Novell hints at a conference all that Sun may not be able to open up solaris so easily since Novell claims copyrights and patents remain with Novell. Is this preventing the development of what may be the most powerful open source operating system in existance?
Novell May Try To Stop OpenSolaris
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What i want to get from people that are against software patents is why they are against and what solutions they have to protect programmers/company’s code?
Oh, that’s easy: copyright. And, unlike patents, it doesn’t cost thousands of dollars to apply for it, so it can be afforded by individuals and SMBs.
Tell me: how many patents does your company hold? How can you be sure that the software you will develop does not break an existing patent? Are you prepared to pay the price of patent litigation – either as a plaintiff or defendent?
Copyright is the only IP protection software needs. Patents were designed for something else entirely.
But it’s seems hard to them to answer to this question. The only thing that they say is they are against, but don’t know why and what solutions to solve this problem, (if i can call this a problem)….
Actually that is not true at all. There are very eloquent arguments against software patents, and the solution to this problem is quite simple: copyrights, not patents. You’d already know that if you took the time to research both sides of the argument.
There, I solved it for you. Now go run that alleged company of yours.
Patents are the only great thing that man created, because they garantee the research of new ideas, and don’t allow other people to copy them without authorization of the owner of the patent.
Yes, patents are truely great. How else would we prevent developing countries to grow crops that are efficent enough to feed their population, how else would we prevent poor people that shouldn’t live in the first place from getting medical treatment and if patents couldn’t be applied to software the streets would be crowded with IBM and Microsoft executives begging for food. We wouldn’t want that would we.
PATENT’s protect programmers for spend their time/work ( could be lots of years) doing a software from being copied.
It is often very hard to know if the code you write is worthy of a patent. The problem with software patents is that they describe ideas that can be formulated in different many ways. This means that a programmer that do a patent search may not realize that he have written something patented. Years later, when he has built a business and is selling his program he may be forced to pay royalties and perhaps even damages for every program he ever sold. This will create losses as the price of the program was not calculated with royalties in mind.
Software is like a book, if you copy a book no author will be interested in write a book because there would be no profit. No author would like to spend years writing something for free. No research, no new ideas, and so on..
Very true, software is very much like a book. Then why is the contents of books not covered by patents? They are covered by copyrights and that seams to be enough for the printed word, why can’t it work for software.
The more software that is out there to build on, the easier it is to do the ‘simple’ things, and the world can move on to working on ‘harder’ problems.
I mean are you really so brainwashed by the Microsoft ‘drip feed improvements to maximise M$ profit’ as to believe that this is the best way forward?
Value – real value – in the computer industry is represented by smart people who can apply computing power to solve problems.
Of course this scares the crap out of a lot of companies who have grown fat and happy simply packaging and reselling the solution to the same problem over and over again, but eventually it becomes apparent that the only reason the problem still exists is to support their revenue streams.
Smart people will always be valuable, and smart people who can solve real problems even more so. Open Source software (just like closed source software) is next to useless without the skills to use it, to develop it and to administer it.
When/if commercial software companies see their revenue streams dry up due to open source (and i wouldnt hold my breath), that simply means their customers are spending that cash on other things. So make sure you recognise what those other things will be and position yourself to profit from that.
You’re either a smart person who can adapt to industry changes and ride the wave no matter how it breaks, or you are already doomed by whatever inevitable industry shakeup occurs in your field.
First off, patents were created for two reasons, primarily to serve society, it was surmised that competition through restriction of already researched avenues would lead to further innovation. The second was to provide returns for the inventor, their time and effort. There is also a clause where if it benefits society then the information should be set free — this is the reason why it’s socially oriented for the libertarians at heart.
The thing is that software is too close to mathematics, which is very much raw thoughts or ideas, and like previous posters have stated, this is covered under copyright. This is a solved problem as far as law is considered, the judiciaries need to understand this and act in accordance to this. Sadly, unless it’s largely explicit judiciaries suck and it’s even worse where countries follow the letter as opposed to the spirit of the law.
Even with this, there are issues, with todays faster paced world, you can’t have these anachronisms. New information is growing exponentially, thanks to improved problem solving strategies and technologies continually increasing the amount of information we can generate both in scope and resolution.
A lot of IP laws are getting in the way, the best bet is to produce usable implementation rather than potentially usable materials. Even in todays world, companies are NOT really interested in licensing unused IP, if the inventor can’t start a company with it, that’s a sign, for them, that it’s far too overvalued. This basically becomes a force function to produce something usable. Invention of core concepts becomes merely a necessary step in many. Not to mention the cost in researching whether one can protect their IP is getting far too high as to starting to out weigh the benefits.
Current band-aid solutions available to most countries is to reduce the length of the monopoly granted and to remove certain class of IP from being patented and being moved into other spaces or removed out right. Ultimately, patents will prove more and more useless as we arrive into the custom product areas. We’re already at a point where soon we’ll have a machine that can generate fairly intricate items of arbitrary geometries made to order. Specification language and cost reduction being the major hurdles, they’re being tackled. Ultimately, IP will die out unshackled services oriented economies take hold.
Lastly, it should be understood that protection of IP is not really the same thing as protection of PRODUCT. One usable and the other is merely and enabler of the latter. Product protection is also a separate ball game.
Does MYSQL commercial version uses MYSQL GPL code? If no, why they are identical? Are they using programmers code that do code for FUN?
The code is identical. And yes it could contain parts that are written for fun. However most free software is not written for fun but to cover a specific need and it is typically done by somebody who gets paid to do it.
