was fragmentation. Open source foes often accuse open source of being fragmented. Open sourcing a piece of software that contributes little to the open source world is a bad thing because it adds to fragmentation. IBM did the right thing: they took the good pieces out of AIX and added them to Linux. Solaris did the wrong thing: they open sourced all of Solaris but prevented any pieces in Solaris to be put into Linux. And neither IBM nor Sun are stupid: IBM wanted to help the open source community, Sun wanted to hurt it.
I'm going to guess your age here.. you're about 15 years old.
I wish. But, unfortunately, your guess is as wrong as your understanding of the software marketplace.
Geez, stop evaluating news source by credibility and start using your own head! That guy makes sense, while claims that terrorists could brew up unstable explosives in an airplane bathroom do not.
Ever hear of, oh, NFS. No? How about RPC? These Sun contributions to open source predate IBM's involvement with FOSS by a long time.
Wow, that's some creative rewriting of history. In fact, NFS was proprietary for many years. I'm not sure at what point Sun did or did not release NFS source code, but it hasn't been relevant to the Linux world because (1) Linux already had its own NFS implementations by the time Sun released it, and (2) Sun's licenses were likely unacceptable.
Furthermore, both NFS and RPC were poor designs. The UNIX network file system world is still in shambles, and Sun and NFS are single-handedly responsible for that. NFS was so bad that with "NFSv4", Sun essentially started over from scratch, but it's been too little, too late.
Let me soothe your concerns, in fact Sun without OpenSolaris dwarfs IBM in terms of OpenSource contributions
Yeah? Care to name some examples?
and it also excludes a huge amount of IP donated by Sun in the form of properly documented standards Patents and interfaces that most of the other commercial donators to OpenSource had to be dragged kicking and screaming to.
Yeah? Again, care to give some specifics? The only "IP donation" that I have seen come out of Sun is their grant of patents and IP for their "OpenSolaris" release--utterly useless to anybody but Solaris adopters. Sun hasn't even released the Java specifications as open specifications (poorly written as they are). So, where are those supposed "IP donations""?
On my Debian system, out of 1600 packages, there are exactly two pieces of software that Sun can claim some kind of credit for: Tcl (obsolete and abandoned by Sun) and OpenOffice. Where exactly are Sun's supposed open source contributions if there is almost nothing of them to be found in a complete, popular Linux distribution?
I suggest people look at your Slashdot posting history to see where you're coming from; I think it speaks for itself.
I think this has more to do with IBM feeling the heat over not doing *anything* to open-source AIX.
AIX has contributed most of the valuable bits and pieces of AIX to Linux already and they have contributed extensively to Linux.
Open sourcing AIX would make no sense; it would be an attack on Linux and open source, just like open sourcing Solaris was a deliberate and calculated attack by Sun on Linux (coordinated with Sun FUD and Sun sham licenses).
I think you're on to something: this seems like a good idea to finance research into manned space travel. Just think how much space travel would advance once the RIAA figures out how to have their lawyers hand-deliver a cease-and-decist letter.
(Of course, given their ethics, they'd just be working on a survivable one-way trip, but that's still quite a feat.)
It's tough to reason with someone who believes they are in the right with their chosen deity by eradicating you and your way of life.
Look at who we support in the region: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, highly un-democratic, oppressive, and sometimes vicious regimes. When Iran had a democratic government, we got rid of it for economic reasons.
To many people in the region, the US is a behemoth that uses its military to ensure a cheap supply of oil and is willing to keep people from achieving self-determination, economic development, and democracy in order to keep oil prices low. They don't want to "eradicate our way of life", they are pissed because they believe that we are preventing them from achieving it themselves.
You know, kill two birds with one stone. Heck, I bet that this machine could establish paternity as well.
Well, obviously, that's a great idea. "Mr. Smith, you must be a terrorist, because you state that the person you're traveling with is your daughter, but our security detector clearly shows that she is not." Oops.
I have about 1600 packages installed on my Debian system. Of those, 84 mention Sun in some form, but mostly, it's just bug fixes or ports to Solaris that Sun contributed to other people's projects. Only two groups of packages can be said to be Sun contributions: Tcl (obsolete and abandoned by Sun) and OpenOffice.
Claims that Sun is a great supporter of open source just don't stand up to real-world facts. Sun usually only open sources things when they are afraid of becoming irrelevant in some market, or as an add-on to a necessary proprietary offering, and even then only under some carefully picked nuisance license.
