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Somebody rings you up or corners you in the street and asks you if you support internet filtering and you say yes so you don't look like a creep but when you get into the polling booth it might be an entirely different situation.

Might be.

But probably won't be.

This how the issues were framed by an ABC poll:

The exact questions asked of the 1,000 people [in a telephone poll] were:

Would you say you are in favour or not in favour of having a mandatory Government Internet filter that would automatically block all access in Australia, to overseas websites containing material that is Refused Classification?

This question followed a definition of 'refused classification' material, as images and information about one or more of the following:

* child sexual abuse;
* bestiality;
* sexual violence;
* gratuitous, exploitative or offensive sexual fetishes; and
* detailed instructions on or promotion of crime, violence or use of illegal drugs.

If a mandatory Internet Filter is established, are you in favour or not in favour of the community being advised which websites have been Refused Classification and the reason why they have been refused classification?

81% favored a mandatory government filter.

91% wanted to see any government black list made public. 80% of Aussies support filter

That strikes me as a reasonably nuanced response. Though not what the geek wanted to hear.

After all we did that to the Russians in the 80's causing one of their large oil pipelines to explode. Does it make you feel better that Microsoft gave China a peek at the full source code for Windows? http://www.builderau.com.au/architect/work/soa/US-software-blew-up-Russian-gas-pipeline-/0,339024596,320283135,00.htm

iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -X

iptables -N SSH_WHITELIST

# My work network.
iptables -A SSH_WHITELIST -s 1.2.3.0/24 -m recent --remove --name SSH -j ACCEPT
# My home network
iptables -A SSH_WHITELIST -s 4.5.6.0/24 -m recent --remove --name SSH -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name SSH
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -j SSH_WHITELIST
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 --rttl --name SSH -j LOG
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 --rttl --name SSH -j DROP

Tune appropriately. I find that 4 per minute doesn't generate false positives but quite effectively blocks brute forcers. You could lower hitcount or increase the seconds to your liking.

And this is just for machines where I do need multiple people to be able to login from multiple locations. On other machines I definitely use ssh key only auth via the sshd_config.

PLUS: This proves that there ARE people out there interested in breaking into Linux boxes. It's just that this is the best way they can find to do it and I think that says a lot. So let's not hear any more of this "Linux would have viruses too if it were as popular as Windows" bull. Between this and the MySQL on Windows worm:

http://news.cnet.com/MySQL-worm-hits-Windows-systems/2100-7349_3-5553570.html

and the recent Linux botnet perpetrated via password brute forcing:

http://www.builderau.com.au/program/linux/soa/Linux-botnet-discovery-points-to-lazy-administrators/0,339028299,339298642,00.htm

you would think we could put that old chestnut to bed by now.

Oh, I don't know. Stop funding Darl McBride.

That would be a nice start.

Exactly. Most of the best Russian programmers are currently either making botnets or breaking DRM. During the late stages of the Cold War, they spent most of their time buying or stealing code from the West. A fact that the CIA once exploited to cause one of the largest non-nuclear man made explosions.

While you might like the DRM breakers, nothing here is much to get excited about.

Not to mention how Microsoft is branching out to new platforms like the iPhone. Microsoft's Seadragon app came out first on the iPhone according to this news article. It makes me wonder if they will eventually be releasing their huge money making office type apps for the little bugger and this is just testing the waters...or maybe at least release some apps to give official exchange compatibility to the iPhone. I am sure that would sell like hotcakes.

I think if IA-64 ever achieved the kind of volume the x86 market has, it would end up being a fine processor with lots of room for improvement still. It never really stood a chance: it was marketed as a server processor and Microsoft offerer only a half-assed support for it (it's their best interest to keep computers a commodity and they will fight any attempt to differentiate in that space). In addition, by the time it could be a viable high-power desktop workstation for developers or data-crunchers (a space it shines in) there was no Fedora or Ubuntu for it.

Instead, AMD came out with a set of extensions to the crufty x86 and that is what we use today. We would be much better if we started from a clean sheet.

And much, much better, if binary compatibility to x86 wasn't such a big issue.

None of that is true. Microsoft ported NT based kernels to Itanium (and spent vast amounts of time doing so because there are some subtle issues). Still since it was made by Intel it was pretty much guaranteed to get Windows support.