The biggest software market today is not schrink wrapped software, but inhouse development in companies whos main business is not software related. After all, nobody really needs software. People need food, housing, transportation,
entertainment, sex,… not software.
By sharing development costs companies can provide services to their customers at a lower cost. By doing so they gain a competitive advantage. This works particularly well if the software in question is a comodity e.g. operating systems, databases, office software.
The bigger the pool of free software gets, the more profitable it will be to add to that pool. E.g. add a system for to handle digital signatures for openoffice will take you a few days, but writing a new office suite from scratch with that capability will take years. Once sombody have added it the value of Openoffice is even bigger and now its even more tempting for others to expand it further.
All of a sudden we have a demand for people that have the knowledge to expand openoffice, and we will have a sofware industry based on service instead of products. The best thing about this, is that this type of industry is much harder to move to India or som other low cost county. To give good service you have an advantage if you are close to the customer.
Patents are a good idea. They ensure people will be rewarded for their work. Patents should have a small expiration date, especially in technology. 5 years is more than adequate for people to be rewarded for their work.
Definition of Patents:
http://www.silo.lib.ia.us/specialized-services/patents-trademark/pa…
Patent Definition
A patent for an invention is a grant of a property right by the Government to the inventor. Patents are granted for any new and useful industrial or technical process , machine, manufacture, or chemical composition of matter, or any new useful improvement thereof.. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required. The term of a patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed. The patent gives the inventor the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention in the United States or importing the invention into the United States.
Now what do Software Patents do? Violate that principle that a Patent being a monopoly designed to recoup Research and Development costs, must be completely described, and is not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine, but instead on the detailed description of it. The only thing Software Patents do is gives the “inventor” the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention in the United States or importing the invention into the United States.
As such it is fraud masquerading as business. Al Capone stuff.
What i want to get from people that are against software patents is why they are against and what solutions they have to protect programmers/company’s code? But it’s seems hard to them to answer to this question. The only thing that they say is they are against, but don’t know why and what solutions to solve this problem, (if i can call this a problem)….
Copyrights would be fine to me. That would create less uncertainty for the developer. Less uncertainty would make it easier to get funding for new projects.
In a world of software patents nobody in their right mind would put their mony in a software project as there is no way to see if the project is unique or if you will loose your money to some big company with some overly broad patent.
Only the lawyers benefit from software patents.
More antics. Reported by a “journalist” whose objectivity has been speculated upon by others more in-the-know than me.
Nothing to see here. If SysVR4 – the license of which Sun bought out completely, ie Sun can do whatever it likes with its SysVR4 source code – was in fact about 50% BSD as the USL vs BSDi case suggested, then it’s probable that eveybody else developing and selling Unix these days, could do the same.
Ie, it’s a non-issue. “Put another log on the fire, …
Suppose you are a software company and you want to sell software, the vendor go to a client to sell the software, the client says at final presentation of our software, i like it! it does all what i want! but i can get it for free (opensource GPL).
My question is simple, is that good for software company business? Is that capitalism, or be able to get a salary at the end of the month?
Well, even employees of communist companies like IBM get their pay check in the end of the month;-)
If your customer can get similar software as yours for free, elsewhere, your software simply isn’t good enough. Companies like Red Hat, MySQL AB and to some extent IBM make their money on selling services. Perhaps you should too.
Actually, I would guess there is much more money in selling services than selling boxes of prepackaged software.
Did anybody ever used Solaris as desktop system? Its absolut nonsense. Without third party applications you cant do anything useful (and there aren’t tools like yum or apt with huge repos). If running on common hardware, stability is gone. If something bad happens, you at your own (linux crash recovery is breeze). Reconfiguration (e.g. NIC change or something similar) can be total nightmare.
And yes, I understand, that in server room (with big iron) things are (or can be) different.
But why one must prefer Solaris to Linux, OS X or Windows in this very moment? I don’t see any point.
(sorry for my language, i’m not native speaker)
What about Yast?
They have given a few things.
I don’t think its expected that you open source your core business to become part of the open source community. Simply distributing or using FOSS is enough to join. And good members share their bug reports/fixes and enhancements with the rest of the community. To be a good member of the FOSS community a business only has to be slightly more mature than Sun.
Honestly its all about cooperation.
Let’s work together, it makes life simpler.
Just a couple of points Bascule:
1) SunOS was based on BSD
2) Solaris (1) was based on ATT code
3) Solaris (2) was a fusion of BSD and ATT code.
FYI: Solaris 2 may have had the ATT code not 1. However; there was still a fusion (mostly ATT though).
I didn’t bother reading all the post, but to all (crond, simba,..), please don’t speak about subjects you are not familiar with.
You obviously haven’t a clue what socialism, Marxism and communism are, nor do you know what are the differences.
I’ve lived almost half my, otherwise short, life in a communist country if you doubt I know anything on the subject.
The reason, communism failed is something that is not, in general, applicable to open source and is probably beyond anything you could comprehend.
And before you criticize, Marxism, i suggest you read something about this, otherwise brilliant and ahead of its time, social system.
And before you bash and troll, remember this, it’s not the idea that counts, what counts is the implementation. And communism was a bad implementation.