10 years ago, Sun promised ANSI and ISO standards for Java plus open source implementations. What did we get? No standards, a lot of FUD (yes, FUD from Sun) about how they can't because of MSFT, proprietary and closed implementations, costly compatibility tests, bloated APIs and implementations, and threats of lawsuits.
Now that FOSS implementations are mature and nearly complete, Sun is trying to undermine them by finally open sourcing Java (at least in name--in practice, the license will probably be a sham).
The sooner Sun goes out of business, the better for everybody. Microsoft at least makes no secret about where they stand on FOSS, but Sun pretends to be a friend to FOSS but keeps spreading FUD about FOSS and keeps stabbing FOSS efforts in the back.
Actually, the people who have made the most headway are Microsoft.
Actually, Microsoft is just trying to catch up. Linux already has a very flexible driver model in place, and its GUI uses an architecture that is ideally suited to virtualization.
Linux has a problem even switching between virtual consoles
Linux has no problem switching between virtual consoles if you use the correct drivers for your hardware.
Most virtualization is for servers or Linux desktops, and they don't require more than virtual disks and networks, plus minimal console emulation; all that code already exists in open source form.
VMware's big thing was a JIT-like x86 engine, a complex piece of software that is now not needed anymore. That really is a big deal.
Hardware virtualization may be slower right now, but both the hardware and the software supporting it are new. Give it a few iterations and it will be equal to software virtualization.
It may or may not be faster eventually, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that small changes in the hardware make it possible to stop having to depend on costly, proprietary, and complex software--like that sold by VMware.
You know, as someone who spends a lot of time dealing with the interactions between malloc and the OS, I find it extremely amusing that you think a sanity checker for the heap is a bad idea.
Malloc debugging is a great idea, it just shouldn't be in the standard library or enabled for production use.
Personally, I wish Linux had it.
Linux has valgrind, dmalloc, electric-fence, and ccmalloc. Unfortunately, the most useful of those, valgrind, doesn't exist for OSX.
Yeah, that's the obvious answer, but I don't think it works. The Segway can turn in place, and I don't see any need to be able to move sideways. In fact, for a robot intended to interact naturally with humans, sideway motion is probably a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooner or later, we will have manned space stations. But the ISS and shuttle fleet are a bottomless pit, draining resources from all the great things we should be doing for space exploration. Well, soon all of that is going to be eclipsed by something even worse: premature attempts at manned trips to Mars.
The article is pretty garbled. But what they appear to be saying is that this was a DNA vaccine, that it generated an immune response, and that people didn't get sick from it. None of that is particularly surprising. In fact, just about every AIDS vaccine ever tested has generated an immune response and hasn't made people sick. The problem is whether it's effective against the real virus, and, so far, no AIDS vaccine has been, and chances are this one won't be either.
These phages will not attack human cells.
But your body is full of symbiotic bacteria. Your health depends on those bacteria; without them, you'd be sick. Some phages attack those bacteria, and it appears that that can lead to disease.
However, it's very unlikely that a phage against a bacterium like this will start attacking your symbiotic bacteria; you're far more likely to pick up pathogenic phages from the environment.
Don't blame a commercial entity for not sharing its crown jewels (which in this case represent millions, and for all I know billions, of dollars of R&D investment) under your terms. Shees.
Yes, you're right: Sun is a commercial entity and they can do with their software whatever they damned well please. However, that doesn't deprive the rest of us to warn people that Sun is misprepresenting what they're doing and that Sun is trying to screw them over.
I can tell you that about the only thing Linux has over the competition is popularity, and I believe that is mostly due to historical accident
You're right on both counts. But that's still irrelevant: Linux is the open source kernel that the world has standardized on, and while it's no better than *BSD, Darwin, or Solaris, it also isn't any worse: they all suck.
See, you like Sun for the same reason I don't like them: they are attempting to fragment the open source community, and they are doing it by propping up your current pet project.
Unfortunately, I was too short sighted to realize that RMS/FSF were going to use future GPL versions
Just like you're too short-sighted now to see that Sun is screwing you over.
Recall NFS was designed in 1984. At the time it was a major innovation. [...] By the way, I suppose you'll hold up SMB/CIFS as a paragon of distributed filesystem design?
