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.
Sun software (Score:5, Interesting)
I was using Sun workstations for a long time. Their hardware was decent and cheap. As for the software, the best thing about it was that you could remove most of the Sun crap and replace it with GNU software. And when the Linux kernel was reasonably stable and we got cheap PC hardware, it was time to ditch the Sun hardware too. That's the history of Sun and Sun software R&D in a nutshell (except for Java, which is another sad story).
Re:Who is Bill Joy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, generally kind of a legend, and one of the real forward-looking thinkers of our time. Kind of the pragmatic dreamer type who tends to think on a humanity-sized scale, but who has the technical chops to back it up.
I also think he has a real appreciation for elegance in design and execution. There's probably a Paul Graham essay in there somewhere.
Re:An important lesson (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun had some really great stuff in their research divisions, and only ever commercialised a small fraction of it.
Actually, Sun may very well be the prime example of a demented institution with respect to technological creativity: In 1993, they had Self, easily the most advanced of all OOP languages out there, approaching the speed of C in numeric computations, and they decided to invent Java, of all things: an attempt at Smalltalk (a language one generation older than Self) with C++-like syntax (why, why, why? Wasn't one C++ enough?), and a lame one at best. Oh, and did I mention the terribly slow naive interpreter? Meanwhile, Self was almost killed. Lack of advertisement, lack of interest of the executives...reminds me of Xerox. Similar breed of people, I guess.
Re:Who is Bill Joy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Did he ever get to meet the guy who wrote Emacs?
Interesting comment. That guy was Richard Stallman, the same man who inadvertently brought down the Sun empire by creating the toolchain to create LInux.
Re:This problem comes up again and again (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/kamwamba-windmill/ [wired.com]
I have also heard of people in rural areas who heat their homes by digging holes and using heat trapped in water a dozen or so feet below the soil; they sometimes do this without using pumps. There are farmers who create cheap biodiesel using plant material left over from the harvest. There are people who create biochar, and use the excess burning from that process as a source of energy (to cook with, or perhaps to drive some other chemical reaction). All of these things can be done on very low budgets.
It is true, though, that larger scale projects require more money, but that is not at all surprising. Really though, a lot of the work is done at universities on grant money, which is an entirely different world from businesses/community development.
Java is really a sad and ongoing story (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, Sun is kind of a company who manages to have their own language/framework on billion devices (J2ME) and still manages to lose money and prestige over it.
Every phone, almost every cell phone you see has a working J2ME and companies who can actually code does create miracles on it. Just imagine what if MS wasn't that blind and managed to get a compact .NET on that number of devices.
Or forget devices, look at CNET Download.com top downloads which is more amazing:
http://download.cnet.com/mac/most-popular/3101-20_4-0.html?tag=rb_content;contentNav [cnet.com]
It includes Limewire which is pure Java and it runs on one of the most hostile Java environments (both OS and userbase).
I can't understand how they CAN'T make money over it. I can't understand the patience of Java developers either... You make top of a general download sites top 10 list and you don't even get mentioned by the language vendor. They had a joke like portal (java.com) and it bugged some people at that sick company to convert it to a pure "download" page.
I mean Java is at a state where MS and Apple (with their culture) can't even dream of and they still manage to get acted like step child with weird rumors going on. I wonder if they have donated/sponsored a CENT to Limewire and Vuze, reason of 90% of Java desktop installations. If there was such a popular .NET open source application, MS would even assign some anonymous coders to that project.
Re:Who is Bill Joy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Evolution doesn't have a speed.... Evolution, at its core, is really a very simple principle: if the environment changes, some will be an advantage, and those will... well, have an advantage.
I believe the GP's point was simply that the rate of adaptation to changing environments ("speed of evolution") is itself one of the traits which evolves. Organisms which adapt slowly are generally at a disadvantage compared to organisms which adapt quickly. Faster adaptation can also have its drawbacks, of course, including over-specialization. However, thinking organisms which can adapt their behavior to changing conditions—or even just the expectation of changing conditions—within a single generation tend to be less prone to extinction than other organisms whose behavior changes only slightly from one generation to the next.
Re:Who is Bill Joy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, no. Evolution has no motive
You could similarly say that self organizing molecules have no motive, and you would be just as wrong.
You could similarly say that self organizing molecules have a motive, and you would be just as wrong.
