HP's E-Speak Source Released to Public 95
TheFitz writes "Hewlet-Packards new flagship internet product E-Speak has been released open source. The story can be found here on Yahoo or you can get information at E-Speak's homepage. Apparently this is similiar to a Java system in that it's a transparent application API over the HTTP protocol." No weaselly license, either; GPL and LGPL all the way. Cheers for HP!
Re:But does it work ? (Score:1)
P.S.- Have you looked into pgp phone? I don't have any experience with telephony, but other people seem to like it. (good speakers/microphones help)
Re:HP's rudderless technologies (Score:2)
All they really have left is printers.
Ummm... and measuring equipment (which I'm informed is pretty much the best there is), the components bit (have you seen what they produce using LEDs, for example?) and then there's all the medical stuff too.
HP's got a lot more to it than most people realise, but most of it is not for the general public, so it's not really visible.
The WinCE devices aren't bad for what they are (address book/organiser). I do think they were overpriced, and I also think the Newton was miles better. Too bad that political deals put an end to the Newton.
Don't know about Chai.
With Merced, it seems that HP was not having much joy with the other company concerned, and have now gone back to continuing development on their own processors. The Merced incident has definately put HP behind, but the PA-RISC chips are actually quite good. Too bad the machines cost so much.
As far as it goes with HP giving away E-speak: no company ever just gives something away - they always want some sort of return somewhere. The form that will take may not be directly related; maybe they want to push this as a standard so they can sell add-ons or consulting. Maybe they're doing it to have a detremental effect on a competitor.
-- Steve
they already did. (Score:1)
Re:What effect have the recent IPOs had? (Score:1)
More free than BSD/GPL (Score:1)
What is e-speak? (IMHO) (Score:2)
Fundamentally HP in releasing e-speak is trying to foster the creation of an open marketplace for electronic services. The web is also an open market, but it was really designed to be a market for mostly free information.
In the e-speak platform you will find the features that we believe will make providing a service on the internet feasible without spending two years and a couple of million dollars rebuilding the necessary infrastructure from scratch. In other words we are trying to remove the barriers to entry for services that the web removed for publishing.
The basic features of the e-speak platform are distribution, language independence (but the most of the current code is in Java), security, manageability, dynamic resource location and intermediation (which allows services to be dynamically configured into composite services).
If that seems a bit too opaque, I'm happy to discuss what each of these means and why they are important to a services infrastructure on the e-speak mailing lists.
-kls (who doesn't officially speak for HP)
Re:OpenSource Craze (Score:1)
I think you are mixing up "open source" in it's purest form with the notion of simply releasing source code. Maybe I'm wrong, but for me, an open source project is more than something where the source code is freely available for all to download. A project like that is simply looking to jump on the hype bandwagon. And call me a sceptic, but I simply don't see HP incorporating bug fixes and code that other people write into their code tree.
I think that the general public is far too easily fooled by the words "open source" and instead of no one hearing about E-Speak, now it is yet another "hot topic".
-dr
What is their market ... ? (Score:1)
The computer industry is rapidly following the development of the early car industry with distinct feature sets (cars, trucks, etc as well as the associated fallout and consolidation). My general impression of the analogies
IBM - corporate market - big iron + Java connectivity
Sun - mid-sized corporate market - medium iron + Java
HP - medical + manufacturing industries - instruments + e-speak
SGI - scientific market - big/medium iron + OpenSource
Apple - education, prosumer market - cute simple boxes
Palm/Nokkia - wireless market - handsets + WAP etc
Wintel - anything and everything
What the big companies are doing is trying to build up the component manufactuers and affiliates and then sell the finished branded product. Sure, you could assemble your own hand-tuned custom car today, but there's a reason why people go off to rummage around the car-yard instead of mucking around with the parts. I expect something similar for computers when the hardware/software/wetware complexity reaches a point such that hackers have to invest in a postgraduate (a la medicine) course just to understand the silly things. For your interest, the Australian Computer Society has pushed to obtain a professional recognition status for IT. Which means that they can now "exclude" non-qualified people from practising. Expect specialist IT salaries to keep on rising as they become the new lawyers/doctrs/dentists to the information infrastructure (with matching fees).