Oups, i mean “Benevolent dictator”
I have to say i’ve really been enjoying reading this thread. I always find it interesting watching people duke it out on the internet. Here’s what i think about all i’ve read:
Software Patents: I can appreciate the principals behind them; protecting programmers and developers from having their innovations used by others. But software patents just aren’t practicall. What if the scroll bar, text box, windowing or the single click button/icon were pattented? Now i’m not sure which (if any) of the above could actually be patented, but to my understanding it is possible. And what kind of desktop environment would we be forced to use??
I dont really know to much about sun or solaris. I’d love to see solaris open sourced. Because i like open source. I’d love to see every operating system open sourced. But novell has every right persue legal action against Sun. ‘IF’sun is violating it’s license agreement, which it would do by open sourcing the original System V code that is part of Solaris. But Novell hasn’t said “Open source Solaris and you can consider yourself sued!”. They are only waiting to see what license Sun will choose (for now). Also, sun hasn’t come out and said “We will open source Solaris!”. They’re only exploring the possibility.
So everyone should just relax. And in response to some earlier poster (i can’t be bothered going back to find out who), socialism and communism have only failed in the past because they have not been true Socialist/Communist societies. They have all really been an oligarchy. And for you kids who don’t know, that means they’ve been controlled by an elite few (the ruling party), where that party (eg. the communist party) has complete controll of all aspects of the government. I’m not a communist or anything. And i know there’s no place on the internet for facts, but i just wanted to share what i learned in highschool history class.
Abe
PS I’m from canad where we have socialised health care, and it works pretty well.
PPS I’m still not a communist
“I think Solaris, and Windows and other proprietary operating systems should continue/stay in closed source of their operating system and patent their new features to not allow opensource operating systems community take their ideas.”
You cannot patent an idea. Only a specific methods or a set of procedures. Hence, generic or product duplicates all over the world. The process to patent is a public one, so public in-fact, it reveals the specific objects method or procrdure. Then the companies must protect the specific procedure or method by enforcing it. If they fail to protect it, then the method or procedure that was patented becomes public domain, or public property.
“When did litigation by itself become a dirty trick?”
I agree. Being a ‘civil society’, litigation keeps us one step above the ‘the law of the jungle’. If someone hurts you either personally or publically, finacially or physically, from an individual or a group acting-as-one entity – what is wrong with litigation?
If Novell(TM) is the true ‘owner’ of *nix code and said code has been intergrated into SCOG(TM) and Sun(TM) product lines, then Novell(TM) has a right to protect and determine the direction of its property.
Making money or reclaiming money off an idea is not wrong. Using someones ‘specific’ process or method is. If it takes litigation to protect a specific process or method then let them litigate.
Dear Sun,
Please do not let Novell or anyone else making you stop distributing free (as in free of charge) Solaris. Do not open sources: sources are relevant to not more than few thousand geeks who have nothing better to do but spend their time inventing better mouse cursor.
My friend, when real IT people were asked what they treasure most in the OS, they gave the following list:
1. Stablility of the system and quality of the code;
2. Good support;
3. Low price;
4. Access to sources.
You have three out of four. Do not let greedy competitors drag you into courts. Just drop #4 for a while, serve people demanding first three items from that list.
We need good UNIX for X86, with the option to run it for free if we are pleased so. If we need your services we’ll give you a call and open our wallets. It is business reality of today.
GNU/Linux is not UNIX. Your OS is. Please do what you planned to do: release Solaris for X86 with the generous license allowing to copy binaries freely. That would be enough for 90% of the people using UNIX as their OS. 10% can stay with “NOT UNIX,” whatever it is: Linux, Windows, BeOS or RSX11. Who cares!
Hope to see your Solaris x86 on many Intel servers in many server rooms soon, replacing “NOT UNIX” OSes.
Keep good work!
Your truly,
Long time UNIX user tired of having to use “NOT UNIX” just ‘case it’s cheap.
Produce your own clothes in the style Mr. Gandhi advocated.
Produce your own “freedom” computer systems.
Have you ever used Solaris before? And yes I use it as a Desktop OS daily at work. This all depends on what you call a desktop. If you are doing system administration and all you need is a few term sessions, then the Common Desktop Environment (or CDE) is all that you need. If you are talking about graphical e-mail clients (besides dtmail), transparent windows, and other “eye candy”, then you have the Java Desktop System (JDS) which supports all of that.
Also you must not be familiar with http://www.sunfreeware.com, or http://www.blastwave.org, or http://www.solaris4you.dk. There are plenty of third party applications for Solaris, and if not just compile them yourself. And what does Solaris need with yum or apt when you have System 5 packages? Solaris 10 comes with a number of applications such as the Evolution e-mail client, IP Filter firewall, Internet Printing Protocol support, and many more.
Obviously you have never used JumpStart (remote installation) or Solaris Flash (archive a system after building it). I have no problems recovering from a disaster if prepared correctly and using Sun tools. It sounds to me like you need to lean something about Solaris before you go talking trash about it
>>Open Source and communism have in common :
– Both are utopian concepts.
– Both implementation are based on dictature : commercial software should die because it is dirty, impure (RMS).<<
Well well well, who’s dangling from the window there? Obviously open source software is not an utopian concept because of several reasons.
The most obvious upfront: “utopian” describes an orientation which isn’t connected to a de facto attempt of realization. In other words, utopian designs are designs trying to transcend reality without consideration of how and when.
Obviously open source software is far beyond the stage of actual implementation. Therefore it isn’t, by definition, an utopian idea.
