if they aren't buying yet, give them room and time to shop.
Chicks really dig "cute" and they really dig not being threatened. You don't have to pretend to be gay, but you can gain a lot of ground just by showing you're not completely focused on having sex with any girl that will talk to you sometime within the next 12 hours.
Hopefully, that description is a bit of an exaggeration, but, also, hopefully, the point gets across.
Insecurity is not so okay, although, in some cases, it could be an advantage. I'd suggest being careful that a woman who takes that bait is not primarily interested in fixing the poor little puppy's faults.
Appearances are only useful in the very short term, and most girls that any sane guy would want to get involved with are looking for something in the long term.
Cute is okay. Just be yourself, and the girls that might be right for you will not run away.
I think what Sun was trying to buy was a little more respect from the open source community.
(At least, that's what I would prefer to think. There is a distinct possibility that that purchase price was heavily subsidized by a certain large company who is quite aware that the best way to kill a technical project is to feed it huge amounts of money.)
Yeah, they went way too far overboard, of course, to actually get that respect.
But, "'e's not dead yet."
Setting aside the brainless rumors of Sun being bought, if I found myself in charge of making the purchase meaningful, I'd be looking at spinning MySQL back out into an independent company and bringing back as many of the guys who built it as they can. Add a couple of developers with other, non-MySQL, database experience to the team, of course, but give control back to the original developers.
Also, don't ask the original developers to give up their independent products.
The MySQL project needed fresh ideas, and this could be one way to bring fresh ideas in. It'd take a long time to get real return on what they invested, but it would be better than blowing away the whole investment.
Anyway, even if the main branch dies, there will likely be some useful development from the forks.
Man it's hard to proofread when your daughter's saying, "Daddy, please, can I use the computer NOW!" (And asking how you can possible remember where al the keys are.)
I guess it's her turn and I'm going to retire from this argument before I can get warmed up. Darn.
You're assuming that the compromise wording is still code for "excuse to attack science."
It's not particularly hard to find un-biased judges in Texas.
It is, I admit, easy to find biased judges, as well, but that's not a peculiar problem to Texas.
The specific issue here is perhaps the nature of the biases you find.
But the question you're driving at is, without a legal definition of "scientific evidence", you must rely on common law, and common law in a particularly place tends to reflect the common sensibilities of that place.
Being one who believes in that government should be by the voice of the people, even when the people are not perfectly correct, I don't see this as something to be fought on terms of the kinds of us vs. them arguments prevailing in this thread. Us vs. them is wrong, even when "we" believe in "the truth", whether the truth is "science" or "religion".
Unfortunately, much though it might be uncomfortable to you and me as geeks, the best solutions to social problems tend to be social, and this is primarily a social problem.
Let me tell you something about intellectual property.
I own everything in my mind. I don't care if you wrote the words and/or tune. I don't care if you performed it. Once it's in my mind, I control what happens to it in my mind. You have no right, and heaven help us all if you ever get the ability, to control what happens to your "content" once it's in my mind.
And you should be glad that's the way it is.
Now, I admit, there are some blasted jingles I may not have initial control over. I hate it when songs get stuck in my head, but I am eventually able to clear them out.
The actual legal thing being granted and traded is merely the right to deal with a certain item in the market place. That's all. Anything beyond that exceeds the bounds of reasonable law (even though there are plenty of snake-oil-salesman lawyers who are trying to sell you control that is impossible to grant you in the sense that it is impossible to legislate the value of pi).
The market place is a community. You can't demand the right to keep your product out of the market and exercise that right and expect your product to be in the market.
Publishing puts the work into the common market. When you publish, you give up a certain amount of control.
Now, if you're still reading, the question you should be asking is this:
Can google provide the index that makes for a more effective market, and still provide some interface to that index so that individual can veto the index if he or she chooses? Can there be other options besides simple veto?
And if you can see the question, you should see the answer: the current "artists associations" weren't and aren't doing their jobs, relative to the internet. Google (along with Yahoo and others) is doing part of what was once their job.
Go looking on Google (and/or Yahoo) and you will find the answer. Yes, you can veto, and maybe even do some other things at the search sites.
And if the artist's associations want to get their jobs back, they need to start producing index sites that are more effective. It's that simple.
What percentage of Red Hat installations are running Oracle?
What percentage of those are running OCFS, as opposed to GFS?
And so forth.
So far, they've been lucky with their patches, and haven't been too far behind the bugs the customer sees. But lucky is not proper support. Putting their own support crew on the phones is great, and showing their confidence in (the enterprise market leader) Red Hat is nice in some ways, but there is a sense that they should do more.
Maybe it really isn't necessary, maybe the patches are al that are necessary, but it seems to me that they could doing a lot more work (and releasing that work to the community) if they built their own distribution.