They must have invented this treadmill just for the rat race.
LL
Re:yep, I'd say you're broadly right (Score:1)
Re:"Do it for me"!? (Score:2)
Re:Kudos to HP! (Score:2)
Think of it as midleware. (Score:1)
Re:Roblimo = Jackass (Score:1)
All of this goes back to their new CEO, who is completely insane, and believes that HP is going to define the next big protocol for internet commerce development.
I don't know what HP's involvement in Internet commerce will be, but the new CEO is definately not insane. She's actually kicking some real butt inside the company. I guess it will annoy a number of people - particularly managers - who have gotten comfortable with being inneffective or overpriced. Things move on, but people often don't like to, hence the need for the kicking.
Time will tell if it works out or not. Also: watch how Agilent does in the future (at the moment Agilent == HP for the most part).
-- Steve
BINGO! (Score:1)
Now, I defy anyone to explain what this product does without using the terms "integrates," "deploys," "solution," or any word that starts with "e-". First person to do so will win the grand prize of a non-failing grade in English, which is something marketing and business majors and slashdot posters alike have been trying for years to attain with little success.
Good luck! You may begin now.
Old News? (Score:1)
Re:Use the source, Luke! (Score:1)
I am yet another person who glanced through the web page, and pulled down the
It didn't.
Every day I'm bombarded with products that offer to improve my life, solve all my problems, and make me rich and famous. If they can't quickly tell me even what area of my life they are wanting to work on, well, I've got other things to do.
Does this form of "marketing" work? Are there people out there who respond to vague promises of "nerdvana"? Personally, it trips my B.S. detector. Open source or not, if it does something for me, I'll consider it. If it doesn't, I won't. If I can't tell, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to figure it out.
Part of me feels like a fool for responding to something I didn't take the time to understand, but on the other hand, I'm more responding to a marketing ploy than to e-Speak itself.
Nick.
Re:But what's it for, Mom? (Score:1)
D-rock
This sort of software has to be free (Score:1)
Anyhow, one thing that bugs me is that some people here seem to be assuming that this is some sort of move to cut development costs or something, in the hope that the free software community will somehow magically equate to a free labor pool. A new slant on the "free beer" side of things, I guess.
But this isn't like a word processor which is useful if you stick it on one machine; it's only worthwhile if you can get a bunch of networked devices using it. In other words, these sort of projects require a certain amount of critical mass in order to be successful at all. And in this day and age, people have grown sick and tired of being locked into proprietary protocols, with good reason. So if HP wants the world to start using their protocol, the only way they can do it is by releasing that protocol as free software.
Even if it were *more* expensive to develop it as free software, they'd still have to do it that way.
Just my personal opinion, of course.
Re:OpenSource Craze (Score:2)
Since HP released the stuff under the GPL and LGPL licenses, if HP chooses NOT to incorporate bug fixes or contributions from others, anyone is free to take the code and in the much cherished tradition of open source, fork it.
HP is probably trying to cash in on the "open source" phenomenon but not only in the sense of publicity. They need the developers badly if this is going to go anywhere. The fact that they are willing to devote 5+ of their engineers time and commit over US$40,000 to initial e-speak projects on SourcExchange [sourcexchange.com] says a lot.
This isn't a case of a PR machine exploiting the words "open source" without the vaguest notion of what it is. It is a company taking tentative steps and testing out a new way of doing business, of achieving things. We should give them our welcome and support.