An Opteron 246 had about the same SpecInt as an Itanium 2 even when both were running native code.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/11/05/amd-benchmarks-opteron-against--itanium-xeons-piiis

An Itanium was much slower running x86 binaries. Even the second generation run x86 binaries slowly

http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Itanium-loses-x86-hardware-support/0,339028227,339230300,00.htm

Microsoft Windows and major Linux versions include IA-32 EL. The emulation layer is considerably slower than a modern Xeon however: A 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor runs emulated x86 instructions at about the same speed as a 1.5GHz Xeon processor, according to Intel.

At that point the fastest Xeon was much faster than 1.5Ghz

Opteron systems were much cheaper

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/57718-28-opteron-kill-itanium

and they tended to win on real world benchmarks

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30FE64linux_3.html

Basically Itanium was a chance for a company with vast resources to start from scratch and it wasn't faster than x86. The Risc chips that NT supported actually had a better performance advantage, at one point up to 2x the SpecInt. And that wasn't enough to get people to bear the pain of switching over.

The fact is you can't judge computer architecture by aesthetic principles. x86 and x64 may look ugly but that is subjective. The thing that counts is performance and x86 has been beating competing architectures on SpecInt for ages.

Amd64 vs Ia64 was particularly dramatic. Intel had a huge financial advantage and at one point desktop Athlon 64s were the fastest processor in the world, beating far more expensive Ia64 server processors. It's the same now with Nehalem -

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-i.html

it beats far more expensive non x86 chips, including ones from Intel.

Actually it wins on FP now, which is something that non x86 chips tended to do well at

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-f.html

It's easy to say that it would be easy to start from a clean sheet, but Intel has tried that, poured money into it got the entire industry (including Microsoft) to announce transition plans from x86 to Ia64 and it still failed. Hell Ia64 isn't even that aesthetically pleasing, the more you look at it the more crufty it is.

It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.

Yeah, and that's pretty much their tactic in the US now, too, since they became one of the biggest "campaign contributors" back in the 2000 elections.

Anyway, slashing prices is difficult in a country where most "customers" get Windows for free. To beat that, MS would have to start paying people to use their software. Of course, for government agencies, it can be a bit more difficult to get away with using pirated software. Your records may be accessible to the politicians who are on the take, and they have ways of punishing people who don't buy from their campaign contributors.

But there may well be a bigger reason: Maybe the Russian government's IT folks are finally getting across the idea that there are serious problems with trusting any binary-only software that comes from a big American corporation. Consider the story discussed here a while back, about the fact that Vista (and apparently XP, too) will sometimes ignore config settings having to do with updates, and automatically update things even when you have explicitly told it not to. This is a giant "backdoor", as the security folks call it. Not only can the software you buy have all sorts of extra code in it that they didn't tell you about ("special for the Russian market"); Windows may at any time replace parts of your system with a new version that has even more "special" code tailored just for you. That's gotta be making a lot of people a bit nervous.

This nervousness is probably encouraged by the widespread interpretation of the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion, as the result of sabotage by American software. That's an Australian site, but you can find lots of descriptions of this event online, and most of them give the same explanation. This story is a good illustration for why you don't want to run unanalyzable binaries in the controls for critical infrastructure. And maybe you don't want to run binary-only software anywhere. ("Think of the children" comes to mind here. ;-)

Note that "free" software is usually also open source. That means you can hire your own hackers to study the code, and remove any backdoors they find. And you can do clean compiles, to ensure that the binaries you're running actually correspond to the code. This should be sufficient to convince anyone with a grain of sense. We don't know whether access to the source code would have prevented the above explosion, but we can safely say that lack of the source code does pretty much prevent finding and fixing such problems.

Whatever "lobbying" was being done previously, it seems to have been completely effective. Many countries have signed, without dispute, so-called "free" trade agreements which essentially codify every US-corporate-friendly dream that could be devised by the Bushites - including DMCA-ish and software patent provisions, to speak of 2 issues in the IT area. In non-IT areas, similar capitulations are even worse. Pharmaceuticals, agriculture, all get twisted into poisonous American corporatised pretzels, to pave the way for overpriced patent drugs and monstrosities such as GM products (which should be flat-out illegal anywhere). It's as if the "sovereign" countries didn't even read the agreements, let alone take heed of the public outry that always accompanies them.

