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Is Fear Reducing the Publicity for Open Source?
sebFlyte writes "Are companies deliberately keeping quiet about moves to open source because they are afraid of the reactions of proprietary vendors they still have relationships with? ZDNet raises and tries to answer this question in a two-part special report, 'Open source behind closed doors'. It comes to the conclusion that, in all probability, companies are keeping quiet to avoid reprisals of one sort or another. One part of the fear of publicizing migrations is nicely summed up in the second part by Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe: 'Guys are really shy -- it's the Munich Linux thing. They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry.'"
You live in fear of the 100% markup that you will pay if you go against MS (for all Windows based software, not just MS's). MS has a long history of penalizing those that do not do exactly what MS wants. Yes, MS will offer 80 % off of this years prices to keep you. But they expect high prices next year, and they expect that you will not even toy with OSS anymore. Simply read what Dell had to say at the MS monopoly trial.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry.
Better that than a monkey dance!
Each of those companies are primarily technology providers in some form.
I think the article pertains mostly to companies whose primary market isn't technology, where they use tech, but don't sell that tech as a product to itself.
Of course it's never the fault of the programmer. From the description of PASSWORD() from the MySQL docs:
"Calculates and returns a password string from the plaintext password str, or NULL if the argument was NULL. This is the function that is used for encrypting MySQL passwords for storage in the Password column of the user grant table.
Note: The PASSWORD() function is used by the authentication system in MySQL Server; you should not use it in your own applications. For that purpose, use MD5() or SHA1() instead. Also see RFC 2195 for more information about handling passwords and authentication securely in your applications."
This has been in the docs for years, long before 4.1 (the version in which the internal hash algorithm was updated) was released. The possibility for application breakage from this change was also fully documented in the upgrade release notes. In fact, it's mentioned in the first real step. As if that wasn't enough, you actually have to want to use the new password algorithm. If after you upgrade the grants table isn't manually altered to support the new hash length, the PASSWORD() function works exactly as it did in versions 4.0 and earlier.