Bill Joy On Sun, Microsoft, Open Source, and Creativity 173
maitas writes "In this interview, Bill Joy talks about green energy and technology. His main point is: 'I'm all for sharing, but I recognize the truly great things may not come from that environment.'" The interview really runs the spectrum from the iPad to Microsoft, and from green tech to nanotech.
Who is Bill Joy? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who is Bill Joy? (Score:2, Informative)
Non sequitur (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think the open-source community focused on this stuff in the same way. In some sense, you only hit what you aim at. What was the goal of the Linux community--to replace Windows? One can imagine higher aspirations. I think the thing is that open source has been great for hobbyists to get involved, and hobbyists in the sense of the word as somebody who really loves it. That's not a negative thing at all. It's just not clear how it organizes a sustained and creative activity. Google is using this approach with Android. It's open source, but the money comes from someplace else. More broadly, how do people make a living and do something really creative? I think they have to organize it as a business. I'm all for sharing, but I recognize the truly great things may not come from that environment.
Open source generally means the developers need to work somewhere else for a living, and therefore the free project needs more developers than a funded project. Only a few are hired by companies and in the end they produce most of the code. (No news here, for example: Linux).
Android is a very bad example: they forked linux and made their own cathedral. He can't generalize with it. Linux, KDE, and Firefox, are innovative and "truly great".
Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar (Score:5, Informative)
The support contracts are a drop in the bucket compared to windows licensing fees which are per-server per-core and per-seat. The bigger a company you have, the cheaper RHEL gets. Not quite with Windows, although they have a bulk pricing, the costs for each CAL still adds up.
You could have 100k employees and still be around the $20grand support costs of RHEL. This on MS would be in the hundreds of thousands range.
Plus, you don't anything for RHEL server. If you want to DIY with in-house trained RHEL developers, do it.
Re:Sun software (Score:5, Informative)
Sun Hardware was actually quite pricy...
Compared to PCs, yes, but not when compared to the rest of the 'real Unix' market. Back in the 90s we had servers and workstations from many Unix vendors and the Suns were generally the cheapest of the bunch and the easiest to work with.
Re:Sun software (Score:3, Informative)
That was certainly the claim -- that their processors did more work than would be impled by pure clocks speeds. However, at my company, we benchmarked a 400MHz Sun/SPARC machine running Solaris against an 800MHz PIII Xeon running Linux. The Linux machine was twice as fast. Now our primary applications were large single-threaded jobs, and had we been running multi-threaded applications, perhaps the Sun would have performed better. For us, the equation was simple: X86 running Linux was half the cost and twice as fast.
I assume other people came to the same conclusion as us, hence reducing the market effectively available to Sun. My industry moved over to Linux and we never had a reason to look at Sun again. When Sun produced X86_64 boxes running Solaris, it was too late, all the software had been ported to Linux.
Re:An important lesson (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think any company makes money off of programing languages anymore. At least not big money.
You have RealBasic, and some Cobol, Fortran, and Ada suppliers that still seem to make a living but I doubt that even Microsoft makes much off of Visual Studio. Microsoft makes money off of Windows and people developing everything for Windows. It just isn't like the old days of Borland when a company could become huge off of programming languages.
Frankly there are just too many good free languages and tools out there.
Gcc
Eclipse.org
NetBeans
Perl
Ruby
FreePascal
The list goes on and on.
I never understood how Sun was going to make money on Java which frankly I do like.
Re:An important lesson (Score:3, Informative)
Java development started before Sun acquired Self and StrongTalk.
Uhm, no. The Self team moved to Sun in 1990, before Java was conceived. Strongtalk and its inventors (Animorphic) were indeed conceived later, and even later acquired by Sun, but as far as I know, they had based their compiler technology on the contemporary Self implementation, which was precisely the thing that Sun had in their labs. I guess that Sun's reason for acquiring Animorphic was simply because the motivated people at Animorphic furthered their technology beyond what the Self team had managed to assemble. (Whether this would have been the case had the support of their management been greater, well, I guess we can only speculate on that today.)
Re:Good choice actually (Score:4, Informative)
Remember a company who dragged their entire OS to Trash, emptied it and restarted with a fresh and open source OS instead of trying to "fix" it?
Apple did that to bail out Jobs, when NeXt was in the tank. Apple had developed a new OS, MacOS 8 ("Copeland"), which was a reasonably good rewrite. The claim was that a warmed-over NextStep could be on the market sooner than Copeland. It wasn't, but the deal saved Jobs' personal wealth.