It must be so easy for them, when the signatories are Bush-puppet governments such as the Howard government in Australia (thankfully rejected at last) and Harper (which malignancy we should pray is thrown out tomorrow, or at least held safely to a minority).

Let's be honest. "Globalisation" never meant anything more or less than "America buys your stuff cheap, you buy America's stuff dear". The world does not need Wal-Mart, Microsoft, McDonald's, or any other substandard, exploitative American brand. The height of absurdity is Wal-Mart selling rice to Indians. What do the Wal-Marts in China sell? Crappy plastic Chinese crap back to the Chinese? The whole concept is absurd. What is Wal-Mart even doing in Canada?

The ultimate irony is that those tilting the playing field towards the USA, and who would most vehemently deny the insuperable insult to sovereignty that these agreements represent, also claim to believe in a "free market" - the Bushites, the Reaganites, the Friedmanites, the corrupt fuckwads, the ignorant lying Sarah and Todd Palins, the criminal Cons and neo-Cons whose chickens, we hope, are coming home to roost at last. If you're wondering why you're having trouble competing - maybe it's because you're not competitive! Top example - Microsoft can't compete on merit. They have to be anti-competitive; and you betcha they love them some FTA help. Pity they got caught at it.

But perhaps as the world wises the hell up, we finally see some logic in Bush's response: More lobbying. "Bring it on", in the Texan moron's famous catchphrase: Just expect more pushback!

But we'd prefer if you'd just Bugger off.

Because then their damned Lexmark printers don't work and I go out of business? Until linux can run Windows games with a "clicky clicky,next next next" installer,and I can install those damned Lexmark all-in-ones that everyone seems to have there is just no way i can survive selling Linux boxes. i tried and ended up having to reformat them and put Windows because folks didn't want them. You can talk about how much safer Linux is to a customer all day long,but if it doesn't work with their hardware and they can't easily install and play their games,it is no sale.

And as for flamebait? Has nobody seen the massive amounts of JavaScript exploits hitting the net lately? If this was an article touting an increased speed for ActiveX would we all be cheering? JavaScript is the script kiddies tool of choice ATM,and it is just getting worse. Don't believe me? Just go here or here and look for yourself. Or type "JavaScript Exploit Firefox" into Google and see how many hits you get. I counted over 702,000! We need to be increasing the security of JavaScript,not the speed. Who cares how fast it'll render if you are afraid to allow your users to have it on for fear of being hacked? But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

The BSD style licensed projects get more momentum and make forward progress.

I am having a little trouble figuring out if you are sarcastic or serious.

I have great respect for the BSD kernel projects, they do some things a lot better than Linux. But if you compare the pace of kernel development, by source-code line count, Linux tremendously outpaces BSD kernel development.

What you're left with after that is a lot of Java projects. Which are great for enterprise, right now. But building a stack of new Java code is definitely building today's code for today, not tomorrow's code. Java is the conservative choice of enterprise at the moment.

And then there are community issues, like the Spring bug that showed us that this enterprise-critical code wasn't getting the eyes that an Open Source project with more non-company programmers does.

MS has been getting free labor from BSD for decades and lately appears to be trying to create an opposition between complementary projects in order to trouble the GPL. MS has as much or more to lose from the GPL than from anything else. The rest of us, we gain from the GPL. However, it is important to remember that the license chosen, is part of the game and that to play in any given sandbox, you must agree to the rules, whether ISC or GPL, or else find a different sandbox. So keep that in mind when MS trolls or pawns try to play BSD/ISC vs GPL licensing.

One caveat for non-ascetics is that in this day and age, especially when going up against a competitor known for 'embrace, extend, extinguish' breaking of technology, is that it isn't enough to just give away source code like we could back before MS politicized technology at the end of the 1990's. There now has to be something to keep the software free as a public resource while it evolved, sort of a payment-in-kind, rather than letting bad players not just walk away with free labor, but use it to undermine the developers.

To steer towards the technical aspects, the BSDs are interesting in that there is a lot of cross-pollenation between them. An advance in one usually rather quickly propagates to the others. Any of the four are excellent tools and complement Linux-based projects like Debian, Fedora, Busybox or UClinux. Any can be used in conjunction with just about any Free or Open Source Software including the various GNU-project tools we have come to use and rely upon, such as Apache, Perl or GCC.