Re:I think we'll see more of this in the future... (Score:2)
I only half agree with you on this. The way any company works is that it uses something cheap as input, adds some value to it and puts the result of that out making money over the added value. With software there's the interesting thing that part of the input (existing software) does not have any production cost. That means that when you add value to it and are competing with other companies who deliver a similar product, you can compete with those companies by not charging for the input software.
That's where the GPL comes in. If you look what is GPLed these days it is mostly software that has been around in some form for years. Who pays money for just a C compiler or a yet another mouse driver or an editor? Right nobody, people are paying for IDE's, not for just a compiler (and even IDEs have to offer more than just edit/compile/debug functionality).
This last example also shows that there is one short term tactic of making money over the input software: bundle it with valuable software and keep those things dependent.
MS is the classical example. DOS became a commodity, so they added windows. Word became a commodity, so they bundled it with other apps. Compilers became a commodity, so they created devstudio. All the previous became a commodity so they webenabled it
What happened with HP puzzles me a bit, I spend half an hour staring at the code examples they provided in the tutorial and had to conlude that there was nothing special to be found. Rather it struck me that this was probably the longest version of Hello world I've seen so far.
All the concepts used in e-speak already exists in some form. Worse, as far as I can see they are all available on top of Java (Jini, CORBA, RMI, HTTP). And what they provided also runs on top of Java!?!?
Possibly the innovation is in the protocol they use for the communication but unfortunately that is only documented in the form of source code. I think this is an area where we could use a simple but elegant protocol. Setting up CORBA stuff is a bit overkill for most remote stuff and RMI only works with Java programs and DCOM is to lowlevel.
The fact that they GPLed it only confirms that they did not actually provide much new stuff here. They don't expect to make much money on licensing this software.
Interestingly I see that the new word for 'component' has become 'service'. I think this started when SUN put out Jini, suddenly anything that had an interface and was approachable over the network became a 'service' rather than a reusable component. HP is cleverly using this word now to market their stuff.
As far as I can see they reinvented reusable components and the ORB in a simplified form. I don't expect that this will go anywhere unless they make its use completely transparent. I.e. make it possible to use COM/CORBA/JavaBean components as a e-speak service. With JavaBeans I really don't want to write IDL specs, thats what we have the reflection APIs for (Voyager is an ORB that uses this to automatically hook up any java class to an ORB).
I'm highly sceptical about this, the only interesting part I was able to discover under all the marketing drool was the protocol and there's not much specific about this to be found anywhere but the gpl'd demo code.
Re:It has "paradigm" on the front page! (Score:1)
The actual technologies involved are ones that everyone would recognize. You can currently write your services using distributed network objects, and document exchange models of programming.
The network objects support uses an API similar to Java/RMI with support for the Java standard RMI in work. Such changes as were made are the minimum necessary to create the platform we were trying to expose; so that is what is available now. Mapping those into Java/RMI will allow Jini and Java Beans to interoperate pretty seamlessly in a services environment.
The document exchange model support is through standard HTTP methods (POST & GET) and their replies; and currently uses cookies to represent conversation sessions. The documents exchanged are standard XML documents, which comply with an e-speak dtd when requesting services of the platform, but can be any dtd at all when sending messages from a miscellaneous client to a miscellaneous service.
My desire with e-speak is not to create a new competing standard for communications, but to unify all of the competing standards into an infrastructure where they can all communicate with one another. It is a great advantage of being open source; we don't have to own the API.
-kls
not speaking for HP
Re:But what's it for, Mom? (Score:1)
Call me a luddite, but I've yet to see any of this stuff which makes me want to do away with Perl/CGI for web apps and socket programming for non-web apps (in Perl or anything else, Java IMHO not being the best choice until it supports nonblocking IO on sockets).
And all that stuff is open source, if not GPL, not that I give a toss about that distinction.
Re:HEY (Score:1)
Distributed network objects and remote procedure calls isn't the only programming model that e-speak supports.
-kls
UpnP (Score:1)
So MS calls their Jini UpnP? Sounds like "Hey, I've had way to much coffee at this meeting. I'd better get UpnP!"
Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity
Uh? (Score:1)
And WTF is Internet Chapter 2? Is this that one
invetned by Bill Clinton to provide us with a
more contemporary solution than the old Internet
invented by Al Gore?
Damn, so much market-speak noise these days and
I'm increasing the amount of useless posts by
discussing useless things
Must go and DO SOMETHING!
Re:Nice license (Score:1)
Back on topic, I think the use of the GPL by HP make a good for them. It shows that they really want to give the software to the Community instead of using the developpers as a bunch of cheap labors. Why? Because the patch they will receive must be under the GPL (that's a tradition that people send patches back with the same license), so, even if they want to make a non-free version of their soft, they can't incorporate all the contributions in their work, loosing a great deal of work. If they used the BSD or other less restrictive license, the deal will not be so clear. They will still be able to fork the code, included the patches and make their own, enhanced and incompatible non-free version. They can do that also under the GPL but, at least without the fixes coming from the Free Community.
For sure, HP has some interest in publishing those software. But most of this interest came from the Network Effect necessary to establish some standard, open or not. HP chooses the open source way; Good for them, good for us.
It may be interesting, and a 'victory', but... (Score:2)
Weaselly licenses? (Score:1)
Is that a word?
Anyway, can we continue to tear down the establishment we have worked so hard to build?
Hang on to your stocks boys, were going to war!!!
Nice license (Score:2)
Perhaps the Debian Free Software guidelines should be updated to use a sliding scale of freeness, with SCSL somewhere around 0.1, the NPL at 0.6, etc. Then we could spend the next decade or so arguing about whether GPL or BSD is most deserving of the 1.0 spot, and whether it is possible for some to even be more free than that
Re:But what's it for, Mom? (Score:1)
"Do it for me"!? (Score:1)
And it better not clutter my bandwidth!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
It has "paradigm" on the front page! (Score:1)
[E-speak]allows e-services to dynamically interact to discover, negotiate, broker and compose themselves to solve a business to business or business to consumer service request.
Congratulations, that tells me nothing at all about it.
But whatever it is, I guess HP supporting Open Source is a jolly good idea. Good on 'em!
So what's new? (Score:1)
How is this different from the likes of XML-RPC [xmlrpc.com], or even Microsoft's SOAP [microsoft.com]? Wouldn't it make sense for everyone to focus on keeping their 'cool stuff over HTTP' application interfaces as compatible with each other as possible?
I tried looking at the site, but got scared after seeing "paradigm" on the first page...
OpenSource Craze (Score:3)
1. E-speak complements device-to-device communication, such as HP's Chai, Sun's Jini and Microsoft®'s UpnP.
2. E-speak leverages key collaborative technology-standardization efforts, such as RosettaNet, ontology.net and Microsoft's BizTalk.
3. E-speak utilizes open technology standards on the Internet, including XML, LDAP, HTTP, WAP, SSL, SLP and SNMP.
Whenever a company puts a product such as this, and opensources it, it means its a good thing. Novell is looking at opensourcing their flagship product, the NDS (Novell Directory Services) I believe that opensourcing products allows designers and programmers to work together on a product that they like/need for the enhancement of that product. Big cheers for HP!
More SOAP? (Score:1)
Pardon? Both press blurb and HP page use HTTP just as analogon. Hope the pdf file on the HP page has a bit more meat.
Re:Weaselly licenses? (Score:1)
Aggreed, Why should we pick at what license a company decides to use for their product, it is their decision, not our's. If I were making the product, sure I'd use GPL, but is Apple or Netscape wrong for making their own license, of course not. It's not our software that is being open sourced, it is the company that wrote it's software. The GPL may be an excellent license, but I say that we should be thankful that the open source process gets any recoignition at all from companies.