Communism is the endstage of history as perceived by a materialistic point of view (you all know of the materialistic dialectics that defined soviet social science? you don’t? Then please never use the terms “communism”, “socialism” or “marxism” again until you educated yourself). Since Communism is the endstage of history you probably can’t achieve it within a single human’s life span. It takes an evolutionary historic process, which will inevitable lead to the downfall of Capitalism (and all other forms of market and society) and the rise of Communism. Societies in a pre-communist stage which already embrace Communism as its historic destination and strive to be communistic are considered to be socialistic. Socialism is the name of the game for these transitional states. Therefore and quite consequential most former eastern block countries considered themselves to be socialist, not communist, states.
So far Marx for starters, on to history. The Lenin approach replaces the evolutionary historic process with a revolutionary historic process. Stalin further modified it to “socialism in one country”. So much for the world-domination ambitions of the former Soviet Union. Of course this doesn’t deny the fact of the “satellites” and the “sphere of influence” battles, also know as the “proxy wars”. Both blocks (WP and NATO, of course) had a lot of fun playing hide & seek and killing millions of innocents in some distant 3rd world country.
Whatever, this further shows that open source software and Communism aren’t so much the same. To my knowledge OSS is not destinied to be the endpoint of historic development and even if it results in this in the end it only affects software, not whole economies and/or societies.
The second argument is even worse. Neither Communism nor OSS are dictatorships by design. Whatever Mr. Stallman says about closed source software, it doesn’t grant him uncontested power over the software development process and i am quite sure Mr. Stallman would refuse any such charge and oppose anybody who tries to do so – if you take a closer look at the GNU history this is actually the reason why Mr. Stallman started all this. Additionally Mr. Stallman is already a contested speaker for the freedom of software. Consider Mr. Torvalds or Mr. Raymond.
>>Choose the path of the liberty, the real one : competition and democracy. We don’t need any “Benevolent dictor”. <<
I wholeheartly agree: we don’t need any dictator. Actually i don’t want anybody who think they know better what’s good for me. I want freedom, which obviously is a negativly defined term.
Now, Competition and Democracy are great concepts, too bad that closed software development is not very democratic and the products of this way of development can’t compete with the products of open source development and will probably will vanish over time.
HAND
i dont know about solarus, but i think Java would be the better candidate for opensource, and i mean true opensource under GPL, and not some fake or psudo opensouce like msft’s shared source…
but i dont think Sun wants to really open source anything, i think they are playing games in order to get media attention…
Maureen O’Gara, if people remember, is the person who wrote the bogus story about the happenings at one of the SCO v IBM hearings that she happened not to be at (http://www.linuxbusinessweek.com/story/46800.htm). Disregard anything written by her, it is all shit.
“What about Yast? ”
Are you seriously comparing Yast, an application that no other distribution can find a good use for in addition to being a slow bloated peace of shi… software, to what Sun has contributed to Open Source. Compare Yast to Mozilla, OpenOffice, Gnome and OpenSolaris and then go back to the drawing board. Yast is found in SuSe. Everything Sun has contributed to open source is found everywhere.
Seriously, if you want me to be impressed with Novell’s contribution to the opensource world, they can open their directory services in such a way that it finds it’s way in all Linux distributions like OpenOffice has. Until then, I’ll stick to my view of Novell being users and abusers of open source.
So Novell will prevent Open Sourcing stuff… wow, now that’s a truly dedicated linux player….
When i defend software patents I defend also copyright! This two juridical issues protect programmers sourcecode,
First, they are not “judicial issues” but rather sets of laws. Since you seem to have a bit of a problem with your english I’ll let it pass.
What you fail to realize is that copyright is completely sufficient to protect software, while patents are not at all adapted to the software world.
You didn’t answer my questions, earlier: how many patents does your company hold? (You do realize you have to apply and pay for them, right?) How can you be sure none of the software you’ve written violates any patents? (You can violate patents without knowing about them.) Can you afford patent litigation, either as a plaintiff or as a defendant?
I’m starting to think that you’re a patent lawyer. These, along with large transnational companies such as Microsoft and IBM, are the only people who will profit from software patents.
binarys and ideas from being copied by people that do opensource, and garantee you a salary in the end of month.
Please stop your demonizing of open source programmers. Copyrights weren’t mainly designed to protect from open source programmers, but from people who want to PROFIT from someone else’s copyrightable IP. The GPL is founded on copyright law, it cannot exist without it.
If opensource coders/company’s should do code for FUN, why opensource company’s don’t do support for FUN?
Because open source programmers and companies don’t code for fun. Many of them are salaried employees. Most of the kernel hackers work for large companies, or for the OSDL. Other contribute freely, not out of fun, but to contribute to the community.
Check it out here,
SunSource.net
http://www.sunsource.net/
(more than 30 projects)
Also be noted that Sun has its root from a very early opensource system, BSD
Because of some patant that Kodak bought from some failing company that broadly patanted the concepts behind Java, (that was never developed by either of them), they were able to win a case against Sun. Sun now has to pay a licensing fee for their own software they developed and wrote.
And because Sun probably closely tied Java with Solaris 10, they may have some issues with Kodak who now owns some IP in Solarias.
This the damage that ill defined patant law gives us. So who holds the patant for posting comments on a internet based forum regarding articles posted for review and critique by the general public?
“And before you bash and troll, remember this, it’s not the idea that counts, what counts is the implementation. And communism was a bad implementation.”
What a tired excuse. I suppose that totalitarianism was a great idea hindered by a bad implementation? Afterall it is all about the implementation, right?
ah, right, and the computer took away lots of jobs because no-one has a typing pool any more.
