How times have changed for the folks at Sun. According to this Reuters article (via Yahoo), Sun Microsystems is going to roll out a line of servers with the Linux OS. This move is a continuation of events that started with their acquistion of Cobalt. Cobalt, if you recall, produced Linux appliances that were shipped in closed boxes. They run without monitors and keyboards — instead they boot up and are configured through a web-based interface (and a small LCD on the back of the unit). Seems that Sun is going to expand this line of units and treat them more seriously. These boxes are excellent small office/home office units — easy to configure, use and manage.

As IBM continues to shift its operating system strategy towards Linux, it appears that Sun is going to have to follow suit. It won’t surprise me if Solaris is phased out in the next five years. Sun will probably have to do what IBM has been doing — moving Linux onto its hardware architecture to achieve performance and scaleability. The current Sun/Cobalt Linux boxes are essentially Intel architecture units, but that won’t do for Sun in the long run. You’ll likely see Sun architecture boxes running Linux in the near future, which is where they will attempt to distinguish themselves in the market.

Seems that KaZaA has been nailed by the Dutch government. As the article says:

“A Dutch judge has ruled that Internet company KaZaA must stop its users sharing copyrighted music files, but the company said on Friday it could not comply because, unlike Napster (news – web sites), it does not know who its customers are.”

KaZaA uses FastTrack technology to implement its P2P functionality. It’s completely serverless, so there’s no way that KaZaA can conceivably comply with this ruling. Similar lawsuits by the RIAA and MPAA against Music City and Grokster will also create a compliance problem.

Frankly I think there’s going to be a huge compliance problem out there. These systems were built as serverless, self-organizing systems specifically so the companies could avoid any copyright compliance problems. In many ways, this problem is exactly like copy machines. As you know, you are not allowed to copy copyrighted material on a copy machine. Yet the publishing industry allows those devices to exist. The music and motion picture industries are now faced with this problem and they are likely going to completely fail in controlling it now that Pandora’s box has been opened.

The only potential outcome from these suits is that they can force certain developers to stop distributing their software. But this is clearly an infringement on free speech, which I don’t think will stand up in the Supreme Court.

Read the full article at Yahoo.

I mentioned in a previous post the fact that Google has gone through the effort of making available some very early USENET archives. I admit that I was never much of a poster on USENET; rather I would read through newsgroups and search for answers to the burning questions of the day.

A few days ago I did a vanity search in that archive to see what I’d find. (A vanity search is when you search for instances of your name on the web — try it sometime — it’s fun.) I found this posting that dates back to August 1994. It’s the earliest post that I’ve located under my name. You can read the post by clicking through, but the signature block brought back memories:

Jeffrey Kay "Net Surfer"
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Internet: jkay@k2.com UUCP: uunet!kappa!jkay
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"In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity" -- Albert Einstein

Interesting memories surround this. One thing you’ll notice is that I’ve had this e-mail address for at least seven years. You’ll also notice the “net surfer” reference — sort of goofy in retrospect, but surfing the net in 1994 was a new and interesting thing to most people. I also had a UUCP address that I suspect very few of you will recognize.

Around that time, direct Internet connections into workplaces were very rare and no one had connections at home. Being the developer that I was, I had been goofing around with different operating systems and around 1990 purchased a copy of Coherent, produced by the Mark Williams Company. It was a Unix variant, based on Unix v7. I had been doing mostly DOS development at that point, so Coherent was an incredible opportunity to learn. It was cheap and ran on just about any x86 pc. I took a 286 PC and loaded it up and in very little time had a running Unix system in my basement.

Connectivity was the next order of business. Coherent included UUCP, so I opened a low volume UUCP account at UUNET (then an independent company). For $300 a year ($25 per month), I received two hours of UUCP connectivity. I named the Coherent box “kappa” and its UUCP address was uunet!kappa. My user account was jkay and hence the complete e-mail address uunet!kappa!jkay. Twice a day my Coherent box would dial out to a local UUNET number and upload out going e-mail and download any new messages. This was my setup for almost four years. It was a little painful to setup, but I was the only kid on my block who had a real e-mail address of his own, delivered into his own computer.

Coherent was an incredible system and a great way to get familiar with Unix. I built some software using the GNU compilers that were available and learned a great deal about Unix system administration and Unix in general. After a while I moved on to Linux using a Yggdrasil distribution of a 0.x kernel, but Coherent was a great opportunity to learn for a mere $99. Mark Williams shut down in 1995 — a eulogy is posted here.

I’ll post some future comments about the subject of that USENET posting — the Apple Newton — and PDAs in general.

In the spirit of Google reposting early rants and raves of the Internet, I thought I’d post some thoughts about communications.

My first foray into collaboration systems was around 1982, when I built a system called 000sys (arcane name, I don’t recall the history of the name exactly) at University of Virginia. It was built on an HP2000 computer system in BASIC and support single threaded conversations, instant messaging, “pages” that people moderated and file sharing. It was a remarkable system for its time and had hundreds of users at UVa. Since the system wasn’t accessible externally, only UVa users could access it.
It’s truly remarkable that in the almost 20 years since I built that system, very little has changed in the way we used computer systems to collaborate. The technology has advanced, but the metaphors are the same — lists, instant messages, e-mail, pages. What I look forward to most in the this millennium is some way to break out of that mold and really substantially change the way we collaborate using computers.

With respect to this, I’ve noticed a significant trend regarding technology and the transmission of content. It seems that technology is inversely proportional to the fidelity of the transmission. Consider the range of technology from face to face conversations (lowest technology) to Instant Messaging (highest tech) and the fidelity of the transmissions accordingly.

• Face to face (F2F)– low tech, highest fidelity. Includes facial expressions, voice inflections, and gestures as well as the words themselves.
• Telephone — higher tech than F2F, somewhat lower fidelity. Loses facial expressions and gestures but maintains vocal inflections and words.
• E-Mail — higher tech than telephone, still lower fidelity. Loses vocal inflections, but allows the communicator to at least put together well thought out paragraphs.
• Instant Messaging — higher tech than e-mail, lowest fidelity yet. Loses well thought out paragraphs of information, relies heavily on the typing ability of the communicators to transmit messages.

Hopefully we’ll figure out how to use new technology to increase the fidelity of our communications and collaboration, not continually reduce it. I don’t know if anyone else has coined this law — if not, perhaps someone will be generous enough to name it Kay’s Law of Collaboration, thereby eternally having the entire universe assume that it was Alan Kay that stated this :-).