But what's it for, Mom? (Score:2)
--
Kudos to HP! (Score:1)
Now, if only someone out there would develop an open-source, cross-platform protocol for turning Natalie Portman into stone...
*ducks*
Re: (Score:2)
Is it great or is it just GPL? (Score:1)
But does it work ? (Score:1)
So what I want to know is will this one work
Re:HEY (Score:2)
The architectural docs do explain all this, though they're not an easy read, and sometimes terminology is a bit strange. (For example, "contracts", as used in the docs, seem a lot like the common meaning of "interface".)
Nah (Score:1)
What do you think is behind Sun's "vision of Java" ? Companies want to make money. Some of them have products that I benefit from, some have products that I might see as a threat. Open source is good for me. Monopolies are not. That goes independently of who issues the open source product and who has the monopoly.
Re:Weaselly licenses? (Score:1)
e-speak and SCSL (Score:1)
GPL, LGPL, they keep the trademark on the name, and you get to use the trademark if you're compatible.
If I'm way out of line, tell me. I really want to know. (Unless you're gonna tell me to pour hot grits down my pants
Mass Confusion! (Score:1)
What the hell does it do?
I looked over the tutorial, which had some sample code on implementation.. As far as I can tell, it looks to be a way to connect to someone else without saying where they are or what port to connect on, or pretty much anything at all. They use a lot of business jargon (contacts? WTF?), but essentially, it looks like it's geared towards the PHB mindset.
I can hear the bosses now: "I mean look at all the technology! It must be good! Look! It's even open source! I was reading about that in Windows magazine!"
Sheesh.. I'm sorry, but I stopped liking HP a looooong time ago.
---
Re:But what's it for, Mom? (Score:1)
Interesting thing from the pda "Ten Ways to Think E-speak"
How do you participate in a dynamic world?
Let us assume that I am interested in finding an ASIC supplier. I don't care which
company (or who) gets to build this ASIC to my specification - it is an open market. I
don't know how many companies are out there, I don't even want to know, as long as I
can get a cheap and reliable supplier.
1.5 The old world
Today I must partner with a supplier that I consider reliable, and hope that they can meet
my growing demands in the long term. If I need to create a new partnership for
something different, I go through this process of finding a new partner all over again. In
fact, creating a new partnership is time consuming and I tend not to choose the best deal I
can get because I may not know about a better deal or because I am comfortable with
what I have.
1.6 The new world
E-speak allows the deployment of e-services that are advertised in an appropriate, well-defined
vocabulary. So for example, all ASIC vendors may advertise their services in
some well-defined ASIC vocabulary. I, as a consumer of their services simply deploy my
service that finds the most appropriate supplier by searching (and potentially negotiating)
for the best ASIC supplier and making sure that they meet some minimum criteria. I can
determine the credibility of some new vendor by invoking some on-line rating service.
My service deployment then will not have any "hard-coded" links to third party services.
This enables me to provide my service, while accommodating the naturally dynamic
service marketplace that is evolving. I don't have to break my service if my supplier goes
broke.
The solution that I deploy should inherently be capable of handling interactions in a
dynamic world where many different failures can be viewed as opportunities. As a
consumer of services, failures can manifest as: failures to find a service that I am
interested in at any given time, failure to reach a service that I need, failure for an
established partner to meet requirements, etc..10
If I understand correctly, it's possible to build a "ebay network" that bypass the middleman--ebay. ALthough ebay service fee is not that high, they can make a smarter search engine that way.
I am going to post the entire of pda in next post, since it's faster then loading the plug-in for slow machine. html rules.
HP is NOT a M$ lackey (Score:2)
Open-source is now a buzzword.. (Score:1)
However, out of curiosity:
1. E-speak complements device-to-device communication, such as HP's Chai, Sun's Jini and Microsoft®'s UpnP.
E-speak complements XXX. Well? How does it complement it? Details, man!
2. E-speak leverages key collaborative technology-standardization efforts, such as RosettaNet, ontology.net and Microsoft's BizTalk.