The weakest one of the lot, strategically mind you, is FreeBSD. That is in part due to the mistake of allowing binary objects in the base. First, blackbox binaries are a security hole in and of themselves. Second, they make you as fully dependent on the vendor providing the binary as you are on the binary itself. That is a double kick in the nads for anyone that plans ahead. Increasingly businesses and governments are realizing that binary-only anything should not be touched even with the shitty end of a barge pole.

• Technically, aside from the above, FreeBSD has good performance on the x86. e.g. streaming video
• DragonflyBSD is interesting in that it aims for clustered and multi-processor computing. e.g. rendering
• OpenBSD prioritizes standards, encryption and pro-active security. PF and OpenSSH start here. It is also famous for its founder's technical genius which is offset by being too direct and occasionally even exhibiting a Gates-like personality. e.g. network packet filter / router, OpenAFS server
• NetBSD focuses on portability and embedded systems. e.g. automation, data acquisition

YMMV

I've used this successfully on several occasions. It's available from CPAN and requires only Perl. Here's a write about extending it a bit to do joins. http://www.builderau.com.au/architect/database/soa/No-fuss-SQL-joins-without-a-database/0,339024547,320268666,00.htm

SO has anyone actually USED Vista? What am I doing right/wrong that I have NOTHING to complain about it?

You are using it in a 100% Windows walled garden. I bought by wife (i know, geek, wife, wtf?) a new laptop with Vista for her schoolwork. I had just a couple simple tasks to perform to finish up the setup.

1 connect to the backup NAS and copy her files.
http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/
2 Connect to our networked printers.
http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=21&FamID=42&ProdID=223

The first task took over 2 hours and a massive Google search. The second task took a little over an hour to connect the first printer. The second went a lot faster.

Vista by default has changed the security level (a feature) but it isn't well docummented, so when connecting to a Simple Share NAS box I couldn't log in. It requires a registry tweak to back down the security level to enable logging in and transferring files.
http://blogs.msdn.com/chkdsk/archive/2006/03/10/548787.aspx
http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/codemonkeybusiness/viewblogpost.htm?p=339270746

The second was a 5 minute task in Ubuntu for a complete noob. I used a stand alone printserver hanging on the back of my inkjet and laserjet printers to provide CUPS networking for my printers. In Ubuntu, it was easy to put in the IP address \\192.168.1.102\lp1 and pick a printer. It was intuitive to pick network printing and put in the printer address. In Windows it took quite a while to figure out how to do internet printing without a directory services server.

It was far from easy for a Vista noob.

If you don't have a port open to the outside world, the Cylons are not getting into your network.

Didn't the miniseries plot hang on the fact that the Cylons had used social engineering (i.e. Baltar) to get their Trojan code into stand-alone computer systems? Not only is hacking a non-networked military system plausible enough for fiction, it's happened in real life too.

Oh, but pay no attention to the jerks telling you that internal consistency isn't important in soft science fiction. I don't care how many of the rules of the real universe you suspend; you still owe it to your audience to make your fantasy universe rational enough for the plot to make sense.

You should check things out before you make assumptions. Sun applied to be a PAS submitter to JTC1, but then they pulled out. Java was never standardized. In fact, they pulled this stunt twice. Once with ISO, and once with ECMA.

http://www.builderau.com.au/program/java/soa/Sun-r efuses-to-relinquish-control-over-Java/0,339024620 ,320280607,00.htm

TFA says Sun has "debuted software for a high-end cellphone that looked very similar to the Apple iPhone" but there are no pictures. In fact, I combed the web for more stories about this and none seem to have any pictures.

Does it have a touchscreen or not? What kind of media playback? Visual voicemail? This story says they want to produce phones that can be sold for $30-$50, which pretty much means they'd be unlike the iPhone at all.

I guess what we have here is an iPhone name-drop with no meat to it. Which just adds to the iPhone buzz, really. Meanwhile, Sun's product (whether it's software or a specific phone) grabs a little attention, but goes back to being boring as soon as you're finished reading the article.

References:

http://www.builderau.com.au/architect/work/soa/Why _Microsoft_won_t_make_your_car_crash/0,339024596,3 20274818,00.htm
http://www.cartalk.com/content/testdrives/Reviews/ bmw-745Li-2003.html?

-nB

The specialized media has been aghast with the result of such fruitful collaboration.