We're not discussing the merits of NFS for its own sake, we're discussing whether Sun has made useful contributions to open source. As long as NFS was hot, Sun kept it closed source. And that's pretty much a pattern with Sun: they usually open source stuff only once it's been reimplemented anyway and/or has become useless.
So I suppose OpenOffice is a totally useless contribution? Or the major contributions to Gnome? Or the work they did on Mozilla? I think you need to compare Sun with the alternatives.
As I was saying, OpenOffice is useful, but that's pretty much the only thing of significance I think they have ever done. I don't think Sun's contributions to Gnome or Mozilla have been particularly important.
Just because everyone doesn't buy in to RMS' idealism doesn't mean that they're out to ruin the open software community. [...] Its important that to note that just sticking everything under the planet under a GPL may not be a good idea -- Sun wants folks to be able to things with the code that, quite frankly, GPL is not well suited to.
This has nothing to do with idealism or RMS or the GPL (RMS doesn't even like open source), it has to do with choosing licenses that are useful to the community. The major open source kernel happens to be under GPL, that's just an unalterable fact. It was Sun management that has deliberately chosen to pick licenses that are incompatible with this kernel (they could have easily dual-licensed their stuff). That leads to fragmentation and it hurts users of open source software. Of course, this is no accident, it's in line with McNealy and Schwartz's philosophy: they have said as much as that they view of open source is as a free labor force that adds value to their proprietary products. The problem here is that Sun management isn't willing to take a pragmatic attitude and tries to push their philosophy on the world instead of making useful contributions. The religious zealots here is Sun management, not the open source community.
I note that you didn't provide any additional examples of useful contributions by Sun: a bunch of patches for Gnome and Mozilla and OpenOffice.
I wonder whether any of these "when will Linux be ready for the desktop" people have actually used it. Linux music players come pre-installed on all major distros and desktops, and, out of the box, can talk to iPod, and can even share music with iTunes. WTF else do people want?
While TiVo has come out with a good product at the right time, that doesn't mean they should own the market. Many people around that time were thinking of, and working on, DVRs, TiVo just happened to be the first.
This ruling isn't even good for TiVo, because they can now just rest on their laurels until the patent runs out, and history suggests that that's what they more or less will end up doing.
NFS was developed in 1984. Long before Linux even existed. It was engineered from the get-go to be open-standard (not necessarily open-source). [...] At the time, the _implementation_ was proprietary. Sun espoused the ideals of open standards and private implementation
Well, yes, we agree on those facts. The question is why anybody in their right mind would consider that a "contribution to open source". Open source projects implemented NFS because they had to for interoperability; as a network file system standard, there would have been much better choices. And Sun only open sourced NFS once everybody had done their own implementation anyway (a pattern they are now repeating with Java). Those aren't "contributions".
In fact, not even the design of NFS can be counted a "contribution"; NFS has poor performance, poor security, poor manageability. The value of NFS was as a prototype, to show what was possible, but it should have been replaced by something else long ago. NFS is a typical Sun effort: the occasionally good insight into the market, crappy design, and proprietary implementation.
By the way, did you know that Sun is the single largest contributor of open source to the community, surpassing even UC Berkeley?
Sun may or may not be the corporate entity that has released the largest number of LOCs under what they consider an open source license, but that doesn't make them a "contributor". A "contributor" contributes stuff that is actually useful and that supports the community. Dumping millions of lines of code that doesn't solve an important problem, or actually actively trying to compete with established open source projects for no good reason, is not a "contribution".
In fact, Sun is trying to do to the FOSS world of what they are always accusing Microsoft of trying to do to Java: Sun is trying to fragment FOSS by introducing new, incompatible standards (NFSv4, ZFS, DTrace, etc.) and new, incompatible licenses; the fact that their fragmentation attempts involve some open source licenses is not out of the goodness of their hearts, it's because that's what it takes to fragment open source.
NFS, ZFS, DTrace (coming to an Apple near you soon), T1 chip (GPL), ...
The question is not whether Sun releases stuff under open source licenses, the question is whether they are making contributions.
Let's take NFS. NFS source code remained proprietary and Sun was getting licensing fees. The open source community eventually had to create their own, independent NFS implementation. I don't know whether NFS v1-3 ever was open sourced by Sun--it certainly isn't being used by most open source desktops or servers.
As for recent releases, NFSv4, ZFS, and DTrace, they all have a bunch of things in common: they are unproven designs, they are not established standards, they come under licenses that make incorporation into Solaris competitors difficult, and Sun controls them tightly. In short, they aren't "contributions", they are simply trial balloons.
