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Is MySQL's Community Eating the Company?
mjasay writes "Craigslist's Jeremy Zawodny reviews the progress of MySQL as a project, and discovers that through third-party forks and enhancements like Drizzle and OurDelta 'you can get a "better" MySQL than the one Sun/MySQL gives you today. For free.' Is this a good thing? On one hand it demonstrates the strong community around MySQL, but on the other, it could make it harder for Sun to fund core development on MySQL by diverting potential revenue from the core database project. Is this the fate of successful open-source companies? To become so successful as a community that they can't eke out a return as a company? If so, could anyone blame MySQL/Sun for creating its own proprietary fork in order to afford further core development?"
Monty has been blogging some about the need to be a more inclusive project. Its one thing to be open source, but to be an open source community project thats still owned by a company takes real effort on the part of the company. Perhaps this would encourage some of these enhancements to be rolled into the main branch.
I keep doing a select statement to download the distribution, thinking it'll only return one result, but it keeps returning more. I submitted it as a bug, but it was marked as WONTFIX.
For paying that much money for a company that gives its core product away for free!? MySQL made a bit of money through support contracts, but now they have a lot more zeros to account for when they pay the bills.
This isn't MySQL's fault. If someone wanted to pay me 3million for my piece of crap car, I would sell it for half that, so they thought they were getting a bargain, but how could Sun justify paying that much?
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Maybe Sun should rename their fork of MySQL to SunSQL Solaris Edition JDK
I'm ready to use PostgreSQL now
This is always the case when you release open source. Someone else can offer support cheaper than you. Someone else can make modifications that people want. Someone else can even fork it and choke you out if they're doing whatever gets more attention than what you are doing. The good news (for them) is that you provided them a getting-started point with all your work so they didn't have to put all that time (and money, since time is money) into getting it off the ground. This is the way GPL/OSS is *supposed* to work. You have to keep investing more time and money while pushing and driving your costs to zero or you'll get snaked by just about anyone else who has the motivation to do so.
All the other databases have them, but mysql only has auto-increment.
Makes it an extra layer of abstraction in code to support multiple databases.
Seems like such a simple feature.
If it's all OSS, then why isn't MySQL picking up the best 3rd party pieces and rolling them back into the official distribution?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't get the joke?
Sun should welcome such improvements into their dev cycle. If such forks are superior, then they should eventually find their way back into the parent model. The successful business models around OSS rely on the services/consulting/support that sit around and on top of the actual OSS code. Red Hat, IBM, HP, and others all understand this. Sun, unfortunately, still has the MySQL model wrong IMHO.
davejenkins.com |
Why would they want to do that? Sun should focus on making MySQL run fast on its hardware, nothing more and nothing less.
"If so, could anyone blame MySQL/Sun for creating its own proprietary fork in order to afford further core development?"
Wait - what good would it do for MySQL/Sun to create it's own fork if, by the poster's own declaration, community supported forks are *already* better?
I think, maybe, part of the problem is companies (not just Sun/MySQL, but other companies I've seen this with too) not really treating open source projects *as* open source. They release the software under GPL, or whatever free license, but because they want to maintain 'copyright purity' (that is, the code they distribute is 100% owned by them, because that is the only thing that will allow them to potentially make the codebase proprietary for selling 'enhanced' versions; if they accepted other contributors' code under the GPL, they would then have to accept the code to be GPL forever, for all versions), so they won't/can't integrate other contributors' code into the main distribution (unless they can work out some seperate licensing agreement with the third-party developer).
Whenever you have a situation like that, as a company, you are giving other developers the benefit of Free Software while *denying* it from your own customers (well, sorta, until they stop being your customers and start using the other forks), and yourselves.
I don't know what the 'best' business model is for open source companies, but if you really want to leverage open source/free software, you have to give up on directly charging for 'enhanced' versions of the software, because the only way to play that game is to force this situation where you cannot benefit from the enhancements of the community. If you are successful, like MySQL, then eventually the community grows to the point where the community's developer resources are greater than your own as the company, and you find yourself in a situation where you can't really keep up with the community.
I hail the MySQL community for a good job.
Now it is time to fork VirtualBox into community driven project. It is getting more and more crippled Since Sun eated the Innotek.
There you are, staring at me again.