Except that, magically, we suddenly have millions of people who are paid to program, use and fix computers.
Linux is taking away jobs because Sun and SCO face competition. Except, magically, we have thousands of people who are paid to program, use and fix Linux.
Please take a wider view. Linux isn’t somehow evil because it competes with proprietary Unix vendors…
“Even Eric Raymond doesn’t agree with Stallman. And Even Eric Raymon admits that Stallman was probably influenced heavily my Marxism.”
Aha, so someone finally succumbs to the ultimate law of online debate – when all else fails, brand your opponent either a Nazi or a Communist. Always works.
Now, where’s my burning torch? Meet you at the castle gate in five minutes.
“Ok, I’m not entirely sure about that last sentence (ESL I’m guessing), but here it goes anyway. Yes, that would be capitolism, the client has a choice and makes a choice. Taking that choice away would not be capitolism, it’s been a while since my High-School Government/Economics class, but I think that would be socialism. And capitolism does not guarantee a salary.”
It obviously has been, because socialism is about public ownership of major infrastucture, not about telling people what kind of software to buy. That would be dictatorship.
“Get used to it, i don’t care if current society needs them.
Imagine a car maker who had to pay royalties to some obscure
organisation which owns the patent to the shape of a wheel.Imagine how it would influence all manufacturing and life in general if there would be such a patent.”
Er, they already do. Every company involved in manufacturing owns lots of patents and licenses thousands from *other* companies involved in manufacturing. It all works out there, more or less, and most people would agree it’s probably a good thing. The problem is that software development is massively different from manufacturing in many ways, but software patent law doesn’t recognise this at all.
He actually said ‘juridical’, not ‘judicial’. Which was a correct term to use.
What a tired excuse. I suppose that totalitarianism was a great idea hindered by a bad implementation?
No. Totalitarianism is the implementation. You can have corporate-friendly totalitarianism (i.e. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Chile under Pinochet).
The original poster was right: when Marx wrote Das Kapital, he was mostly thinking about England and Germany, which were industrialized nations, not Russia (still largely agrarian at the time). Lenin and the Bolsheviks (and later Mao) adapted Marxism for a society that wasn’t ready for it, with disastrous results.
BTW, you all should know that OSNews usually moderates down any posts that talk about communism, capitalism, etc. So it’s kind of self-defeating to try to veer off discussions about the GPL and open-source in that direction. In any case, F/OSS is neither at the left or right of the economical spectrum – it is economically neutral. Trying to portray it as “communist” is not only factually incorrect, but also a tired old cliche that does not advance the debate in any way.
It obviously has been, because socialism is about public ownership of major infrastucture, not about telling people what kind of software to buy. That would be dictatorship.
Well said.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure what “capitolism” is…I guess it has to do with congress. 🙂
He actually said ‘juridical’, not ‘judicial’. Which was a correct term to use.
You’re right, I read his post too fast. [Bows his head in shameé]
However I still don’t think Patents and Copyrights are “juridical issues”. They’re laws. Whether Patents should apply to software is a juridical issue, but pretty much everyone agrees on copyright law…
Anyway, it was just a little jab at crond’s english skills. English is my second language as well (I’m french-canadian), and my philosophy is that I’ll only improve my command of the language if people correct me when I make mistakes. Accordingly, I don’t refrain from helping others by pointing out their mistakes as well.
<< Look at BSD. There are no commercial FreeBSD distributions.>>
This is a failing of the BSD community. In Linux, I can name quite a handful of commerical distros.
-RH
-SUSE
-MDK
-Xandros
-Linspire
-Linare
-etc…
How is it a failing of the BSD community that we don’t have thirty-thousand people trying to sell us something we can get for free?
Personally, I feel slightly queasy after the creation of things like GoBSD, because it’s similar to Redhat…
Those companies should be pariahs, since overall they are significantly more bloated and slow than what you can do yourself.
crond; do you know the difference between copyright and patent ? Your precious software is protected by copyright. software licensing is based on copyright. Software patents only serve to allow companies that can’t produce saleable code, to sue other programmers for “using their ideas” even if they have never heard of the patent or the patented product. I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath on you ..
Actually, totalitarianism is not an implementation at all. Implementations of totalitarianism would include – nazi germany, stalinist russia, maoist china, etc.
I disagree. Nazism was a philosophy, Nazi Germany was a totalitarian implementation of Nazism, Stalinist Russia was a totalitarian implementation of Socialism, and so was Maoist China.
Totalitarianism is not a political philosophy. It is a form of social organization. Case in point: Nazi Germany was pro-private ownership (except if you were a jew…), anti-socialism (despite their name), while Stalinist Russia was anti-private ownership, pro-socialism (well, a very narrow definition of socialism, anyway).
Just like you can be a Libertarian Rightist (Friedman) or a Libertarian Leftist (Chomsky, Gandhi), you can be an Authoritarian/Totalitarian Rightist (Hitler, Mussolini) or Leftist (Stalin, Mao).
Interesting interpretation of history – not really responsive to anything, however. It is irrelevant where it was tried and failed.
It is not an interpretation of history at all. If you read Das Kapital it’s clear that he has mostly England in mind – perhaps because nearly all of the cases and examples he gives involve England. Marxism applies to industrialized societies, with a skilled workforce. Neither Russia nor China fit the bill.
It is irrelevant where it was tried and failed.
Please explain the logic behind this statement. I’ll state that, on the contrary, it is extremely relevant to know the background of where it was tried in relation to its failure.