Is this even a sentence? E-speak "leverages" XXX... WTF does "leverage" mean anyway? I know leverage when I'm trying to lift something heavy. I know leverage in an engineering sense, but I didn't know it had another meaning.
3. E-speak utilizes open technology standards on the Internet, including XML, LDAP, HTTP, WAP, SSL, SLP and SNMP.
Clue: nearly everything else on the internet also uses XML, LDAP, HTTP, WAP, SSL, SLP, and SNMP.
Hell, my web browser uses at least three of those. Bonus points for you if you know which three. Extra points if you can name a common application that uses 4 or more.
---
Re:What It Does (Rampant Speculation) (Score:1)
Is this very different to Jini? I've never actually used Jini, just read the hype, but they sound quite similar. Is this just because the hype is vague, or are they really doing similar things?
Jon
Re:Open-source is now a buzzword.. (Score:1)
Re:HP's rudderless technologies (Score:1)
Ding! Thats exactly it, all the brains of the company jumped ship to Agalent (sp?), which AFAIK will make most of the technology and R&D while HP gets more into a "e-services" (translated: an army of consultants) type business. You see, if all your big brains leave, you now have a corporation filled with MBAs and marketing people. IMNSHO, a truope of trained monkeys could do a better job of steering a high tech company.
Also, on a more humorous note, remember all the press they got about their new CEO? Strange little fact is her education was in Midevil History, which kinda gives new meaning to the Dilbert cartoon where he says "...And I hear we'll all be reclassified as serfs!"
So why not add a discovery protocol to SOAP? (Score:2)
SOAP (and XML-RPC) is cross platform, and is implemented in many languages. It's simple, and runs over HTTP.
It doesn't have a standard service discovery mechanism, though.
It's a pity that just because Microsoft was involved in the RFC's most people on Slashdot are going to hate it.
If MS really does use SOAP for the new verion of DCOM/COM+, then it could be a great for for Linux client software to "leverage existing investments in legecy Windows software" (Tell that to your manager.. they will love it!)
Re:So why not add a discovery protocol to SOAP? (Score:1)
On the contrary e-speak provides for some basic abstractions which enables easy development and deployment of services in internet. For e.g., it presents some service abstractions like a notion of a vocabulary (for advertising), contract and service elements. The concepts like local names, protection domain would be powerful in internet domain. E-speak provides for life time management through scopes, persistence, folders. The concepts concepts of groups and communities is interesting. It supports messaging, NOM and document exchange models. It supports events. It presents API's in Perl, Python, Java and other languages. It presents a programming model. To develop all this over SOAP will probably take as much time as it took to develop e-speak!
I would say SOAP is more of a bridge which helps in getting through firewalls, where as e-speak is a complete framework for developing services and they are no way comparable.
Timewarp! Eeeek! (Score:2)
But, hey! If this is a newer version, what the heck! I'm a sucker for upgrading.
Having got that out the way, it's great that HP have gone the path of GPL. Not that there's anything wrong with BSD licences, et al, but Open Source is still very new in industry. If HP can demonstrate a successful release of a commercial package, under the GPL, that would have much more impact than, say, releasing it under the BSD licence. (Why? Because the GPL is close to the extreme end of "Open Source". If a package can do well under it, then anyone else's package can do well under a more "greed-friendly" licence.)
P.S. This is a semi-off-topic note, but I'm seriously pissed off with a number of commercial companies for not wanting to release Linux versions of their packages. This includes Lego, Sierra (makers of MasterCook), etc.
The more successful journeys the big-name, high-profile companies make into the land of Linux and Open Source, the more likely these other companies will take the first step.
HEY (Score:1)
WHAT DOES IT DO?? Can someone explain???
The web page was filled with meaningless marketspeak.