The summary, also posted on Matt Asay's CNET blog, has little to nothing to do with either Zawodny's blog post nor reality. Return on investment? Sun wanted eyeballs, some strange sort of open source marketshare, and various other bits of MySQL AB. They got it. I don't think anybody ever thought it was about turning MySQL into a profit center. Eke out a return? That has nothing to do with what Sun is all about, in much the same way as Novell isn't trying to get rich by selling disks of SUSE.
MySQL seems to be a project with alot of mindshare that doesn't execute well.
With commercial software, you're screwed when the vendor decides to do stupid things. With OSS, you have options besides moving to a new platform or living with the vendor's stupid decisions.
At the end of the day, this is good for everyone, and is an example of why OSS is good for society.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
One of the keys to a successful open-source project is to take the improvements being made in forks and bring them back into the main project. One of the reasons forks are created is that users have a need that's not being met by the project. If you bring their solutions back into the mainline project, the fork will tend to die because it's no longer needed.
This is, BTW, one of the reasons to use a GPL-like license. If you do, you're guaranteed that you can bring improvements from forks back into your mainline codebase. If you go with a license that allows you to create a fork with things that aren't available to others, it simultaneously allows others to create forks that aren't available to you. Then you end up in Sun's situation with no way to resolve it except by creating the same improvements yourself. And there's more of your competitors than there are of you, which means they will win this particular race to create improvements. If you go with a license that forces improvements to be available to you but not anybody else, many people who might have created an improvement you could use will simply not contribute to your project. It's a perception issue: GPL-like terms lead contributors to think in terms of their contributions helping everybody and you just happen to be one of that "everybody", while "owner gets everything, everybody else gets what the owner gives them" terms tend to lead contributors to think you want them to work solely for your benefit without you giving them anything in return. That turns a lot of people off.
sun might have made a mistake by purchasing mysql, couldn't they have benefited from it without paying $1B?
You speak London? I speak London very best.
They want to be able to own all code and many of these forks have only GPL2/3 licenses.
Sun could BUY a propriatory license from these people like KDE offer, but they apparently don't want to suffer under the closed source licensing headache (that's for their USERS to experience!).
I don't really believe software that's 'good enough' doesn't need support at all, but I do think it's realistic to assume that the better software gets the less people will be asking for help.
You can always make improvements, but you can only squeeze so much blood out of a stone. Should a single project really need to always and forever need more and more money spent on development? Architecture will keep changing, standards will improve (hopefully), but eventually any real improvements will be more for novelty than real functionality.
MySQL should be more than happy that it can still offer the support services it can.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Lots of wrong things in this article.
OurDelta isn't a fork of MySQL. It's builds for the regular MySQL with optionally some third party patches.
Drizzle isn't a fork of MySQL. It's a complete restart and reengeneering of the database core of MySQL and will likely become a base for the future releases of Sun's MySQL and other database products. Drizzle is to MySQL like MinWin is to Windows, though maybe bad analogy, MinWin is just as porly understood by most people.
Sun doesn't have a propriatary fork of MySQL. Former MySQL AB wanted to put some proprietary services and applications on top of the existing open-source product, but the community reacted and since Sun never approved of this direction, those plans were immediately dropped.
Sun/MySQL can and should be blamed if they are failing the community that made MySQL so popular and strong.
Sun has a bad reputation for having very closed open source projects such as OpenOffice. The project is managed much more like a proprietary venture than an open source project and community input is minimized or ignored altogether.
I can't feel sorry for Sun when they drop buku bucks on MySQL and then complain that others are taking their revenue away from them doing what the OSS community does best - improve the software on their own.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
If Sun actually cared for the "long term unix community" you speak of, you wouldn't have that "unix like" OS in hand.
Thank God both them and various companies are wise to ignore such long term communities so they keep doing favours.
I know a long term Unix Hack. He says. "Fuck Sun. Fuck IBM. Fuck SCO. Fuck Microsoft..... come to think of it Sun aint too bad"
If such forks are superior, then they should eventually find their way back into the parent model
Many corporate environments simply refuse to operate in this manner. It's like telling a room full of executives their bonuses aren't coming this year. The disbelief is palpable, the laws of gravity no longer apply.
