4 ms·

Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language sta

by dust42 10mo ago

Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard. JavaScript will be an open, freely licensed proposed standard available to the entire Internet community. Existing Sun Java licensees will receive a license to JavaScript. In addition, Sun and Netscape intend to make a source code reference implementation of JavaScript available for royalty-free licensing, further encouraging its adoption as a standard in a wide variety of products. The 90ies had quite a few pretty visionary people. CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use. At that time there were still CompuServe, AOL, Minitel and BTX around - not just walled gardens but walled worlds but a handful of people already saw and shaped the future...

znpy 10mo ago
Another testament to how incredibly forward looking Sun Microsystems was. Truly a champion of open systems.
- BirAdam 10mo ago
  If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
  - dust42 10mo ago
    A big problem was certainly that Linux on commodity boxes became an industry standard. In 2000 it was still seen by many corporations as hobbyist amateur system. But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world and for many use cases a Linux box for 1000 bucks would do the same as a 10000 bucks Sun server.
    - mavhc 10mo ago
      Teenagers pick free software because a) they're broke, and b) there's way more videos about the free software on Youtube. 10 years later they pick the same software at their job
      - neilv 10mo ago
        The Linux (and LAMP, etc.) adoption happened before YouTube, Stackoverflow, ChatGPT and the other recent ways that people decide what tools to use, when they have a choice. Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.) Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.
    - znpy 10mo ago
      From what i remember from Bryan Cantrill's talks there were talks about open sourcing Solaris years before sun actually did that. If Solaris was open sourced say, five years earlier, it would probably have been a major player in the OS space today. (we'll never know, of course, history took a different turn). > But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world IIRC i read/heard somewhere that there were also talks for Google to use sun hardware or the solaris OS for their internal infra. I don't remember the source for that though :(
  - OhMeadhbh 10mo ago
    You're reminding me of when Sun was using the slogan "The Network is the Computer," and even put it on a T-Shirt or two. Most tech-types I knew chuckled a bit. Someone had a T-Shirt printed up saying "The Network is the Network. The Computer is the Computer. Sorry for the confusion." But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
    - jeffhwang 10mo ago
      I remember being confused by that tagline and also by Sun's later pitch: "We put the dot in dotcom"!
      - DonHopkins 10mo ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291 DonHopkins on April 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident! But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if. The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft. It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc! And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh! https://web.archive.org/web/20200814053447/https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computing-to-the-channel/4107 https://web.archive.org/web/20200814053447/https://www.itbus... Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris. To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T? A: AT&T.
  - iberator 10mo ago
    Save Sun?! SUN never died or loose. They WON: got accuried for BILLIONS of dollars by Oracle. It was not a fire sale
- raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  It wasn’t forward facing from a morality standpoint. It was a business strategy. Every tech company open sources (or tries to standardize) things where their competitor is stronger. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
  - bryanlarsen 10mo ago
    Doesn't that article contradict your statement? It gives a bunch of examples of companies supporting open source for sound business reasons, and then claims that Sun is doing stuff with unsound business motivations.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
      This was written in 2002, I can’t fault Joel for not having perfect foresight. But if I squint I can see the strategy. First you got to get rid of the industries dependency on Microsoft, if you can get developers comfortable with Java, Microsoft Windows was not going to focus on making Windows Servers the best place to run Java. Java could have very well been the “nose of the camel in the tent”. Javascript was definitely an attempt to commoditize “where you run applications” to get more people running apps in the browser.
      - bryanlarsen 10mo ago
        I think the motivation is backwards. Many employees and even executives are highly motivated by moral arguments. They want to do good in the world, and get paid for it. But to do so they have to justify it with a business case. IOW, the moral argument comes first, the business case follows.
        raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
        I posit that no non founder executive does anything without thinking about profit first.
- RexFactorem 10mo ago
  [dead]

by dust42 10mo ago

znpy 10mo ago

Another testament to how incredibly forward looking Sun Microsystems was. Truly a champion of open systems.

BirAdam 10mo ago
If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
- dust42 10mo ago
  A big problem was certainly that Linux on commodity boxes became an industry standard. In 2000 it was still seen by many corporations as hobbyist amateur system. But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world and for many use cases a Linux box for 1000 bucks would do the same as a 10000 bucks Sun server.
  - mavhc 10mo ago
    Teenagers pick free software because a) they're broke, and b) there's way more videos about the free software on Youtube. 10 years later they pick the same software at their job
    - neilv 10mo ago
      The Linux (and LAMP, etc.) adoption happened before YouTube, Stackoverflow, ChatGPT and the other recent ways that people decide what tools to use, when they have a choice. Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.) Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.
  - znpy 10mo ago
    From what i remember from Bryan Cantrill's talks there were talks about open sourcing Solaris years before sun actually did that. If Solaris was open sourced say, five years earlier, it would probably have been a major player in the OS space today. (we'll never know, of course, history took a different turn). > But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world IIRC i read/heard somewhere that there were also talks for Google to use sun hardware or the solaris OS for their internal infra. I don't remember the source for that though :(
- OhMeadhbh 10mo ago
  You're reminding me of when Sun was using the slogan "The Network is the Computer," and even put it on a T-Shirt or two. Most tech-types I knew chuckled a bit. Someone had a T-Shirt printed up saying "The Network is the Network. The Computer is the Computer. Sorry for the confusion." But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
  - jeffhwang 10mo ago
    I remember being confused by that tagline and also by Sun's later pitch: "We put the dot in dotcom"!
    - DonHopkins 10mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291 DonHopkins on April 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident! But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if. The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft. It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc! And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh! https://web.archive.org/web/20200814053447/https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computing-to-the-channel/4107 https://web.archive.org/web/20200814053447/https://www.itbus... Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris. To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T? A: AT&T.
- iberator 10mo ago
  Save Sun?! SUN never died or loose. They WON: got accuried for BILLIONS of dollars by Oracle. It was not a fire sale
raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
It wasn’t forward facing from a morality standpoint. It was a business strategy. Every tech company open sources (or tries to standardize) things where their competitor is stronger. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- bryanlarsen 10mo ago
  Doesn't that article contradict your statement? It gives a bunch of examples of companies supporting open source for sound business reasons, and then claims that Sun is doing stuff with unsound business motivations.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
    This was written in 2002, I can’t fault Joel for not having perfect foresight. But if I squint I can see the strategy. First you got to get rid of the industries dependency on Microsoft, if you can get developers comfortable with Java, Microsoft Windows was not going to focus on making Windows Servers the best place to run Java. Java could have very well been the “nose of the camel in the tent”. Javascript was definitely an attempt to commoditize “where you run applications” to get more people running apps in the browser.
    - bryanlarsen 10mo ago
      I think the motivation is backwards. Many employees and even executives are highly motivated by moral arguments. They want to do good in the world, and get paid for it. But to do so they have to justify it with a business case. IOW, the moral argument comes first, the business case follows.
      - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
        I posit that no non founder executive does anything without thinking about profit first.
RexFactorem 10mo ago
[dead]