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I think if you take a look at the TOra project, you'll see an example of the closed fork doing worse than the open one. TOra stands for Toolkit for Oracle, it is a feature competitor to Quest Software's TOAD toolkit.

I was thrilled when I found TORa, and when I found the project had a windows port. It's DDL/Data extraction is by far the best feature for my day-to-day work.

At some point, Quest Software hires the TOra developer, and closes the source on the Windows port. I was still so enamoured with TOra that I pestered the Quest sales staff monthly to find out when it will hit the price sheet, so I can buy the now closed version. I don't think they ever intended to sell a competing product, though.

So, 9-12 months later, the Windows port is defunct, with Quest claiming that all features of TOra are now available in Toad.

I wouldn't call this a successful acquisition, unless you count Quest Software (for squishing a competing product) or the original developer of TOra (which, I admit, has to make a living some how). Perhaps you could count Mac and Linux users as winners here, as they still enjoy an open-licensed version, whose developer is now on a steady payroll related to the project.

Had they kept TOra intact for Windows users, and priced it competitively with TOAD, I would have been happy to be a paying customer.

This should increase the availability of quality F/OSS software on the windows platform, which can help ease the transition to Linux.

I only wish this were the case a few years ago. TORA (Toolkit for Oracle) was a great, inexpensive cross-platform PL/SQL editor. I tried to get my boss to standardize on it so that we could use the same tools in Linux and Windows, but he was turned off by the need to charge for Windows support. (He interpreted that as Linux arrogance and was worried that the Windows support would be lacking. Even though I explained it was because of Trolltech licensing.)

Turns out the boss was right, though for different reasons. Tora got bought out by a windows pl/sql tools competitor and basically killed.

iWarp has been around for a few years and I think is getting deprecated by a newer system. Just a way of getting *that* much more speed by avoiding unnecessary context switches. Datacenter stuff mostly but is general enough that it could be dropped on a lot of current stuff (AFAIK).

Links:
Low-Earth Orbit Satellites: Technologies and Trends

LEOs Dance The Jitterbug

HTTP Traffic over Satellite

In short, because of the youth of LEO it's a bit hard to say. Also don't forget this is for the "last mile"[1] problem. The ones that will be using this, already have their own terrestial networks.

[1] Think of it as an "extended" last mile. Also you could gain other advantages. VoIP,Internet,TV, and the freedom to live were you want.

BTW Watch the dates on some of the stuff you read.

The SRV record can be used to tell a client what server and port to go to for a named service.

Rather than using hostnames (www.foo.baz)
use a SRV record to send http traffic to a host:port pair, frp traffic to a different host:port pair, and on and on::

; SRV priority weight port target
_http._tcp IN SRV 0 0 8080 heuey.foo.baz.
_http._tcp IN SRV 0 0 8080 deuey.foo.baz.
_ftp._tcp.ftp IN SRV 0 0 21 louie.foo.baz.

No more do you need to include non-standard ports for http. (8080, 81, etc) just make the app SRV aware and update DNS. done.

This would allow for much simpler Server configs too!!

TOra is an awesome database utility that runs on Linux and Windows that could be used to replace SQL Navigator. It can connect to Oracle and MySQL.

Go check out the proposed MPLampS, Electricity over IP draft.

There is hope for the people of Fremont. ;-)

the AC

do a google search for ssh key dns and you'll get lots of hits. This is probably the best way to manage large sets of ssh hostkeys, assuming you have your DNS house in order. good luck!