61–70 of 239 posts
> Virtual worlds could be such a thing Haha, Metaverse talk while Zuckerberg was in preschool
Oh man, VR and metaverse-style concepts were big in the 90s even if the technology obviously wasn't quite there yet. Active Worlds predated Second Life by several years and surprisingly enough is still online to this day.
> Virtual worlds could be such a thing Haha, Metaverse talk while Zuckerberg was in preschool
Why was the "extinguish" step in "embrace and extend" left out?
I don't like it when people focus on grammar too much but "I am worry..."?
Oracle had already acquired Sun by the time I was in the technology industry. The respondent states that Sun is so set on giving things away. Can someone comment on the culture of Sun at that time? Sun seems to have left a legacy in the open source community. What was the business logic on giving away the software for free? I know it's very common today, but Sun may have been a leader in open source. Any books recomm…
1. Sun originally meant Stanford University Network and the university shared the open-source ethos of Unix along with UC Berkeley.
2. Although Microsoft was already dominant on the desktop by then, the Internet was still up for grabs.
3. And even though JavaScript shipped with Netscape (meaning almost from the beginning of the public Internet), it was still severely underpowered.
4. Java, in the form of "applets" (mini apps running on the browser), could add dynamism to HTML (CSS didn't exist yet) and so define a new software paradigm for the Internet.
5. Sun, like Apple, made money on hardware.
All five factors incentivized Sun to give Java away. Java applets, although a cool demo for the time, never really went anywhere, but Java did go on to compete with Microsoft for the (enterprise) server.
Has anyone ever used the cross platform capability of java? Java is cross platform in the way c is cross platform, you can compile to many target platforms. But aren't pretty much all java applications intended to run on one specific platform only? Developers like the idea of cross platform but they pretty much never use it. I think javascript is the only language that is truly used in a cross platform way.
Oracle had already acquired Sun by the time I was in the technology industry. The respondent states that Sun is so set on giving things away. Can someone comment on the culture of Sun at that time? Sun seems to have left a legacy in the open source community. What was the business logic on giving away the software for free? I know it's very common today, but Sun may have been a leader in open source. Any books recomm…
I can recommend the book “Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing”. The Author compares NeXT a lot with Sun including their business strategies. I have never thought I will learn so much about the early days of Sun by reading this book. https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/06891213...
The above podcasts are hosted by Bryan cantrill and often has guests from that era, though the newer episodes try not to reminisce so much, because it became a bit much at some point
> As you and know very well, this sort of widespread interest can become a self fullfilling phenomenon, because programmer attention creates programs. Some of these will be successful and that only fuels more participation in the phenomenon.
I hope this is what's happening with Rust. :)
I also thought this paragraph just afterwards had an interesting point:
> In the limit, they can make the web totally OS agnostic - but there will still be other things that motivate one platform versus another.
This looks like it happened; but did/do people actually credit Sun for this? On the client side it was Netscape that broke MS' monopoly with Internet Explorer, but on the server side Java was and is still very popular with the business folks, so... does Nathan have a point here?
Oracle had already acquired Sun by the time I was in the technology industry. The respondent states that Sun is so set on giving things away. Can someone comment on the culture of Sun at that time? Sun seems to have left a legacy in the open source community. What was the business logic on giving away the software for free? I know it's very common today, but Sun may have been a leader in open source. Any books recomm…
And oh yeah, with this hardware you also got this SunOS Unix thingy. SunOS was very much core to Sun's success especially in the 80s (not the least because Bill Joy was already a "big name" even before Sun on account of creating BSD and vi), but it wasn't their core business. From their perspective they weren't really "giving things away for free" because they weren't selling it. Interoperability also gave Sun advantages as their SunOS/Solaris machines could communicate with other systems so it made the barrier to adoption/migration lower. People talk about this WSL thing on Windows now, but for Windows NT and 2000 there was SFU – "Services for Unix" – which pretty much did the same thing for Microsoft: make it easier to use Windows with other systems.
Microsoft in the 90s on the other hand was very much in the business of selling software. I'm not sure if they were making any hardware in the 90s (maybe some mice and keyboards?), but if they did it was a little side-thing and not their core business.
Sun was never really an "open source company" in the way we would understand that now: parts were open, many parts were not. They did eventually release OpenSolaris but that was much later. This wasn't entirely Sun's choice: the legal situation at the time was complex, and even OpenSolaris wasn't 100% open due to legal reasons (see the BSDi lawsuit, or the SCO lawsuit that is hopefully finally dead once and for all).
It's similar to Apple today; you can still download the source for Darwin, Swift, Safari, clang, and some other things. What does Apple have to gain by keeping these closed? It's not their core business: no one "pays" for Safari or even macOS; they pay for iPhones and AirBooks. There is still a lot of "secret sauce" at Apple – as there was at Sun – and you could argue if that really protects Apple's profits or not – but there's a wide agreement that "some openness" doesn't really hurt their bottom line.
It's not a coincidence that Microsoft has become "more open" as their business model moved away from almost exclusively selling Windows, Office, and other software suites to selling Azure Cloud, Office365 subscriptions, X-Box, and other things.
In short: Sun never really "gave away" things, they just had a very different business model than Microsoft. On one hand you could say that the author of the email doesn't really seem to appreciate that, but you could also say that Sun failed to foresee that their core products and business model would slowly become obsolete. This is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight, but less obvious in 1996: they had $7.1 billion revenue/$476 million net income in 1996 (Microsoft had $8.6 billion revenue and $2.2 billion income in the same year; less overhead if you distribute only software) and in 1997 this increased to $8.6 billion/$762 million. The profits continued to increase until the dot-com crash, which they recovered from only to be done in by the financial crisis.