JD
What effect have the recent IPOs had? (Score:1)
You have to wonder if the recent IPOs and the general "market likes Linux" mentality has encouraged many "fortune 500" companies to jump on the bandwagon in order to boost their stock price.
It is unfortunate in our market economy we have to be more worried about stock prices than even making money. Nice link off the Suck parody yesterday to the SEC filing for Andover.net [sec.gov] (which includes Rob's stock deal with Andover) also contains a line which says "WE EXPECT TO INCUR SUBSTANTIAL LOSSES IN THE FUTURE."
I don't know, maybe it is just me but how can companies like this get blown up, while real companies with real income (see banks, insurance) are sitting pretty low.
So way to go "Open Source" we may not help companies profit, but we will push stock prices up, that's for sure.
HP looking to pay people to use e-speak (Score:3)
It is nice to see HP putting their time, money and marketing muscle behind something open source. Hopefully, theirs will be a positive experience for all, rather than scaring a lot of developers/companies away.
I think we'll see more of this in the future... (Score:3)
The companies that are actively supporting open source all have one thing in common - they are primarily getting there revenue from hardware, or software consulting - not sales of software. We all know that software isn't really a product, but a service - and I think the economy is waking up to that fact.
Open source helps companies like HP because they get wide distribution of their software - not because they get free developers! Wide distribution of software means it's easier to find bugs. Finding bugs makes better software. The developers are a bonus, but people shouldn't feel exploited.
I did some work for Intel, and they have a LOT of software engineers - why? To find ways to make programs that use their processors. The code isn't important, it's that they sell more hardware.
Open source goes one futher, because when the source code is out there, the program will never become obsolete - hint, engineers a dirt cheap compared to the revenues places like HP and IBM bring in. The only obstacle is not having the code. Remember the PC DemoScene? If all those groups released the code for their effects, then we'd still see evolution of their demos - but none/few of them did. (See the hornet archive before it goes away!)
Companies like Sun haven't completely figured this out yet, I don't think. IBM and HP sure have. We'll see more from them in the future - they are very "with it". If all goes will with my courses this term I'll be accepting an offer with IBM for this very reason - the push for linux and open source in general.
Kudos!
Re:OpenSource Craze (Score:1)
I don't know whether the product itself is going to turn out great or not (the article is typical of commercial prose -- vague, unclear, non-specific on the details of the actual product) , but the fact that they open-sourced it is a very good thing.
A move like this effectively stops any corporation from hogging the protocol and "locking down" the market. There will be no way for MS (or anyone else for that matter) to abuse this technology by locking it down in proprietary implementations and forcing everyone else out of the market. Well, at least not directly. It's things like this that could eventually bring some balance into our world of mega-corporations vs. individual freedom.
why does this matter? (Score:1)
-- nous
Be Wary of HP (Score:2)
HP is not a friend of Open Source. They represent the coming wave of cynical, manipulative corporate entities that wil try to present themselves in a friendlier light. HP has had a dismal financial year and is trying to right its boat. I, for one, will not support them in any of their endeavors.
Re:What It Does (Rampant Speculation) (Score:1)
jeff smith
Looks like CORBA by another name to me... (Score:1)
yep, I'd say you're broadly right (Score:1)
Nice summary of what it gives us.
Anyone familiar with the CORBA Trading Service spec will see immediate parallels here - the architecture doc suggests CORBA integration is possible too.
Basically, someone will create a service (say, an on-line auction). They will "advertise" this service over E-Speak (using a "vocabulary" specified on an E-Speak server) and when someone's client software (or device) decides to buy (for instance) some RAM, it will go to its nearest E-Speak logical machine with a search request for 'auctions offering RAM at $3/MB or less' (except the search will be described in the "vocabulary"). And the E-Speak logical machine will chat to its mates, find various 'auction' services advertised and return one (or more) to the client, who can then go straight to the auction service and say 'gimme some RAM'.
Vocabularies are written in a metalanguage which is described as 'similar to' (paraphrasing) XML - hopefully it'll soon be fully XML.
