"Cannot send news to Hotmail" may be an acceptable excuse for your Star Wars Action Figure Collectors Newsletter, but it may not be so for a grassroots political organization that actually cares about how many people it reaches.
Would you switch mail carriers just to read a newsletter? I wouldn't. I just wouldn't subscribe.
The folks who SEND the newsletters don't have the luxury of telling all their subscribers to "use Gmail." They have to deal with the fact that a large percentage of their readership may not use Gmail (for any number of reasons) and the fact that Gmail exists doesn't help them in the least.
Undoubtedly, bacteria will learn to "get around" these drugs, just as they have traditional antibiotics. But don't look at evolution as a magical process -- everything comes at a cost. Drugs attack essential pieces of a bug's life machinery, and evolving around them is often difficult and reduces the survivability of those bugs, compared to non-resistant strains (unless, of course, they are being selected by the drug in question).
You can expect, the moment we stop using beta-lactam antibiotics, resistance to them will disappear from the population. So combining multiple vectors of antibiotics is useful, both in eliminating the bacteria (for now) and in making them weaker (in the future).
In an ideal situation, multiple drugs would attack systems that are so critical that evolving around them would make the bacteria so weak as to be unable to defend against the host immune system.
Microsoft thought of this, already, but since I ignore them, this is still a notable idea. Besides, won't X have copied all of Vista's useful features within the year? Then I can claim they were listening to me!
Since when has servicing an Apple product ever been affordable? Easy, yes, but affordable, never. People who are willing to shell out the cash required for an iPhone aren't about to balk at the price for a replacement battery. Not only that, but by the time they need a replacement, they'll be wanting whatever the next generation gadget is that's replacing it.
Apple knows their portable device customer base: people who are willing to buy a new device every year for incremental upgrades.
(Disclaimer: I think the iPhone is the coolest thing since sliced bread, I just value my money)
Its responses to news like this that really illustrates what's wrong with the OSS community. Novell's deal with Microsoft didn't break the spirit of the GPLv2. The first fact everyone has to accept is that RMS's vision of software development is unrealistic at best and fanatical at worst.
You people are crucifying the company that popularized XGL, the only reason Linux desktops have been able to scoff at Vista and OS-X's functionality, because they made a simple business decision that anyone thinking about trying to pay their developers for their hard work would have made.
Novell has customers for SuSE. Believe it or not, some people actually pay for their software, not just on principle, but because they want assurances. They want to know the software is stable, and furthermore, legally legitimate. OSS already has to deal with the unfair assumption that free software must be illegal (which, while it may sound ludicrous to us, is a very real impression in the business world).
When Microsoft comes to Novell with a list of patents that Linux might be infringing, Novell knows that the NEXT people they'll be going to is the customers. I don't know who Novell's customers are, but I'm guessing many of them are businesses that aren't rich enough to afford a Microsoft solution. Likely, they are business that can't afford a patent lawsuit from Microsoft, either.
So what does Novell do? Sign an agreement with Microsoft that assures their customers that whatever the result of a patent lawsuit may be, SuSE will still be legal for them to use. The "right" thing for the OSS community might have been, on principle, to let Microsoft sink Novell with unfounded patent threats that they could only diffuse with an SCO-sized lawsuit that nobody wants to pay for.
But by the time such a lawsuit was finished...where would their customers be? Migrating to Windows, most likely.
Seriously, people. Just think about it for a bit before you decide to write off one of the best companies for Linux since the original Red Hat. In the real world, sometimes you have to make a practical decision, not a principled one.
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Hm. I'm not sure my karma is good enough to risk posting a comment in a GPLv3 thread.
Oh shit.
"Cannot send news to Hotmail" may be an acceptable excuse for your Star Wars Action Figure Collectors Newsletter, but it may not be so for a grassroots political organization that actually cares about how many people it reaches.
Would you switch mail carriers just to read a newsletter? I wouldn't. I just wouldn't subscribe.
The folks who SEND the newsletters don't have the luxury of telling all their subscribers to "use Gmail." They have to deal with the fact that a large percentage of their readership may not use Gmail (for any number of reasons) and the fact that Gmail exists doesn't help them in the least.
Undoubtedly, bacteria will learn to "get around" these drugs, just as they have traditional antibiotics. But don't look at evolution as a magical process -- everything comes at a cost. Drugs attack essential pieces of a bug's life machinery, and evolving around them is often difficult and reduces the survivability of those bugs, compared to non-resistant strains (unless, of course, they are being selected by the drug in question).
You can expect, the moment we stop using beta-lactam antibiotics, resistance to them will disappear from the population. So combining multiple vectors of antibiotics is useful, both in eliminating the bacteria (for now) and in making them weaker (in the future).
In an ideal situation, multiple drugs would attack systems that are so critical that evolving around them would make the bacteria so weak as to be unable to defend against the host immune system.
I like the end of the article:
Microsoft thought of this, already, but since I ignore them, this is still a notable idea. Besides, won't X have copied all of Vista's useful features within the year? Then I can claim they were listening to me!
Since when has servicing an Apple product ever been affordable? Easy, yes, but affordable, never. People who are willing to shell out the cash required for an iPhone aren't about to balk at the price for a replacement battery. Not only that, but by the time they need a replacement, they'll be wanting whatever the next generation gadget is that's replacing it.
Apple knows their portable device customer base: people who are willing to buy a new device every year for incremental upgrades.
(Disclaimer: I think the iPhone is the coolest thing since sliced bread, I just value my money)
Its responses to news like this that really illustrates what's wrong with the OSS community. Novell's deal with Microsoft didn't break the spirit of the GPLv2. The first fact everyone has to accept is that RMS's vision of software development is unrealistic at best and fanatical at worst.
You people are crucifying the company that popularized XGL, the only reason Linux desktops have been able to scoff at Vista and OS-X's functionality, because they made a simple business decision that anyone thinking about trying to pay their developers for their hard work would have made.
Novell has customers for SuSE. Believe it or not, some people actually pay for their software, not just on principle, but because they want assurances. They want to know the software is stable, and furthermore, legally legitimate. OSS already has to deal with the unfair assumption that free software must be illegal (which, while it may sound ludicrous to us, is a very real impression in the business world).
When Microsoft comes to Novell with a list of patents that Linux might be infringing, Novell knows that the NEXT people they'll be going to is the customers. I don't know who Novell's customers are, but I'm guessing many of them are businesses that aren't rich enough to afford a Microsoft solution. Likely, they are business that can't afford a patent lawsuit from Microsoft, either.
So what does Novell do? Sign an agreement with Microsoft that assures their customers that whatever the result of a patent lawsuit may be, SuSE will still be legal for them to use. The "right" thing for the OSS community might have been, on principle, to let Microsoft sink Novell with unfounded patent threats that they could only diffuse with an SCO-sized lawsuit that nobody wants to pay for.
But by the time such a lawsuit was finished...where would their customers be? Migrating to Windows, most likely.
Seriously, people. Just think about it for a bit before you decide to write off one of the best companies for Linux since the original Red Hat. In the real world, sometimes you have to make a practical decision, not a principled one.