Why do you think the U.S. maintains its embargo on Cuba? It can’t be because of human rights abuses, because the U.S. maintains normal commercial relations with many countries where the human rights situation is much, much worse (in Latin America as well as in the rest of the world). In fact, Cuba was singled out because of the “threat of a good example” of socialism that worked. The fact that Fidel is still widely respected in Cuba (even though most people think it’s time for him to step down), that levels of education are very high (Cuba has one of the highest doctor/patient ratio of all Latin America), that the population is actually quite involved in local government (local officials being elected by the citizens), proves that you can have a reasonable successful socialist government. Plainly put, if it hadn’t been for the devastating effects of the embargo, Cuba today would be one of the most prosperous Latin American countries out there.
There are also numerous socialist governments in Europe, in Asia, in South America (Brazil) and in at least one canadian province, though that does not mean that those countries/provinces are “socialist”. It simply goes to show that essential principles of socialism have become part of many governments.
In fact, socialism has greatly influenced Keynesian economics, which are still dominant in today’s economies. For example, for all its posturing as a free-market champion, the U.S. is still a very protectionist and interventionist country. Those are not capitalist principles, by any standard.
cron; you’re a trolls troll ! I don’t think I’ver ever seen sucha wave of ignorance in quite some time.
” Suppose you are a software company and you want to sell software, the vendor go to a client to sell the software, the client says at final presentation of our software, i like it! it does all what i want! but i can get it for free (opensource GPL). ”
if the GPL product is better, or equal, the company is right to use it, as it has the added advantage of being modifiable. Now suppose the company says “i like it! it does all what i want! but i can get it for a better price from another proprietary source” Is this still sooooo wrong ? It’s the same freakin thing ! Compete or die !
You can’t be in charge of anything but your X-Box ! Do your homework and stop being such a pest !
That idiot O’Gara – remember her?
She takes one off-the-cuff comment from Messman, and runs with it.
It’s all bullshit. Wait for actions before running off at the mouth. Of course everyone will be examining the Sun license for legal ramificiations – IBM, Novell, SCO, everybody involved in UNIX. So what?
As for Solaris, it and Sun are a dying company. In ten years, there will be no other UNIX variant except Linux being considered seriously by anyone other than the corporations who still run OS/360.
It’s been obvious for five years now that HP, Sun, and IBM should dump their proprietary OS’s, contribute the features that make them enterprise-class to Linux, and get on with differentiating themselves by adding management features. It’s stupid to continue to try to push niche proprietary UNIX systems into the enterprise. All that does is hand the market to Microsoft which is unified.
AIX, Solaris and HP/UX are dead systems, no matter what features may be added to them in the near future. Linux will surpass them in scalability and features in short order.
Open sourcing Solaris or any of the others will not change that.
“I disagree. Nazism was a philosophy, Nazi Germany was a totalitarian implementation of Nazism”
How else could Nazism be implemented? Totalitarianism, like socialism, is a broad classification of different forms of political organization. For instance, totalitarianism is to junk food as National Socialism is to potato chips. Are you suggesing that junk food is an implementation of a potato chip? Silly.
“Totalitarianism is not a political philosophy. It is a form of social organization”
Since when do political philosphies ignore social organization? In other words, these are not mutually exclusive terms.
“It is not an interpretation of history at all.”
If not, then what is it? Are we to assume it is a first person accounting, Karl?
“Please explain the logic behind this statement.”
I think you missed the point. I was saying that your version of marxist history was irrelevant to my point. I suppose it would be relevant to a general discussion of russia and karl marx – just not my point.
How else could Nazism be implemented?
That’s irrelevant: just because a philosophy can only be implemented in a certain way doesn’t equate the philosophy and its implementation. Just because A leads to B doesn’t mean that A = B.
Totalitarianism, like socialism, is a broad classification of different forms of political organization.
Incorrect. Socialism is an economic theory. It is not a form of political organization. You can have a democratic socialist government, or an autocratic one.
For instance, totalitarianism is to junk food as National Socialism is to potato chips. Are you suggesing that junk food is an implementation of a potato chip? Silly.
Good example of the False Analogy fallacy. Totalitarianism is certainly broader than National Socialism, but it does not contain it, while “junk food” does contain “potato chip”. Totalitarianism is an attribute of the power exerced by totalitarian governments, while National Socialism was the political philosophy (i.e. what determined the direction of policy making decisions) of the Nazi goverment.
Since when do political philosphies ignore social organization? In other words, these are not mutually exclusive terms.
They are not mutually exclusive, but they are not synonymous. In other words, political philosophies can be implemented in various forms of social organizations (mainly because of background socio-historic currents). The two concepts are definitely related on many levels, but are not interchangeable.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough: totalitarianism can be an attribute of the implementation of a political philosophy. It is not, however, a political philosophy in itself, even if a totalitarian state is the predictible outcome of some of political philosophies (such as fascism in general and Nazism in particular).
If not, then what is it? Are we to assume it is a first person accounting, Karl?
It is not an interpretation to say that Marx based his theories using England as a model. It’s right there in his writings. So indeed it is a first-person account, Groucho.
I think you missed the point. I was saying that your version of marxist history was irrelevant to my point.
I think you missed the point. You originally said:
“What a tired excuse. I suppose that totalitarianism was a great idea hindered by a bad implementation? Afterall it is all about the implementation, right?”
in response to someone who said that “Communism” as demonstrated by the U.S.S.R and China were bad implementation of Marx’s theories.