Actual implementation at the moment seems to be one for the Java gurus - only Java is currently supported. C++ and others to follow..
I like their 'plug in transport protocol' - allowing support for WAP, HTTP, etc is plainly sensible.
I'm not too sure how this fits in with JINI - any JINI experts out there who can comment?
Re:What It Does (Rampant Speculation) (Score:1)
What you describe has already existed for some time now. It is called CORBA [corba.org].
-BRe:Be Wary of HP (Score:2)
Sun's vision of Java is a Microsoft vision. That is, Sun wants to be Microsoft, by having the same iron grip on the Java platform that Microsoft has on Windows, and then force everyone to pay money to Sun, while enabling more O/S competition. The result of this fantasy would be that Scott McNealy would become the richest man in the world. HP, of course, will not tolerate this. No company that competes with Sun can tolerate this. For Java to be a standard, Sun will have to give up some power and use its greater experience at Java implementation as a competitive advantage, rather than its iron-fisted control of the platform.
Sun is shaping up to be a major enemy of open source, and a very clever one, by coming up with licensing that looks like open source but is not (the important difference being that all money and all control goes to Sun). This is too bad, because Sun in the past has been a good guy.
If HP takes orders from Bill, then why are they a major funder of the Trillian project (porting Linux and the GNU tools to Merced)?
Re:Nice license (Score:1)
It's an obnoxious proprietary licence which misleadingly claims to be "Community"!
God Bless Microsoft (Score:1)
Re-inventing themselves (Score:1)
Commercial on TV - where they talk about how Hewlett and Packard worked together in a garage
to invent something 'innovative and useful'?
Anyway, the commercial goes on to say that the
company is re-inventing itself - and for us to
watch (naturally, or why would there be a
commercial?) But maybe this is part of that...
GPL'ed huh?
Sun who?
Read the Architecture document (Score:2)
I've played with e-speak some (we're supposed to be one of those e-commerce consultant companies), and though it is still vey much "Beta" software, I think it has a lot of potential. Going first with an open standard and now with open source, it has the promise of becoming one of those fundamental standards like NFS was after Sun released the source code to that.
Re:Weaselly licenses? (Score:1)
What It Does (Rampant Speculation) (Score:5)
From a very, very cursory perusal of the site, I get the following impression of what this thing actually is.
From the look of it, its a way for programs to invoke RPC's from hosts they don't know exist. That is:
Suppose My coffee maker wants to know the time, and its sitting on a network in my Home Of The Future® It can query the local e-speak server server (e-speak core???) for a service with the appropriate properties (must have TimeZone=>GMT, must have Precision=>microsecond, must have Name=>Time, etc), and then follow it up with a call to the *right* server's services. shazam.
This could be really cool, not just for coffee (which is pretty neat to start with) but for the ultra-thin cell phone-futurerama devices everyone is so keen on ushering into reality. And cool or not, it could be very popular with the "Now I don't have to worry about the license at all 'cuz I'm not distributing the software at all just the service' crowd.
There might come a day when open services are the name of the game- when we not only have to see that software has source shipped with distributions, but that Completely Documented Service API's are published (And the only way to do that, really, is expose the source). It would really bite to have to get a Micro$oft coffe maker to get the most out of my Micro$oft Microwave, which I got because it was the only kind that could use the Micro$oft clock-radio correctly... We may be compelled to establish our own network of services on this second chapter of the internet that HP is so cheery about (and hey, I can't say I'm not, it'll be an excuse to buy a pilot...). An open source service negotiation protocol is a great start, but from the look of things, it may be uphill from here.
I think so. (Score:2)
Now that it's free (as in "freedom"), I think it has the potential to really take off.
Use the source, Luke! (Score:1)
People like you ruin slashdot... alright, people like me are only kidding! :) really, it was a joke! I couldn't figure out what it did either.