Sun's old-school command-and-control corporate hegemony will not fall to some management model that can't be accounted for in whatever back-stabbing, powerpoint-presentation-driven, corporate culture exists there.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
People need incentives to buy products, and open source software doesn't give people that incentive outside of the enterprise realm where paid support is a big money maker. Let's get closer to regular users here. What incentive do home users have to buy StarOffice when OpenOffice is more than good enough? How about pay anything for WordPress when it's free and easily installed by CPanel? I can't see any, aside from altruism, and only economically-clueless nerds tend to put much stock in altruism as a source of revenue (this also explains why so many think that bands will still sell large amounts of recorded music, even though most of it can be downloaded for free on a P2P network).
In the case of MySQL, a big part of their problem is that Sun isn't dumping a lot of R&D money into them to make MySQL 6 really competitive on an enterprise level with PostgreSQL. A pure open source approach isn't going to allow Sun to make good money on their R&D investment, but if they were to dramatically improve MySQL and provide high quality tools at reasonable prices, that sort of hybrid approach would work. Companies that want to make their core software open source are going to have to make compelling products that interact with them if they want to be able to sell more than consulting and support services.
Open source advocates need to be realistic. If you do work outside of the enterprise realm, chances are you will end up doing it for free and never seeing a dime from it unless your users are feeling overly generous. That's just because most users outside of the enterprise realm have no incentive to buy anything you might be selling related to your open source product.
Sun is the worlds largest open source company both in terms of size and contribution.
MySQL
OpenOffice
Java
VirtualBOx
Open Solaris
are all wholly Sun projects but they also contribute to numerous other open source projects.
Sun may not be perfect but, there are none better at the moment.
An important question is not whether the Open Source community is eating some of SUN's cake, but whether the cake itself (and thus SUN's total amount of cake) is larger because of the community. I don't have any figures but this is at least a considerable possibility. After all you have something technically superior like PostgreSQL *ahem*
Half of a big cake or all of a small one. SUN bet on the former, I think.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
There's no need to put the blame on the corporate body. Developers have mortgages too.
"So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them. Can you explain to us what value you bring to SUN, and why we shouldn't just hire or reward the 3rd party contributors directly?"
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I've been in contact with a dozen companies that all use the community version of MySQL. Without paying any support because none is needed when you have a semi-competent DBA around. If MySQL wasn't there, then it would have been PostgreSQL instead. If there was no MySQL, PostgreSQL nor any other high quality free RDBMS, they would have to use a commercial system instead. There are thousands of companies out there in the same situation and I don't think that MySQL has gained as much money as the commercial vendors has lost thanks to MySQL:s freeness.
Football Odds
My SQL is an excellent example blog application or glorified todo list engine. Call me when it actually gets serious about being a real database, or better yet dies a firey death. There are so many great alternatives, I wish the hosting providers would STFU and stop pretending MySQL is actually a database.
thats what ibm and others are doing, and its working well. sell your customers COMPLETE solutions. do not put stuff out separately.
think it like this - imagine you are going to offer a webserver solution. hey, the database server development is already handled by the open source community, cutting many of your development, bugfix, testing costs.
AND you will sell support. no, really. no business can go to an open source forum, post their problem and wait for a useful answer in a busy workday. they will want to have someone to call and get support fast. AND that will be the company who sold the solution to them. charge reasonably for support.
do NOT try to go into the ancient 'hey we did something, we are gonna sell it and make money'. in our days and times, support, service are constant revenue streams. whilst you buy a server every few years. which you would want to bank on ?
Read radical news here
Perhaps Sun could get by having the same kind of relationship Crossover has with Wine. Core development can go into the proprietary fork, but all that eventually trickles down into the free, open-source version
Much of the article & threads here seem to be supposition, and niche arguments. MySQL has the mindshare because, back when RedHat was all the rage on production servers, MySQL + Apache was just an RPM away, and LAMP started to really kick in (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). PHP has big mindshare too, and the MySQL functions *are* the DB functions for a lot of coders out there.
So even if you fork, add third party patches, or whatever... the fact is that the basic MySQL dominates the low to mid range server DB market in Open Source, and that's that. Of course there are better alternatives available, but hiring staff that know those alternatives isn't as easy.