People are clamoring, no, begging, for more of it.

The strange thing about supposedly ironic and sarcastic comments is that very occasionally they are, in contrast to the intentions of the author.

One of the results of the collaboration has been Java 6 integration with Windows. No matter what the common belief, Java desktop development is widespread, but what is really needed is GUI integration and performance that makes it comparable to other Windows applications. This has been one of the areas of collaboration, with Sun providing, in Java 6, such capabilities.

Here is one such 'specialised media' article:

http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/30722
"Java SE 6 First Impressions: A Desktop Winner"

here is another:
http://www.builderau.com.au/program/java/soa/Java_ SE_6_in_a_nutshell/0,339024620,339266522,00.htm
"Java SE6: A Desktop Revolution?"

So yes, there is publicity about what this collaboration has delivered for desktop Java. And many developers have indeed been 'begging' for it; Java on the desktop has been held back, many say.

So, before posting ironic comments, it is a good idea to make sure you have your facts straight....

Here you go... performance comparison of unmanaged C++ vs .NET

I think you might be confusing .NET's JIT compilation with the way that Java code is interpreted. Check out this link for more information on the .NET JIT process.

What I find amazing about the group of C++ detractors as a whole is how rarely I comprehend the claims put forward about the vaguely defined desirable language ~C++.

I think "you don't pay for what you don't use" is a fundamental design flaw of the language.

What is the precise claim here? That the entire language niche of pay-as-you-play languages should have remained empty? That C++ was the wrong language to occupy this niche? That there is a finite set of everyone-pays-all-the-time features that could have been added to C++ without compromising the language's scope or applicability? That any two people asked to write down such a list would produce a non-empty intersection?

Pay-as-you-play enables compositionality: the very idea that libraries like Boost can exist and be 90% as effective as if those same features had been designed into the language. It's the 10% that Boost doesn't achieve that gets folded back into the core language.

One guy was ranting that the true test of cohones is what the designer removes from the language, while another long post was devoted to a laundry list of "how could this language not have all these kitchen sinks so late in the day?" Which is it? You can't have minimalism in all places all of the time. Minimalism to the compiler vendor is a different beast than minimalism to the end user.

Ada had generics in 1983. Yada yada yada. What do you get when you start with a clean slate in 1995?

Does it thrill Marc Andreessen?

http://news.com.com/Andreessen+PHP+succeeding+wher e+Java+isnt/2100-1012_3-5903187.html

"Java is much more programmer-friendly than C or C++, or was for a few years there until they made just as complicated. It's become arguably even harder to learn than C++," Andreessen said. And the mantle of simplicity is being passed on: "PHP is such is an easier environment to develop in than Java."

Does it thrill Miguel de Icaza?

http://www.builderau.com.au/program/work/0,3902465 0,39129961,00.htm

The problem with J2EE really is that it became very, very academic and the complexity of all these perfectly designed systems in schools does not necessarily map when you have deadlines and all kinds of other things.

http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=cplus plus&seqNum=200&rl=1

When Java designers decided to disallow operator overloading, they cited C++ as an example of the inherent woes of this feature. As usual, they got it wrong, which is why operator overloading is slowly but surely creeping into Java just as generics recently did.

Does it thrill Sun insiders?

http://idevnews.com/CaseStudies.asp?ID=170

Peter Yared, former CTO for Sun J2EE app server unit says Java/J2EE may lose out to Open Source technologies in the future, as IT managers are architects get tired of the time and cost of building in Java.

The sad fact is that few of the C++ detractors out there could do any better than Java, and Java didn't hit its own sweet spot any better than C++ mapped to its own misbegotten design criteria.

I'm not saying mySQL doesn't have a place in the market, just that they compared a Toyota with a Ferrari and discovered that both had doors, wheels and engines, but oddly one cost more...

The counsel that Linux Australia instructed, a jovial fellow (who also is a right proper geek) named Jeremy Malcolm, has been toiling away at this for some time now. He recently resolved some outstanding confusion (mostly just crossed wires between all the unpaid volunteers involved on various sides of whichever your favourite ocean is), and is putting together the final pieces of the puzzle that will resolve the issue properly. Part of that was a sending a letter to various people around the country who might happen to be using Linux professionally, asking them to indicate their knowledge of the international trademark and their support of it.

Is Agile development secure?

