Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Today's scriptingNews Outline

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:10/2/1999; 1:23:24 PM
Topic:Today's scriptingNews Outline
Msg #:11703 (In response to 11690)
Prev/Next:11702 / 11704

Dale Dougherty wrote:

It was clear Sun was trying to get feedback about community licensing with regard to Jini. Eric was there as well as Linus. Linus stormed out in a huff saying the license was unacceptable and jini would never be a part of Linux. I was surprised by his reaction.

I have to confess that I can't even begin to imagine why: the Sun "Community License" is exactly what its critics say it is: an insult.

The only rationale I've heard for the license that makes any sense to me is in the case of Java, where Sun's commitment to cross-platform compatibility means that they get to write and apply conformance tests to any implementation that wants to call itself "Java." At the same time, clean-room implementations are free to exist, implement the various Java standards, and even extend them. They just can't call themselves "Java." "Kaffe," with its support for Microsoft extensions even on non-Windows platforms, is probably the best example of this.

But to apply the license outside of this context--which is itself open to question and indeed has been questioned vociferously in the Java community--is silly. There's more to Open Source than simply making the source code of your proprietary product available. It has to do with the process of determining who assembles the work and declares the collection of work "done," "high quality," "tested," "ready for distribution," and so on, and whether the entities who do so can and do do so at their own profit and/or at the expense of the community who did the work.

To put it more concretely, literally anyone can take the Linux kernel, the massive collection of GNU etc. software available for Linux, start pressing CDs and printing manuals, and charge for them--with the blessing of the entire Linux community. Obviously, the same is not true for Solaris.

Bill Joy is obviously correct about service businesses vs. product businesses, but to suggest that the line between them is black and white and crystal clear is to suggest the absurd. Red Hat Software isn't primarily a service business; the service aspect of the business has made them, and by extension the Linux market, more credible. What Red Hat does is a huge amount of content aggregation and, more importantly, integration; a considerable amount of development, e.g. GNOME, RPM, and PAM; and a considerable amount of documentation. Even the distribution end of the business is probably negligible when you consider that you can download a complete Red Hat distribution from Red Hat or your favorite mirror site for free.

Also, when Eric talks about "hackers", I think he has a rather narrow view of who they are and what they do and why they do things. I don't like it when he says, as though an elected representative of the community, that "hackers won't like this or that." I don't see that kind of uniformity anywhere.

Hackers--in the sense that people like Eric and RMS talk about them--are like a lot of self-selecting subcultures: they start off being a pretty loosely-defined group and then solidify (and, in extreme cases, codify) their self-definition, which leads to splinter groups, sub-subcultures, etc. All very sociologically normal.

Eric's observations about "hackers," to the extent he's referring to the type of people discussed in "The New Hacker's Dictionary," which he maintains with (I believe less and less over time) the assistance of its first editor, Guy Steele, are actually right on target. The real question is "how influential is this fairly specific group in the industry?" A related question would be "How much will their influence as a group grow before the various schisms and factions within the group have a material effect on that influence?"

Eric can say things like "Hackers won't like this or that" because, like it or not, he's their biographer and has thus been accorded a huge amount of respect by that community. And believe me, anytime he says something hackers don't like, hackers will let him know, in no uncertain terms. ;-)

I would suggest--only anecdotally--that, at the moment, "hackers" pretty much "own" the Open Source movement. They created the GNU tools and non-GNU tools that fall under either the GPL or LGPL licenses. They created the Linux kernel. They've been behind UNIX literally for as long as there's been UNIX to be behind. Sun is a great commercial implementation of UNIX and an obviously successful business, but all the Bill Joy cheerleading notwithstanding, they didn't invent UNIX. I would go much farther and say that, without the huge quantity of UNIX tools that are free both in the speech and beer senses, UNIX wouldn't be the force that it is in the server market.

With Linux on the map now, hackers are on the map now. One of the consequences of that is likely to be that "branding" of technology becomes irrelevant: a vigorous hacker community will do clean-room implementations of any worthwhile technology and the Red Hats of the world will aggregate, integrate, document, extend, package, market, and distribute the results. Enterprises relying on their technology "brand" should be very afraid for their futures.

Thanks for reading,
Paul Snively
<mailto:psnively@earthlink.net>

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:52:55 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.