Yes, your examples adequately sum up Sun's open source "contributions": too late, entirely self-serving, and useless.
OpenOffice - gone
/etc/shadow - Gone /etc/shadow isn't a Sun contribution, it's a convention.
As I was saying that's pretty much the only contribution Sun has made. (Of course, it wasn't actually written by Sun, Sun open sourced it for a specific business purpose and conflict with Microsoft, and they are still having trouble letting go).
Java - Gone
Sun didn't contribute Java to the open source world; in fact, they have been trying hard to prevent open source implementations. The Java implementations that run on my Debian box were painstakingly developed clean-room implementations, and there is no significant client or server code that relies on it.
RPC - Gone
First of all, Linux's implementation of RPC isn't based on Sun's. Second, RPC and NFS are horrible standards.
PAM - Gone
There are no Sun contributions in Linux-PAM that I can see.
Much of Gnome - Gone
"Much of Gnome"? Where is your evidence? I don't remember the last time I have seen a Sun copyright on a piece of Gnome software.
Not a very usable box anymore and this is only a very small set of examples.
Yes, and your small set of examples is typical. You keep listing things where Sun made decisions for their proprietary UNIX systems and open source then had to reimplement those decisions (sometimes against Sun's objections and usually without help from Sun) because that was the pragmatic thing to do.
If we went by your reasoning, that copying of a proprietary feature by an open source project contributes a "contribution" by the proprietary vendor, then Microsoft would be an even bigger contributor to Linux--after all, according to your reasoning, Microsoft "contributed" OpenOffice, Wine, Samba, and most of Gnome.
The real kicker is that that, not only did Sun fail to contribute most of the things you say they did, many of the standards they set for the UNIX world have been crap.
How open-sourcing something can go against open source really does defy logic.
Open sourcing AIX would fragment the open source UNIX world because it would add yet another UNIX-like OS to the open source world. It would also place more of an obligation and burden on IBM to contribute to it, when they'd much rather focus on Linux.
Maybe you don't remember, but the reason why UNIX was having such problems was fragmentation. Open source foes often accuse open source of being fragmented. Open sourcing a piece of software that contributes little to the open source world is a bad thing because it adds to fragmentation. IBM did the right thing: they took the good pieces out of AIX and added them to Linux. Solaris did the wrong thing: they open sourced all of Solaris but prevented any pieces in Solaris to be put into Linux. And neither IBM nor Sun are stupid: IBM wanted to help the open source community, Sun wanted to hurt it.
I'm going to guess your age here.. you're about 15 years old.
I wish. But, unfortunately, your guess is as wrong as your understanding of the software marketplace.
Geez, stop evaluating news source by credibility and start using your own head! That guy makes sense, while claims that terrorists could brew up unstable explosives in an airplane bathroom do not.
Ever hear of, oh, NFS. No? How about RPC? These Sun contributions to open source predate IBM's involvement with FOSS by a long time.
Wow, that's some creative rewriting of history. In fact, NFS was proprietary for many years. I'm not sure at what point Sun did or did not release NFS source code, but it hasn't been relevant to the Linux world because (1) Linux already had its own NFS implementations by the time Sun released it, and (2) Sun's licenses were likely unacceptable.
Furthermore, both NFS and RPC were poor designs. The UNIX network file system world is still in shambles, and Sun and NFS are single-handedly responsible for that. NFS was so bad that with "NFSv4", Sun essentially started over from scratch, but it's been too little, too late.
Let me soothe your concerns, in fact Sun without OpenSolaris dwarfs IBM in terms of OpenSource contributions
Yeah? Care to name some examples?
and it also excludes a huge amount of IP donated by Sun in the form of properly documented standards Patents and interfaces that most of the other commercial donators to OpenSource had to be dragged kicking and screaming to.
Yeah? Again, care to give some specifics? The only "IP donation" that I have seen come out of Sun is their grant of patents and IP for their "OpenSolaris" release--utterly useless to anybody but Solaris adopters. Sun hasn't even released the Java specifications as open specifications (poorly written as they are). So, where are those supposed "IP donations""?
On my Debian system, out of 1600 packages, there are exactly two pieces of software that Sun can claim some kind of credit for: Tcl (obsolete and abandoned by Sun) and OpenOffice. Where exactly are Sun's supposed open source contributions if there is almost nothing of them to be found in a complete, popular Linux distribution?