They just need to keep hiring away our best Open Source talent.

I know they did recently -- article here focusing on their "theft" of Daniel Robbins, the former chief architect of Gentoo Linux.

They claim to be wanting to learn more about Open Source when they try and justify hiring guys who are just getting by financially but are huge braintrusts of the Linux movement. Basically they offer these guys 6 figure salaries to work behind closed doors in Redmond and never release anything of value to OSS ever again.

Many of them being family guys, they cannot turn these offers down due to finances. Kids are expensive, wives are expensive, SUVs are pricy, gas is pricy, taxes, computer hardware, and on and on.

I don't blame them but I think it's a dirty trick by Microsoft. I love OSS and use it at home at work and on project I create. We need to keep our talent.

Shame on you MS.

3rd paragraph from the bottom.

"For smaller companies that may not want to invest the time or the US$1,000 to rent the Intel system, a company called Advenio has a service in which it will do the necessary porting work. As an indication of the relative time involved, the company is charging a flat US$100 fee to create a universal binary of a Cocoa application; the fee for porting a Carbonised program starts at US$500 and depends on the amount of work involved."

http://www.advenio.com/

This is almost too idiotic to respond to, but nowhere does AGILE manifesto mandate (unit) tests.

No, the manifesto is completely vague, able to justify about anything, but still self-contradictory. On the other hand, proponents/extremists are the ones who say all tests have to be written before you write a line of the implementation, as though it were possible. A quick search reveals many articles matching the flawed mind set. Where have you been? Such as: http://www.builderau.com.au/architect/ood/0,390246 08,39130684,00.htm

And it certainly DOES rely on actual functioning product (aka running code); especially if one needs to choose between phone book sized "specifications" and actual functioning implementation.

Another silly straw man of the Agile community.

A simple specification with some good forethought can tie down a product behavior far better than a million tests, because tests can only handle one set of inputs at a time.

Have you actually even read the Agile manifesto? Go and read it: it has just main 4 bullet points, outlining what all Agile methodologies focus on, and what they consider secondary. As to conformance to a design, what do you think unit tests are?!?!? And if the two are not the same, what is "testing conformance to a design"?

They test points of conformance, not conformance. Which ones do you want to test? A function typically has a nearly-infinite set of possible inputs. Are you testing a specific implementation or the black-box function it is supposed to serve? If the implementation, then it is really non-Agile, because when the implementation significantly changes, the test cases likely to break also significantly change (and they were all written before even the first implementation?). If the black box implementation, then you have no justifiable reason to choose one set of inputs over another out of the infinite set of possibilities.

Or perhaps it's more likely you misunderstand what unit tests actually are. They are NOT written by outsiders (QA etc), but by the developer who writes the implementation, based on design of some kind (whether formal or informal), and as such actually not only tests conformance, but also improves understanding of the design.

I'd say it is more likely that you misunderstand. The claims by extremists that all unit tests must be written before the function is implemented shoots a big hole in that theory (supported in the former randomly-selected reference and elsewhere).

Oh, and assertions actually are generally used to verify that implementor correctly understands how the implementation works (esp. when integrating someone else's code). They can help, especially with legacy code. But unit tests have wider scope, and in general are more useful... as well as more work.

I'd say they have more work to verify an infinite set of inputs for each function.

Go to http://www.whirlpool.net.au/ or http://www.builderau.com.au/ for free forums in Australia.

...for its RDBMS development platform. See this article So I hardly think this applies to them.

Using Google search terms "make money using open source", I came up with the following:

-101 Ways to Make Money off Open Source
-How to make money with Open Source Software
-Making an open source living
-eWeek:How to Make Money Off Open Source

I am not intending to be snitty in suggesting that you search Google; there were tons of other seemingly-good resources contained within it, and it might just be a case of different search terms. You might be able to team the information gained there with the advice of people here.

Also, if you can gain access to the class papers from the Boston Embedded Systems conference, particularly those from Bill Gatliff in 2003, there were tons of developers there who lectured on this very thing, citing examples and explaining the ins and outs of open-source licensing. I thought Bill Gatliff did an excellent job, and you may be able to contact him through his website for some resources.

Get a number of large Fortune 500 companies to commit to switching to Linux. Then hardware and software developers will say, "Hmmm... If I want to sell into these companies, I have to support Linux."

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