So I reckon Sun won't be affected too much, their product does what most people need already. Those who need something else can pay Oracle, MS or work with PostgreSQL, which kinda got to the party late. Yes, it is more powerful. But it's LAMP and not LAPP, and the tutorials for PHP/MySQL outnumber PHP/Postgres by a large factor.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them.
Proving my point nicely, thank you!
The corporate emphasis is the number of commits. Management is the one scoring productivity by commits. Which, starts the "not invented here" environment, which is why Sun is doing such a bad job maintaining MySQL.
Did Danny's commits make a better product? What about the time vetting outside contributions? What about the expertise developed working on code so long you can look at a contribution and see it's value? As Danny's manager, that should be enough to justify his employ. But it isn't.
The number of commits with Danny's name on it no matter the quality is how a good product goes horribly wrong in the typical corporate environment. The waning popularity of MySQL has begun.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
n/t
... that successful open source companies direct their efforts primarily at support, not software as such. If Sun is ignoring this, its doing it to its own detriment.
Hi!
We typically call Drizzle a fork, since we do have a common ancestor at this point (though it is doubtful you could apply a patch between the two). We are pretty up front about this though. Drizzle is supported by Sun which the article does not mention, though we are different in that we have patches that have to date come in from 30+ companies.
OurSQL is more of a distribution then anything else. Their tree is a collection of patches they apply at each release.
Cheers,
-Brian
You can't grep a dead tree.
A better solution is for Sun to repackage the improved MySQL bits from Drizzle, OurDelta, Perconaand and charge for support and upgrades ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
Is anyone at all surprised? Remember Sparcworks, the official, surprisingly expensive compiler for Solaris with really annoying license requirements that your management made you buy, that immediately became shelfware in favor of the free and far superior GCC if you hoped to do anything approaching ANSI C development? As soon as I had heard that Sun had purchased MySQL, I thought "Ah, the expense of Oracle without the innovation".
I consider the code base for "Enterprise" MySQL to be dead. It's not that community development is preventing Sun from doing core development. Community development is filling the void caused by the lack of core development.
Parenthetically, is anyone counting the number of /. articles lately that are whining about free development undercutting for-profit development? Maybe we need a new tag -- something like "mommyhesnotchargingenough".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
Exactly. I have very few problems with Sun, and I don't HATE Microsoft like so many people do. Making money is not evil. I wouldn't want to see the MySQL project thrash Sun. Although I doubt it will: Most companies I've heard speak about their software support DEMAND professional support they can call whenever they have a problem. Sun provides that.
Also have a look at that blog post, by a Sun employee, on the SUn blog :
http://blogs.sun.com/mrbenchmark/entry/scaling_mysql_on_a_256
The comments are insightful.
{{.sig}}
I don't HATE Microsoft like so many people do. Making money is not evil.
Note: I strongly dislike Microsoft, but not because they're profitable.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Seriously. What is the business case where one may justify using MySQL and paying for it?
Whenever the issue of MySQL vs other RDBMS is raised on Slashdot, its niche is typically defined as cheap hosting and other low-budget solutions where reliability and data consistency are simply not as important. Nothing wrong with that, but isn't it precisely the segment that's not going to pay so long as they can get the same for free? Support - I doubt many people actually care much about that, especially for MySQL. And any Web solution, no matter how big, doesn't have to care about the license of the DB backend.
This leaves commercial apps who don't like GPL - but they can avoid it much easier by using one of the many viable alternatives, from SQlite or Firebird on the embedded side, to Postgres and again Firebird on the full-fledged database side; and for $$$, if one is willing to spare some, why not just pay a little bit more to get Oracle or even MSSQL?
So it seems to me that the target audience to which MySQL caters is precisely the one that's less likely to pay for any "enterprisey" features, and stick to the base F/OSS version, with "good enough" community patches. Or am I missing something?
Fortune 500 (and smaller) companies are going to want support. Support is a stream of revenue, paid every year. For traditional software supports is normally 25% of sales cost per year. For Free software it appears to be 20% of the cost of comparable commercial product per year.
Also big companies don't want bleeding edge software, so the latest that the community has put out is not as interesting to them. The problem is that Sun paid a lot for MySQL. Of course I think they did that for defense against Oracle.
Oracle is pushing people to Linux, they want all of the revenue slow for the database servers, so if they can cut Sun out on the OS, then Oracle can support both the Linux OS and the Oracle DB.