I suggest people look at your Slashdot posting history to see where you're coming from; I think it speaks for itself.
I think this has more to do with IBM feeling the heat over not doing *anything* to open-source AIX.
AIX has contributed most of the valuable bits and pieces of AIX to Linux already and they have contributed extensively to Linux.
Open sourcing AIX would make no sense; it would be an attack on Linux and open source, just like open sourcing Solaris was a deliberate and calculated attack by Sun on Linux (coordinated with Sun FUD and Sun sham licenses).
I think you're on to something: this seems like a good idea to finance research into manned space travel. Just think how much space travel would advance once the RIAA figures out how to have their lawyers hand-deliver a cease-and-decist letter.
(Of course, given their ethics, they'd just be working on a survivable one-way trip, but that's still quite a feat.)
It's tough to reason with someone who believes they are in the right with their chosen deity by eradicating you and your way of life.
Look at who we support in the region: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, highly un-democratic, oppressive, and sometimes vicious regimes. When Iran had a democratic government, we got rid of it for economic reasons.
To many people in the region, the US is a behemoth that uses its military to ensure a cheap supply of oil and is willing to keep people from achieving self-determination, economic development, and democracy in order to keep oil prices low. They don't want to "eradicate our way of life", they are pissed because they believe that we are preventing them from achieving it themselves.
You know, kill two birds with one stone. Heck, I bet that this machine could establish paternity as well.
Well, obviously, that's a great idea. "Mr. Smith, you must be a terrorist, because you state that the person you're traveling with is your daughter, but our security detector clearly shows that she is not." Oops.
I have about 1600 packages installed on my Debian system. Of those, 84 mention Sun in some form, but mostly, it's just bug fixes or ports to Solaris that Sun contributed to other people's projects. Only two groups of packages can be said to be Sun contributions: Tcl (obsolete and abandoned by Sun) and OpenOffice.
Claims that Sun is a great supporter of open source just don't stand up to real-world facts. Sun usually only open sources things when they are afraid of becoming irrelevant in some market, or as an add-on to a necessary proprietary offering, and even then only under some carefully picked nuisance license.
10 years ago, Sun promised ANSI and ISO standards for Java plus open source implementations. What did we get? No standards, a lot of FUD (yes, FUD from Sun) about how they can't because of MSFT, proprietary and closed implementations, costly compatibility tests, bloated APIs and implementations, and threats of lawsuits.
Now that FOSS implementations are mature and nearly complete, Sun is trying to undermine them by finally open sourcing Java (at least in name--in practice, the license will probably be a sham).
The sooner Sun goes out of business, the better for everybody. Microsoft at least makes no secret about where they stand on FOSS, but Sun pretends to be a friend to FOSS but keeps spreading FUD about FOSS and keeps stabbing FOSS efforts in the back.
Actually, the people who have made the most headway are Microsoft.
Actually, Microsoft is just trying to catch up. Linux already has a very flexible driver model in place, and its GUI uses an architecture that is ideally suited to virtualization.
Linux has a problem even switching between virtual consoles
Linux has no problem switching between virtual consoles if you use the correct drivers for your hardware.
Most virtualization is for servers or Linux desktops, and they don't require more than virtual disks and networks, plus minimal console emulation; all that code already exists in open source form.
VMware's big thing was a JIT-like x86 engine, a complex piece of software that is now not needed anymore. That really is a big deal.
Hardware virtualization may be slower right now, but both the hardware and the software supporting it are new. Give it a few iterations and it will be equal to software virtualization.
It may or may not be faster eventually, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that small changes in the hardware make it possible to stop having to depend on costly, proprietary, and complex software--like that sold by VMware.
You know, as someone who spends a lot of time dealing with the interactions between malloc and the OS, I find it extremely amusing that you think a sanity checker for the heap is a bad idea.
Malloc debugging is a great idea, it just shouldn't be in the standard library or enabled for production use.
Personally, I wish Linux had it.
Linux has valgrind, dmalloc, electric-fence, and ccmalloc. Unfortunately, the most useful of those, valgrind, doesn't exist for OSX.
Yeah, that's the obvious answer, but I don't think it works. The Segway can turn in place, and I don't see any need to be able to move sideways. In fact, for a robot intended to interact naturally with humans, sideway motion is probably a bad idea.