The differentiation gained from the fork should make their contributions much more accessible. As it is, everybody has to look at the patches and scratch their heads and do some real research to figure out how to use them. (Or do you have the impression that the community should just trust Oracle and apply all the patches?)
I am way too sleepy to be doing this, but here's how I resolved it in my mind.
Think of a graph of density of the sun versus radius from center.
Turn the rubber sheet upside down and take a cross-section. Now it looks like your graph of density, except it extends out along the x axis in both directions.
BSD or GPL, it makes no difference. The GPL makes the obligation explicit, but a BSD class license does not remove the consequence of failing to give back. In the end, you lose if you fail to give back.
No, Red Hat can't take Oracle's patches, most of them, because they are completely useless to Red Hat. The patches are specifically to support Oracle, and do not generalize.
How do you fail to see what Red Hat gives back to the community?
When you call the GPL a virus, you appear admit that you prefer to be able to ignore the obligation, and the effect of ignoring on the future of the tools you use.
I'd suggest you re-think what you choose to be annoyed by. The BSD class licenses do not buy you any better future than the GPL licenses, even if they may give you a little more leeway in the present.
Conceptually, it is a good idea to have their own distribution.
Conceptually, Red Hat would be a good choice of a distribution to fork.
Conceptually, it's a good idea.
But, practically speaking, they're screwing it all up.
No, it is not good business to take without giving.
No, it doesn't reduce the price of Oracle's server stack significantly to cut Red Hat out.
Not significantly, not with what they lose by cutting Red Hat out.
No, it isn't business savvy. It's cutting off their nose to spite their face. And it's totally misunderstanding the meaning of free as in freedom, not as in beer.
In essence, it's trying to give their customers free beer and put it on Red Hat's tab.
Now, maybe they hope to absorb enough of Red Hat's business to induce Red Hat to sell the company. But that kind of predatory business always comes back around to bite you in the end, and it eventually destroys your own business.
Maybe they are actually feeding some of the revenue back to Red Hat. If that's the case, I'll take back part of this rant. But they still have said a lot of things publicly that sound more like a spoiled rich kid celebrating that he gets to legally take the poor kid's candy. And the AC who said it was business savvy seems to be doing the same thing.
It's hard to provide a covenant to protect people who haven't entered into a covenant with you. Only God can do that, and His protection is not what you seem to think protection is.
Besides, this kind of patent is valuable only as a part of a big bundle of patents to drop on the table in front of Microsoft when they bring their big bundle of the same kind of patents and try to scare you with them. Everybody around the table knows that these patents would disappear in a brief six months or so, if challenged, but the act of challenging invites the challenge. It's for inducing the 800 pound gorilla to think twice before they try abusing the courts.
Eight years is still a long time, but much better than twenty. And they say you can require an examination before the patent owner comes after you with it. I didn't know Australia was doing that.
So, yeah, it was granted, but it could never have been used in adversarial action without an examination first, and it appears it would expire this year.
Oracle is probably trying to position itself against IBM.
But they really should be passing some of their revenue stream back upstream, instead of pretending to be predatory towards Red Hat.
Maybe they plan to eventually make a play for Red Hat. That would be a shame, because, unless Oracle changes a lot internally, they would not know what to do with Red Hat.
Oracle's Linux is tuned for Oracle's primary product. More than half of your servers do not run Oracle's database. Saying, "Let's run Oracle Linux!" for anything but Oracle's database servers could be bordering on incompetence.
And if your management is still saying "What's that?" when someone suggests implementing servers on Red Hat's OS, maybe you need to communicate more positively with management about the state of the OS marketplace.
This is one of the reasons I'd prefer Oracle to have a good, cooperative relationship with Red Hat, rather than a parasitic relationship.
They could be working together to keep the APIs the same.
I will admit, however, that where I might use an Oracle server, I'm most likely to be accessing that server through Oracle. On the other hand, there is peace of mind in the sense of being able to fix it yourself if you know that SAP, JBoss, etc. can get around Oracle if necessary.
Right. If you can't afford support you don't need and you can't afford the time Fedora takes, CentOS is great.
Ordering red hat licenses is one way to make sure the OS is still there for you next year. If you're using it in business and making much profit (or just saving money) by using their data products, you should be recognizing that you need to give them (or canonical or one of the others) money because you need them to be there next year.
Same with feeding bugs back by using Fedora. If you rely on the OS as a tool in your job, you want to help keep the project alive and healthy.
So, actually, even if you are using CentOS, your self-interest will induce you to support the community in whatever ways you can afford to, maybe even just by helping others start using open source.
(And while it would actually make sense for Oracle to have their own distribution based on Red Hat, it does not make sense for them to be effectively dissing Red Hat. Unless, I suppose, their share-holders and/or primary customers expect Ellison to put on the dog.)