Think Deeply.
I have been saying this for years. In the opensource business being a late entrant is not a bad thing. Ubuntu picked up the contributions from Redhat and Novell (suse) to the linux ecosystem and is now a really popular distribution. I would say it will apply to any other project. Once its become a commodity its there for anyone to pick up and distribute. What sun needs is an ecosystem, which we all know it cannot do. See java for example. IBM makes more money off of java than sun does.
Bullshit. The reason most people use Linux is because the hardware costs a fifth as much as Sun kit and also supports Windows, and the software is free as in beer. Linux was started because Linus wanted a cheap unixlike on x86.
First thing,
I am a hardware guy by inclination and training. I had some programming experience, but never enjoyed it.
I also tend to look more at the business side of things sometimes. I am the Chairman of my Company's ESOP committee. We are 100% employee owned. We are not an IT company. I am the only IT person.
I have always had a hard time believing in the business model of the Open Source community. As an IT person and a software customer, I can appreciate the ability to view and modify the source of software that isn't doing everything I want it to do, but as a business person, I have a hard time picturing a long term model where open source is a product I can make money off of.
In the short term, customers would purchase the software and support from me, but as the community grew around the software, it would fork in new unsupported directions, the community and customers would become more savy and need less support from me.
Long term, I think open source will work real well for drivers, routers, switches items that the hardware is secondary to the appliance.
But for standalone software products like Databases? I just can't see it, no matter how many Open Source advocates try to convince me of it.
I don't hate MS either, but I don't think the reason people hate MS is because they make money. It's because they've often been assholes about it. People generally love a good success story as long as the recipient of the success seems to have done it in a fair way. Witness Warren Buffet. Or Google... as long as they shy away from evil. Apple is loved for now, but they're evil enough to get themselves thoroughly hated down the road.
But the point is: making money is not evil, but if you make money while being evil, people will hate you. And that's as it should be, really. Nobody likes to see assholes get ahead.
Cheers.
Making money is great. Making money through rampant corporate skulduggery isn't.
... a wakeup call: nothing prevents Sun from copying code from the forks. The more places to test certain code that fits into it's own codebase the better MySQL gets.
Sun is currently only making money selling hardware anyway as they've become a FLOSS company (almost nobody buys StarOffice). Sun could greatly benefit from better software for their hardware.
If Sun would just not be so freaking ignorant of patches these superior databases wouldn't even exist. Sun could also make money with StarOffice by just including Microsoft stuff Sun could license from Microsoft. StarOffice is proprietary anyway and OpenOffice.org would not match that level of compatibility with Microsoft Office. Problems with extra functionality submissions for Sun ran FLOSS projects solved...
Here be signatures
I don't hate Microsoft either, but I do hate many of their products - unstable, slow, bloated, buggy as hell, and only popular due to their monopolizing of the market.
There are parts of MS I truly admire - the Xbox division for example, they epitomize capitalism at its best: you come in, out of nowhere, and topple (at least in one market) the dominating player by simply building a better product. This is the way it should work, and this is the way I wish the Windows and Office teams ran things.
Which of the six developers who's work I committed do you propose to hire? If they're busy vetting other people's code, when will they have time to keep writing this great stuff?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Sun's corporate PR spins talk of "accelerating our delivery of open source solutions."
But the company is hurting. Sales down about 30%, losses approaching $2 billion in its third quarter.
I think the days of open-handed corporate funding of open source - without a clearly defined plan to make it profitable - are over.
Sun Microsystems Cuts 6,000 Jobs
Y'know, I'm with you in general, but pointing at the Xbox division as the epitome of capitalism is, I think, misguided. They've lost billions upon billions of dollars and have no chance of being profitable (as a whole) this generation, and certainly weren't profitable last generation. Xbox is an example of a company trying to leverage a monopoly to fund expansion into a new market at a huge loss, with only vague plans on *ever* making a profit. That isn't exactly the ideal entrepreneurial spirit.
Google is an advertising company. People don't hate them simply because they're a *good* advertising company, carefully controlling their corporate image. Google makes money by putting ads in front of you - hardly somehting to love them for.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The X-Box 360 was put out before their production line was ready to make it. More like capitalism at its worst.
"So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them. Can you explain to us what value you bring to SUN, and why we shouldn't just hire or reward the 3rd party contributors directly?"