The telos which you are attributing to evolution is external to evolution. The telos of self organizing molecules is internal to their development. Your carelessness leads to nonsensical concepts like progress or at worst intelligent design.
Re:Sun software (Score:5, Interesting)
I was using Sun workstations for a long time. Their hardware was decent and cheap. As for the software, the best thing about it was that you could remove most of the Sun crap and replace it with GNU software. And when the Linux kernel was reasonably stable and we got cheap PC hardware, it was time to ditch the Sun hardware too. That's the history of Sun and Sun software R&D in a nutshell (except for Java, which is another sad story).
I agree with this assessment, other than Sun hardware being cheap... perhaps it was a bargain compared to other commercial Unix vendors back in the 90s, but by the time it became plausible to choose between Linux-on-x86 and Solaris-on-Sun, Sun was really way more expensive.
Here's my historical perspective...
In 2001-2002, I worked at a small company making speech synthesis software. Our products had been developed on Sun workstations, and most of us developers used them still. They were very reliable once set up correctly, and they had nice, big, clear CRT monitors, nice optical mice, nice keyboards with extra programmable function keys, and fast SCSI hard drives. They ran the CDE [wikipedia.org] GUI desktop, which was ugly and clunky, but worked out-of-the-box. We relied on the proprietary XWave software for audio waveform analysis, but otherwise used GNU tools almost exclusively.
Developers, especially the young-uns like myself, were rapidly acquiring enthusiasm for Linux. I was 19 and had been using Linux for years and got a lot of my older coworkers enthused, although I liked Solaris too.
Solaris still had a few key advantages:
Linux was building up a lot of advantages though, and fast:
Basically, Linux was fixing its deficiencies (audio, reliability, GUI) a lot faster than Sun was fixing theirs. Performance comparison was exacerbated by Sun's hardware: it was expensive and hard to upgrade, so we resisted upgrading it, so it started to seem slower and slower and even less appealing.
Sun had built its business on reliable hardware coupled with a highly-regarded, reliable UNIX OS that only had to support a small range of hardware (not unlike Apple's Mac model). They seem to have been completely blindsided by Linux's ability to support an incredible range of commodity hardware, and they seemed utterly ignorant of the fact that their proprietary development tools sucked, and everyone wanted to use GNU tools.
No it failed (Score:4, Interesting)
The actual project to enhance MacOS was failed so badly. It was good on paper but was horrible in reality. Amelio hired legendary Ellen Hancock to figure what the hell is actually going on, she suggested Apple to cancel project since it is going nowhere.
If it wasn't Steve Jobs, it would be another OS but not multi tasking enabled MacOS (of course, I know copland is way more than that).
Perhaps they gambled with NeXT just to get Steve Jobs but it doesn't really change that NeXT is such a amazingly future ready and multi platform by nature OS that Apple has to do childish tricks to prevent it from running on anything not Apple. If Bill Joy wasn't a billionaire and he didn't have to act like politician, he would sure have some comments about openstep and how Apple had to conspire it for future.
Re:An important lesson (Score:3, Interesting)
The original plan was to base Java on Objective C [gmu.edu], but as I understand it, the creators saw that widespread adoption of a brand new language was going to be an uphill battle, so they (wisely) chose to base the syntax on C++ to minimize the learning curve for the majority of existing developers, especially commercial developers.
Personally I would have preferred an Objective C syntax, but Java might have died a quick, obscure death were it not for the ease of transition from C++. Academic/technical ingenuity isn't worth much if no one ever uses your technology ... which kind of sums up many of Sun's issues.
As for the original Java interpreter, I've yet to see anyone write a faster one for a 486.
Re:Even Windows for free would have replaced Solar (Score:4, Interesting)
More like, "quite often jobs which make use of the open source initiative they are contributing to."
For example, a while ago I contributed some code to WebInject [webinject.org]. It was code I got paid to write at my day job [vervendi.com]; I found WebInject, said "This would be useful to us if it had X, Y, and Z", added X, Y, and Z -- getting paid to do so, same as if I was writing our own bespoke test tool -- and contributed the code back.
I suspect that this sort of scenario is at least an order of magnitude more common than people contributing to free software projects that directly compete with their day jobs.
Re:An important lesson (Score:3, Interesting)
The more I learn about Smalltalk the harder I find it to swallow the notion that Java is closely related to it.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)