But the fact is that “totalitarianism” was never a great idea – by definition it is an oppressive form of government for the citizenry at large, the only ones benefitting being those who hold power. On the other hand, Socialism is a great idea that was never well implemented, the reason being that it was never implemented in a society that was ready for it (i.e. England in the late 19th century). Socialist principles did find their way into modern economic systems, however, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
So my argument was totally relevant to your point, despite the fact that it undermines it (that was the intent, anyway).
I’m guessing we’ve really close to becoming a nuisance on this forum. I’d be happy to continue elsewhere.
I can see that you have a lot of argument in you – I just don’t know who or what you are arguing against.
Any favorite political discussion forum?
Yeah, my guess is that we’ll be moderated down once Eugenia comes in from the week-end. She doesn’t really like that kind of talk here.
Just as well…it’s sunday night and I’m supposed to make dinner! I’ve got a feeling I’ll get oppressed by my totalitarian sweethart if I don’t get to it soon.
Nice arguing with you, even if we don’t agree.
Fair enough. Perhaps another day and another forum.
I don’t quite know why you describe that as ‘interesting’, it’s a practically universal historical interpretation. Even Marxist historians (who still represent a significant historical school, btw) would agree with that interpretation of Russian history.
It is simply amazing the sorts of idiotic debates we get as a result of an idiotic, throwaway comment from Jack Messman.
It’s throwaway in that he’s just trying to throw seeds of doubt in the direction of Sun as to what open sourcing Solaris will entail. He’s another one of these idiotic heads of IT and software companies who has no clue what he’s talking about, but hey.
If opensource coders/company’s should do code for FUN, why opensource company’s don’t do support for FUN?
First of all, most open software is not done for fun. The programmer that make the software may think its fun, but that is not relevant in the business sense. Whats relevant to the business side of it, is that they by releasing their software for create a need for support that can be sold for real money.
I think the next step of GPL licence is opensource code and support for FREE:)
And I suspect that you think that the next step for telecom companies handing out free cellphones to their customers is to let people use those phone for free in their networks. Dream on.
The fact that free software often is considerd less expensive to support than closed source software is probably mostly due to Linux, FreeBSD and other free *nixes
are compared to windows and that windows is so poorly designed that almost anything would be cheaper to support.
Windows doesn’t need to be any good, as the Microsoft business model depends on software lock in. There is no incentive for Microsoft to improve their software. They just make sure that slightly incompatible software hit the market with almost every new PC sold. Then it is just a matter of time before people need to upgrade to stay compatible with their friends or businesspartners. If that strategy doesn’t work, they could always stop suppling bug and security fixew. To get new customers hooked they tolerate a certain degree of software piracy. Once the pirates need support they will have to buy a legal licence, before they can buy support.
In the free software world, this strategy doesn’t work. Somebody will continue to support old code. There is also a strong incentive to keep the quality up. If you don’t, your customers will use some other software and your support market is just a memory.
In the free software world, this strategy doesn’t work.
And, by the same token, people aren’t adopting the “free software world” on their desktops, either. So your point is moot.
“In the free software world, this strategy doesn’t work.”
And, by the same token, people aren’t adopting the “free software world” on their desktops, either. So your point is moot.
But they do put free software on sometimes mission critical servers and it is probably in this field where a free Solaris would make any difference. The fact that we so far have very little penetration of free only shows that the MS-lockin model is very effective. The problem is that it only work in monopoly or near monopoly situations.
The question is will that near monopoly situation remain. I think not. Up until two years ago leading Linux venders such as Red Hat stated that they had no intention of building or supporting desktop systems, but even so the quality of free desktop softwarre rose dramatically. And by now it is a viable alternative for Novell at least on a limited scale.
You can also see a change in attitude in the free *nix community. Five years ago the average Linux user would tell you that anything worth doing could be done in terminal window running “vi”, and if you couldn’t or wouldn’t learn it, you were most likely to stupid to even look at. The main reason for them to run Linux was the macho feeling that they managed to handle something few others could. This giving them little incentive to improve usability.
Today this is all gone. Now usability is cool. This means that the usability of the free desktop have improved tremenously over the last two or three years. New cross platform toolkits have evolved and it becomes easier and easier to port Linux free applications to windows.
Today OpenOffice/StarOffice holds over 10% of the market. What’s even worse for Microsoft, is that it is especially strong in the education sector. This means that we will have new generations of computer users that are aware of the fact that word processing doesn’t necessaryly mean MS-Word. Another example is Mozilla/Firefox. In the last year it have doubled its market penetration, mainly at the expense of MS-Internet explorer. Today more and more free software is developed to be cross platform. You also see a lot of windows software being ported to Linux, e.g. First Class, Peoplesoft…, This reduces the Microsoft advantage.
If Linux wasn’t a potential threat to Microsoft dominance you would not see all these ads from Microsoft comparing Linux to Windows whenever they can find something that make Linux look bad compared to windows.
Solaris is not true open source.
I believe that you left a word out of your post. Surely it should have read…
Solaris is not true open source *yet*.
If we in Sun have not yet toally decided on the license, any speculation on it is simply that. Speculation. There is however, the commitent to an OSI approved licence.
Alan.
wasn’t sunos based on bsd? Is Solaris completely absconced of SunOS code? Or what?
Yes, I used Solaris (up to 8). Just one thing- virtual consoles (yes, i know, this can be enabled) and SSH, essential for administration?