Which of the six developers who's work I committed do you propose to hire? If they're busy vetting other people's code, when will they have time to keep writing this great stuff?
This is known as the "developer as interior decorator" model, where the developer is hired on their ability to mix and match code that is in good taste that blends attractively with the existing architecture.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The diacritical is over the "i", not the "a". It's "naÃve". Thanks for trying, but seeing that wrong was worse than seeing it without the diaeresis.
The problem isn't that Microsoft makes money. The problem is how they make their money.
I must say also that the .NET framework and Visual Studio are both very impressive products.
I wish Java's VM had more languages and an official IDE (maybe they should buy and improve Eclipse).
But he did get trolled.
I actually really dislike the fact that .NET is tied so deeply into Visual Studio - it makes it very difficult to use the languages with any other tools. That being said, VS is one of the best IDEs out there, so my objection is sort of moot.
I do agree though - .NET and VS push some very cool and useful innovations despite already being a market dominator, and the quality is increasing substantially over time for both products. I just wish they could do the same with Windows.
Id be more inclined to believe the real issue is, they have all that money... yet what real advances have we seen in windows in the past 10 years? GUI improvements? basic security advances? opensource seems to be keeping up, yet the billions MS has.. and they cant belt the crap out of free apps?
I'm not a huge fan of the GPL, but I can at least understand why people want to develop under it. But the GPL is not really the licenses that MySQL is under. Instead they want to take peoples code and sell it as their own under a non-GPL license... they obviously can't do this if they start merging in GPLed code that they don't own the copyrights to. MySQL isn't and has never been about FOSS... but its a good tool to generate mindshare and get free development.
The only way I see to make any money in open source software is through support. It has taken OSS a while to finally compete with the funded developments of the corporate world, but it has in many way. Yes, there are more to catch up but it's happening. I don't believe that OSS would even die off if the whole corp software world folded. There is a human element of artistic creation that is filled here. I truly believe the future is going to be being the company that knows how to maintain it, and support it. The new stuff will come from the OSS world. This isn't going to be an overnight change, this will still take a long time if, ever fully realized.
I think it might be a little more subtle even than you say - it's that they are making money by being assholes certainly, but they make money by doing the barest minimum and calling it sufficient. And then they create mind-bogglingly complicated solutions to simple problems and wonder why no one bites. Both are forced onto the random consumer in ways that can only make you hate.
Regedit - functional, but no way to "GO TO" a key, despite all the MSDN docs that say go to a specific place and make a change. No, you have to click to expand each folder, then scroll down till you find the one you want. "Find" is kinda nice but it will take you to the wrong one quickly, and the right one slowly. Has no one ever thought this would be a good idea?
File search - find a few files, then do something with the list that takes more than a few seconds. If anything in the search path is modified, the search gets re-started and the list resets. So I have been 500 items into a 4000 item list, and the list resets and the "current selection" is now the first item again.
DirectX 10 - complicated, but used as a leverage to sell operating systems instead of supporting the ones they already sold.
Background apps allowed to give themselves focus, so that when you type you accidentally hit the space bar and unintentionally agree to something by clicking the default button.
The web browser that wouldn't update for 6 years
The AVI filters that think a file format is "unrecognized" just because the length doesn't match what is in the AVI header, so missing a single byte makes a movie unplayable while VLC has no problem with it.
Notification balloons that won't go away on their own.
Did you know that when you use Windows+R to run something, the Run dialog is started using "QueueUserWorkItem"? There is a thread queue and your request gets put into the queue. That's why you can hit Windows+R sometimes and the dialog takes forever to come up. I don't want to wait, I want to run something.
Pay attention next time you search or list something - Windows often finds the folders in reverse order. For example, copying a bunch of folders sometimes gets done in reverse. Or doing an IrfanView slideshow where there are sub directories - within the folder the slides are in order, but the folders are sometimes backwards. IrfanView could work around that, but the point is that behaviour is all over the place and every app has to work around it. Also when copying or moving, why do I get the message about existing file being overwritten if a folder name exists? Why can't it just ask me when it gets to that file? Oh right, poorly implemented code reuse that copies the whole folder, defaulting to overwriting files, when it does ask about individual files in the parent folder. No recursion implemented here?
