Dream in CS&E

Larry Moore

What type of (hypothetical) SC&E technologies do you dream of?

• Some new embedded system to control some electrical or mechanical device and gives it features that were possible before. – A design that will allow cars to navigate themselves.– A personal digital assistant that will dictate, do research, send

emails and print reports without touching or typing anything.

• A recompiler that parallelizes or optimizes compiled byte code (JAVA) or bit code (native machine code) that you do not have source for.

• A program that uses facial recognition to organize, search and more for all the photos you have taken.

• Autonomic threshold logic (artificial neural network systems)

The Solution to those dreams Y O U

• You can do the research• You can write the program• As time has shown, tedious time consuming tasks can

be done by a computer effortlessly.– Math and related tasks (accounting, taxes, graphing)– Record keeping/archiving (databases, searching, sorting)

• Embedded systems can control machinery that WAS purely human controlled.– Autonomic systems like Roomba, Robomow– Touch screen hardware controllers– Auto-focus and smile aware cameras

Direction

• Work for a company and attempt push your ideas.• Start your own company or community project and do

what you want.• Join a community project and aid it with your knowledge

and skills.

Software types• FOSS – Free OSS – Free and open source software• Freeware (closed source)• Proprietary software (shareware)

Why open source?Pros: • What you don't finish yourself, others may work on and

you can't be fired (except for non profit orgs that do pay you).

• No waiting for the release of a simple bug fix or a better solution to a problem. – Microsoft Explorer: slow simplistic file searching– Some bugs are put at a low priority and you may wait years

• OSS is sometimes a leader in innovation– Much of Win Vista features, Linux and Mac OS had first

• An OSS project that was written for an operating system can be ported to another operating system more easily, but a closed source project must be written fresh by the second programmer since the source is not available.

Why open source?

Cons: • Costs time and maybe money• Usually pays little or no money

Open Source/Freeware projects can:

• Make money (ads)• Give you recognition. (PC Magazine, PC World, Popular

Science, CNet)• Leads to:

– Future job– Credentials– Experience

• Serve your needs and wants

Open Source/Freeware projects can

FOSS• Game emulators• Windows utilities• Phone/PDA applications

– On the IPhone, a simple $1 program that just made a fart noise (maybe a joke). $1 x 100K = $100000

– A valentines day greeting card– Games

Closed Source Freeware• AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition• Wigits/Gadgets• CCleaner• WinRAR• ATTO Disk Benchmark

Examples of community projects (FOSS)

• GCC and variants like GCJ• 7-Zip• PCSX2 - PS2 emulator• OpenOffice.org (Sun

Microsystems)• Emule - P2P client• Damn Small Linux - originally

started as an experiment to see how much software could fit in 50 MB eventually became a full-fledged Linux distribution. Extremely fast and very flexible.

• WinSCP• MySQL• Perl scripting language• GNU project

• GIMP (like Photoshop)• Video players and plugings [XINE,

VirtualDub, AC3Filter, ffdshow]• Notepad++• Wireshark aka Ethereal - network

analizer• [] - uses the microphone input as

the input for an oscilloscope• WINE – Windows API• NetBeans• Clam AntiVirus• Dr. DivX (encoder)• Webkit, where Chrome and

Safari came from;+ Apple's e-mail client Mail and the 2008 version of Microsoft's Entourage personal information manager

• GMail Filesystem

Examples of community projects (FOSS)

University projects• Manta (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)• jGrasp (Auburn University)• BSD Unix (UC-Berkeley)• CINCH (Stanford University)

OS's• ----- Linux (Ubuntu, Google OS, DSL, Puppy, Red Hat)• ----- Unix (BSD, FreeBSD)• Google Android• Sun OS

Examples of community projects (FOSS)

Legacy code• Apache [HTTP Server, Hadoop, Maven, Jakarta,

Tomcat]• Mozilla [Firefox, Thunderbird, ChatZilla, ...] - formed by

Netscape, a for profit company, aided by many others with donations (AOL, IBM, Red Hat linux)

• Netscape – made the software open source as an attempt to increase popularity.

• Sun Microsystems• Google – for profit, but releases open source software

Companies that started from one or more CS/CE majors

• MySpace – was unpopular, but was bought by an advertising company

• Microsoft –– Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Albuquerque, New Mexico– Offered to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC

programming language for his new micro computer system in order to get investors ($50k each in late 70’s and early 80’s)

• Dell - sold computers from his dorm

Business models, views, ethics and opinions

• Sometimes, there's little or no profit in what we do, but it makes a big difference to the users who need/use it greatly. – Most Apache products – “Celebrating a Decade of Open Source

Leadership.”

• Somebody had to be the first to leap before a new market area can emerge. (Google Chrome and many others) – “Since we spend so much time online, we (Google) began seriously

thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there”

• If there's no profit, why do it? (Microsoft)– In its 2008 Annual Report, Microsoft stated that FOSS business models

challenge its license-based software model and that the firms who use these business models do not bear the cost for their software development.

• Let’s try to make problem free. (Apple) – “Apple tries to control everything and at the same time expects to

please everyone.”