[COSM-NEWS] Cosm News - 2000 May 2
Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Tue, 2 May 2000 03:26:47 -0500 (CDT)
First off, the mailing lists are moved and working again. The list
addresses have both been changed to @lists.mithral.com as well.
Status:
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The dual license (see http://cosm.mithral.com/~beberg/license-grid.html)
is still under development. Progress on this has been slow since the
goals of the license are rather different then any other, and lawyers
are not willing to help for less than $3.99/minute. The goal is to
create a dual license that any form of property can be licensed under,
not just the current projects.
Work is also starting on the privacy policy for all data used within
Cosm applications. Since various people will want to collect data when
you participate in their project, it's very important we lay down the
rules form the start. It's my intention that the policy be extremely
pro-privacy, fully opt-in, and with all data-sharing prohibited without
per-instance user consent. I'm hoping the various pro-privacy
organizations will lend a hand in this, as well as lots of feedback from
users. Unfortunately, every policy I can find is a list of ways the data
collector can broadcast your information, and all the rights you agree
to give up - not acceptable for Cosm. A good starting template with any
legal teeth is lacking, so if you know of one, let me know.
Once the dual license is done, the Client-Server SDK (CS-SDK) will be
put into the CVS and launched. CS-SDK allows rapid development of
internet scale client-server projects on all supported platforms by
anyone with a semester of coding experience. CS-SDK has been seeded to
several research projects which should be launching soon. CS-SDK allows
them to focus all their efforts on their research code, but development
is still not a fast process.
Unfortunately after CS-SDK is launched, the future of the Cosm project
itself is less rosy unless some things change. Programmers working on
the project have dwindled, while interest in a finished system has
grown. Obviously this doesn't work, it has to be built before it can be
used. Cosm is still a unique system, nothing even close to it exists.
But unless there is support from the programming community and funding
is found, the project will be no more.
Press:
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Scientific American (Apr 2000)
http://www.sciam.com/2000/0400issue/0400scicit5.html
Report On Business Magazine (Feb 2000)
http://cosm.mithral.com/press/www.robmagazine.com/html/tech_know.html
Minneapolis Star Tribune (Jan 10th 2000)
[offline only]
The press and others are still unaware what distributed computing is,
mistaking it with client-server, and I doubt the term can be reclaimed.
Cosm is considered trivial client-server by association, and thus is
mostly dismissed by the people who could use it. A quick one-page
description of what distributed computing is supposed to used to mean:
http://research.mithral.com/
Miscellaneous:
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I wrote an article on titled "To open source or not to open source" that
addressed the issues of open source from a business perspective. I
consider it a good thing to show your boss if you're trying to push open
source where you work - after you read it of course:
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/su-open.html
We chat about Cosm and other things in the #cosm channel on IRC EFNet.
More information on IRC and the mailing lists is at:
http://cosm.mithral.com/comm.html
A post to the cosm-dev list will follow in a few days with details on
the coding status, what is done and what still needs to be worked on.
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/