I need to give an example of this one. When you start SQL Server Management Studio by connecting to a server, you can do a lot of things to that server with relative ease. But when you go under "Legacy" and try to import/export a DTS package, it sometimes says "SQL Server not found". What's the answer - something in the package? Or can it not find the server you are already connected to? No, it turns out Management Studio doesn't do the DTS transfer, it relies on some other tool to do it. So it takes its own connection info and hands it off to another tool, and that tool can't find the server. As far as I've found, there's no documentation on this, and the solution is to disconnect from the server, reconnect using a different alias, and it works now. Nowhere does it say you need to use a connection string that the DTS tool can figure out, and the error looks like it comes directly from the Management Studio app that is already connected. This kind of code/app reuse probably got someone a nice bonus, but I lost 2 weeks of functionality trying to figure out why I couldn't update my DTS package. I use secure WTS and shared hosting, so I can't just write a tool to move from one server
Leave my mom out of this! I pay my part!
As long as most people are unwilling/unable/afraid to make "micropayments" while they browse advertising on the web is here to stay. Google showed it could be done viably in a way that was far less annoying to users than the then typical popups, popunders, huge animated noisy banners etc.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
not so related to mgmt guys
it's whether ur worker make good product for u
if not
juz ask urself why
if mysql is not workable....who will play with it
and who will pay for it
after buying it
if not workable, the fate is the same
why after buying it then it becomes unworkable
u think for it
Most importantly it shows what a piece of crap MySQL is to begin with. Why do people still consider relational products when you have excellent object oriented databases like the free db4o and the much better, albeit commercial Obsidian DTS/S1.
Mod me all you want. But I still think PostgreSQL is better. Now I have proof!
Seriously thought, if a company buys up the software and they start forking this much, the company doesn't get it
Who exactly did they topple?
* Afaict sega had basically given up (though they were still selling old stock/refurbised units for a few more years) before MS released thier first console.
* nintendo was already moving towards the "family friendly" market even before MS entered.
* sony still seem to be going strong though the blu-ray gamble did cause an initial hiccup
Afaict MS never made a profit on the first gen Xbox and things aren't looking too good this time arround either. They have discounted the xbox 360 so deeply that it is now cheaper than the wii (which is technically a last gen console with a gimmiky controller and must be far cheaper to produce).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
There's a firefox add-on that lets you jump to a key in regedit :)
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
I dislike them for HOW they became profitable.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Well. Google is allowed to make money too. Would you prefer that google search cost you $9.99? Or each mail sent on gmail 10 cents?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Here here! Nothing wrong w/ making money if it's not deceitful or looking like begging.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
did I say there was?
I was saying I think googles contribution to online advertising was generally positive for users. I would much rather see relavent adverts discretely presented than have popups and large animated noisy banners in my face.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
simply building a better product
Weren't these the things that were catching fire?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
see subject
Did you not understand the "Here here!" was in agreement w/ your post?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
MySQL is a prime example how the GPL is a huge failure - unless you are a hardware company, like IBM, supporting the Linux kernel as a mere add-on for what you really sell.
First they dual-licensed it, creating a proprietary version of it, together with the GPL version. Now, again the thing is forked and the community splinters it yet again. So far this story has been going like this: GPL, then proprietary, then GPL, then proprietary, and now a GPL fork again. This is absurd. This represents the utter failure of the GPL as a model for open source pure software (by which I mean the vendor is not a hardware vendor), if the theory ever was that free software was a better, more rational way to pool resources. Unless, of course, you are one of those who substitute rationality and optimizing resources for moral concepts (like the moralists of the Church of GNU).
Before anyone points to Linux, let me say it's a kernel, and therefore is tied to hardware. For example, IBM does not thrive on Linux alone. Linux has been giving Solaris a hard time, because why would you pay for Solaris when you can get Linux for free? This is how IBM is competing with Sun and only blind people don't see that. IBM would love if the UNIX landscape became a Linux monoculture.
MySQL's story illustrates how harmful the GPL really is. First you create an uneven field, by creating two categories of developers - those who get rich selling the proprietary license, and the suckers - who provided them with free patches. By promoting this all-or-nothing standard, the GPL pushes developers into two categories - those that are coding for money, and those that are merely relinquishing the rewards of their labor. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of MySQL where the suckers would give away the fruits of their labor so that MySQL could repackage it and resell it under a proprietary license.
