OSD modification regarding what license can require of user

[David Johnson]

On Thursday 14 March 2002 03:20 am, John Cowan wrote:

> > I don't think that's relevant. Web Services will, by definition, be
> > served this way. That they may not be available (or viable) to some is a
> > different issue.
>
> My point was that distribution will not become irrelevant just because
> of the Web Services hype.  In the reasonably foreseeable future,
> most programs will continue to execute locally because of bandwidth
> constraints.

It's more than bandwidth contraints. A future where all applications run on 
remote servers and all the clients are thin is foreseeable, but not likely. 
We had that once, back in the days when RMS decided not to place restrictions 
on usage but only on distribution. We've moved beyond that. We now realize 
that it is more efficient to have a thousand CPUs process a thousand 
applications than to have a single centralized CPU process those same 
thousand applications.

Personally I don't think this latest big push towards thin clients is going 
to be any more successful than the earlier pushes. Some of it will of course 
happen, but I don't expect it to be the common mode of executing applications.

I do foresee distributed processing. But this involves distribution, so no 
problem. But centralized processing has come and gone.

-- 
David Johnson
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