Readit Newsyosoyubik commented on Show HN: An Ethereum-authenticated community on Web3, science and technology caches.xyz/... · Posted by u/ilovenerds
> Last Updated: September 24, 2018
This is very outdated and Tlon no longer operates/runs urbit.org but, in any case, the ToS says this: "The Site is owned and operated by Tlon", so the reference was to the website "urbit.org", not the Urbit project.
yosoyubik commented on Show HN: An Ethereum-authenticated community on Web3, science and technology caches.xyz/... · Posted by u/ilovenerds
I'm not familiar with Urbit, but a quick glance at their website says that it's owned by the "Tlon Corporation," which I have to assume is a for profit company. Ethereum on the other hand is guided, but not owned or controlled by a non-profit foundation. Ethereum is a public utility and they have a mechanism for community involvement and contribution via Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP). Hope that helps!
Urbit has always been open source—currently under the MIT license [1]—and same as Ethereum it's also guided by a non-profit foundation, the Urbit Foundation [2] established in 2021.
[1] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt [2] https://urbit.org/overview/people-history
If I had the time and the money, I’d like to pick up where Xerox PARC left off when they stopped working on Smalltalk, Cedar, Mesa, and similar projects. I’m also very fascinated by Apple projects of the 1990s such as SK8, Dylan, and the original proposal for a Lisp-based Newton. During the “interregnum” years at Apple many people with interesting ideas on system design and usability worked at Apple, such as Don Norman and Larry Tesler. I’m grateful for Steve Jobs’ return and for NeXT-based macOS, but unfortunately as time passed by, the Smalltalk, Lisp, and even NeXT influences at Apple faded away. It would be cool if somebody continued this vision. I’d do it in a heartbeat if I had the time and the financial resources.
"Many historical OSes and interpreters have approached the SSI[2] ideal, but fail on persistence, determinism, or both. In the OS department, the classic single-level store is the IBM AS/400 [18]. NewtonOS [19] was a shipping product with language-level persistence. Many image oriented interpreters (e.g., Lisps [20] and Smalltalks) are also SSI-ish, but usually not transactional or deterministic. And of course, many databases are transactional and deterministic, but their lifecycle function is not a general-purpose interpreter."
- [1] https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf
- [2] "Solid-State Interpreter"