The General Public License, by creating such a cleavage between for-profit and free (in the economic sense) development in actuality proves to be counterproductive, as we see yet again.
The BSD license and other business-friendly licenses are the only licenses that can level the field between working for money and contributing to a free software project. Either that, or you believe in Stallman's pipe dream that "all software will be free", by which he means the whole fucking world will produce GPL code. Sorry, it ain't gonna happen.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
MySQL is still just a forking toy.
Google makes money by putting ads in front of you - hardly somehting to love them for.
They put ads in front of you by providing good quality free services/products, hardly something to hate them for.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
While Microsoft used monopolistic practices to reduce the number of players, the number of platforms, an the number of compilers... They invented their own proprietary single sourced technology they call .NET, the purpose of which is to make all other programming systems obsolete and make us all slaves of Microsoft.
None of us can avoid noticing that programming books have become expensive, but in addition to that they have become version specific. By the time good books appear on any version of Microsoft development products, two beta versions of coming technology (which may or may not survive to be shipped) are in the hands of developers.
Being successful in software used to mean predicting the best platform, predicting the best language tools, coming up to speed, and developing a worthy product that could sell profitably before everything changed again. I call this understanding and taking advantage of the window of opportunity.
Because of the onslaught of new os and language tool/framework versions, there is no clear view on a window of opportunity for a platform/language in the commercial marketplace. Only people at Microsoft (if anyone) know which platform and which tools will come to fruition, will be released, will get support, and will last long enough to provide a stable environment for marketing, selling, and supporting a successful product.
Every time you turn around, Microsoft pushes an update that changes something important and causes trouble with third party software. This often causes third party vendors to have to struggle to release updates unexpectedly, requiring unexpected resources. Because Microsoft is the cause of the changes, they can do this whenever they like, warning their internal departments ahead of time about changes coming up.
Other platform suffer from this sort of thing, but no where near as badly as they occur on the Microsoft platforms. As I said, because good book barely arrive in time before things change, trying to buy the right materials to keep up is very expensive, and trying to comprehend the changes to the environment at the speed it changes is also nearly impossible. Microsoft has waves of teams producing waves of new versions and technologies. Changes come at you in sets like waves at the beach. It really takes teams of people and gobs of money to try to stay caught up, much less get ahead enough to see the next window of opportunity coming.
I'll chime in too: I have no problem with Microsoft being successful. I do, however, loathe their business practices in many, many cases. My loathing borders hatred, and is nevertheless intense.
Balanced enough?
Well, it would have made it more clear if you hadn't done it wrong.
It's "Hear hear"
As in "listen up"
It is as simple as that.
Many of us don't like them , amongst many other reasons, because they have acted illegally immorally and unethically.
Would you knowingly make business with a trader you know for certain that has broken the law? Lets say a plumber. Would you allow him to fix your shower if you know he has been stealing good shower parts for example?
Many folks think that this dislike of MS is some irrational flight of fancy, but go on, tell me you are that understanding when it comes to dealing with any other entity making business with you.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So are TV stations advertisement companies also?
Is the Superbowl also an advertisement event?
Google is a company that offers a service, web searches, and pays for it by means of advertisment placing.
If they were just and advertisement company they would just put a website with searchable advertisements, it would be closer in spirit to the Yellow Pages.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Name successful BSD OSes and DBs.
Lets compare market share.
I rest my case.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... FAIL!
(Again. Yawn.)
+++OK ATH
It is not Google that puts the ads in front of you, it is other people who put the google ads in front of you so that they, the other people, can make money.
None of our websites put google ads in front of you; a choice we made, not Google.
Jamey
Jamey Kirby
OurDelta, not OurSQL.
I might also point out that OurDelta is really a "downstream" of Percona's server builds, which are also freely available. OurDelta is to Percona as Fedora is to CentOS, if you want to look at it that way.
Nobody likes a monopoly! I have never liked the phone company, the electric company, the gas company, the cable company or Microsoft.
OK i agree with you as in MS don't make a penny on the console itself. But what about Live, Game Licensing and Accessories? a 120GB that retails at £30 being sold in a plastic case for £80... Yeah they arn't in it for the money :P