BTW, I know about add- on packages (Solaris companion CD etc).
But, i need also Gimp and ImageMagik, good CD burning tools, audio tools (cdparanoia, mp3 utilities etc, i mostly work with Mac (Logic and Peak!), but i like many command line tools too) every day.
Modern desktop linux can do this all *out of box* on cheap hardware and much much more comfortable. Period.
And yes, I agree, server is totally different universe. Relax.
wasn’t sunos based on bsd? Is Solaris completely absconced of SunOS code? Or what?
SunOS was Sun’s Own Version of 4.xBSD. Solaris – the OS it turned into, was Sun’s Own Version of System V Release 4.
But System V Release 4 was composed of about 50 % BSD code anyway, and the rest AT&T and miscellaneous.
SunOS was 4.xBSD optimized and extended by Sun into a world-class operating system by the time it reached 4.xx, whereas Solaris has probably taken up till now to reach the same level of sophistication as SunOS 4.xx.
I don’t think it would be in Novell’s best interests to be seen as jumping into conflict with Sun over open-sourcing Solaris. It would be more in Novell’s business interests to make sure that whatever copyright leverage it still retains over Unix System VRx, is used to ensure that no future SCO FUDfest ever occurs. And that could be done more easily by talking to Sun and getting it to agree to a GPL-compliant license – that way, whatever stuff Novell releases or develops under the GPL could just slot right into Solaris.
Gimp is a part of the Solaris 10 download, as is cdrw and ImageMagick. Many of the others that you reference are available from places like http://www.blastwave.org with a simple pkg-get.
Alan.
Using an invention(like a computer chip) in the way it was designed(programming) is NOT AN INVENTION. Its engineering, plain and simple.
To stop copying we have copyrights.
Lets don’t prevent engineering.
Patents are the only great thing that man created, because they garantee the research of new ideas, and don’t allow other people to copy them without authorization of the owner of the patent.
PATENT’s protect programmers for spend their time/work ( could be lots of years) doing a software from being copied.
Software is like a book, if you copy a book no author will be interested in write a book because there would be no profit. No author would like to spend years writing something for free. No research, no new ideas, and so on..
Sir, you are a patented idiot.
The worlds greatest books, from Socrates to Proust, have been developed for no profit. Sometimes they had cost money, effort and even human lifes to be published.
Science has also risen by being free. “I’ve only seen that far because I was standing on the shoulders of giants” et al.
Sun needs to be unencumbered with threats like this. Sun needs to be in control of it’s own destiny. Therefore, Sun neds to buy Novell so that Sun now controls all of UNIX and can do what it needs to do with Solaris. Then sell of the rest of what it doesn’t need piecemeal. But Sun needs to control any and all licencing issues with Solaris.
Sun needs in Novel’s OK to do something with Solaris. It wouldn’t happen on my watch if I was in charge.
But I’m not in charge …
Jim
another Sun’s important contribution,
NextStep API,
of which now Apple Cocoa and GNUStep based/inspired on (API design – not a real code).
also
OpenFirmware/OpenBoot,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
and
Project Alliance (single-sign on stuffs)
http://www.projectalliance.org/
These may not a real open source SOFTWARE,
but they’re really truly open architecture,
all the specs are open and
already adopted by many parties in the industry.
(for Project Alliance, the reference implementation is also freely available (not sure about the license))
Sun is too late. It doesn’t really matter if Novell grants them the rights to opensource Solaris or not. Releasing source code is not enough, to be effective they must have a developer community as well. Gaining such a community will take years. Just look how long time it took for the free Mozilla to evolve from the Netscape code base. A browser is a big program, but an OS is even bigger. I wouldn’t expect to see any significant results from a free Solaris in a near future. I would guess we will have to wait at least five years. By then the battle for the customers is since long ago won by either the Microsoft or the Linux camp.
The only way for Sun to make an impact on future events, would be to release Solris under some Linux compatible licence so that Solaris technology could migrate into Linux.
But even that would be difficult due to differences in code and lack of developer community on the Solaris side.
I don’t know about you, but I SSH into machines for better security than telnet. Unless you like the idea of someone getting your password from snooping traffic using plain text protocols (telnet, ftp, r commands).
I have used Solaris x86 on a number of “low cost” machines without any problems. My test lab at home was at one time all Solaris x86 boxes before I discovered eBay and bought Sparc hardware.
By Maureen O’Gara, once again. OSnews picks it up with a ridiculous title like this. There’s no need for any fractation. Novell did not say they’d stop this effort, Novell merely asked -just like many others- how Sun is able to do this. This perfectly makes sense, no conspiracies are needed.
If Sun does it the right way, they infringe no copyright and do it perfectly legal. Hands down, Novell will not sue anyone then. I assume Sun is smart enough to evade such problems, so why assume Sun won’t? OTOH, *if* Sun is stupid enough to infringe copyright by distributing code under a liberal OSI-compatible license whereas they are not the owner of it or may not otherwise legally do so, then the owner of that copyright (probably currently Novell) will sue Sun. Lets not assume that’ll happen, we’ll see it all when OpenSolaris is there.
Maureen O’Gara OTOH, is probably a SCO shill or someone who writes sensational articles. The latter is proven that every time she writes an article like this one, the web statistics rise till huge proportions. The former fits in the doubt around Novell and could serve as a reminder of ‘does Novell actually own that IP?’. I think such theories are a bit far sought, and assume therefore the latter reasoning. Either way, Follow The Money.