No it isn't smart. It's just very short-sighted, the same way that lots of "smart" things being done in financials the last ten years were just very short-sighted.
Ill-gotten gains have the baggage of having been gotten by ill means. When you start taking from other people, you start forgetting how to make your own.
I know the economy is bad. It's always bad. That's part of the puzzle we are trying to solve, how to provide for ourselves and our own in an adversarial economy. When we solve that puzzle well, we add value to the economy and to our own state of being. When we steal, we take away from both.
Of course, the bad guys don't understand this, and maybe it isn't worth quibbling over words, but I think I would have said "rake in" instead of "make", and not said profit. What to say instead of profit, I'm not sure. Any ideas?
Well, you know, if I start wanting to do something else with the hardware, I can always install RedHat. (And probably migrate to postgresql.)
The one thing that bugs me about Oracle's customization of RedHat is the question of whether they are giving back, both to RedHat and to the community. Maybe I don't look in the right places to know, but it sure isn't obvious that they do.
Actually, I'll go a little further and put it this way: From a potential customer's point of view, if I'm going to dedicate a lot of my infrastructure budget to Oracle's products, I would be a lot more comfortable if I knew that Oracle and RedHat had a good working relationship, both technically and economically.
(Cannibalizing the market is really not in a company's own best interests, any more than relying on the schoolyard bully to protect you is.)
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for making that clearly ironic enough.
Somebody needed to.
As people keep saying, cute is okay.
if they aren't buying yet, give them room and time to shop.
Chicks really dig "cute" and they really dig not being threatened. You don't have to pretend to be gay, but you can gain a lot of ground just by showing you're not completely focused on having sex with any girl that will talk to you sometime within the next 12 hours.
Hopefully, that description is a bit of an exaggeration, but, also, hopefully, the point gets across.
Insecurity is not so okay, although, in some cases, it could be an advantage. I'd suggest being careful that a woman who takes that bait is not primarily interested in fixing the poor little puppy's faults.
Appearances are only useful in the very short term, and most girls that any sane guy would want to get involved with are looking for something in the long term.
Cute is okay. Just be yourself, and the girls that might be right for you will not run away.
I think what Sun was trying to buy was a little more respect from the open source community.
(At least, that's what I would prefer to think. There is a distinct possibility that that purchase price was heavily subsidized by a certain large company who is quite aware that the best way to kill a technical project is to feed it huge amounts of money.)
Yeah, they went way too far overboard, of course, to actually get that respect.
But, "'e's not dead yet."
Setting aside the brainless rumors of Sun being bought, if I found myself in charge of making the purchase meaningful, I'd be looking at spinning MySQL back out into an independent company and bringing back as many of the guys who built it as they can. Add a couple of developers with other, non-MySQL, database experience to the team, of course, but give control back to the original developers.
Also, don't ask the original developers to give up their independent products.
The MySQL project needed fresh ideas, and this could be one way to bring fresh ideas in. It'd take a long time to get real return on what they invested, but it would be better than blowing away the whole investment.
Anyway, even if the main branch dies, there will likely be some useful development from the forks.
Well, we discovered that "elite" is mostly hubris.
Man it's hard to proofread when your daughter's saying, "Daddy, please, can I use the computer NOW!" (And asking how you can possible remember where al the keys are.)
I guess it's her turn and I'm going to retire from this argument before I can get warmed up. Darn.
You're assuming that the compromise wording is still code for "excuse to attack science."
It's not particularly hard to find un-biased judges in Texas.
It is, I admit, easy to find biased judges, as well, but that's not a peculiar problem to Texas.
The specific issue here is perhaps the nature of the biases you find.
But the question you're driving at is, without a legal definition of "scientific evidence", you must rely on common law, and common law in a particularly place tends to reflect the common sensibilities of that place.
Being one who believes in that government should be by the voice of the people, even when the people are not perfectly correct, I don't see this as something to be fought on terms of the kinds of us vs. them arguments prevailing in this thread. Us vs. them is wrong, even when "we" believe in "the truth", whether the truth is "science" or "religion".
Unfortunately, much though it might be uncomfortable to you and me as geeks, the best solutions to social problems tend to be social, and this is primarily a social problem.
Let me tell you something about intellectual property.
I own everything in my mind. I don't care if you wrote the words and/or tune. I don't care if you performed it. Once it's in my mind, I control what happens to it in my mind. You have no right, and heaven help us all if you ever get the ability, to control what happens to your "content" once it's in my mind.
And you should be glad that's the way it is.
Now, I admit, there are some blasted jingles I may not have initial control over. I hate it when songs get stuck in my head, but I am eventually able to clear them out.
The actual legal thing being granted and traded is merely the right to deal with a certain item in the market place. That's all. Anything beyond that exceeds the bounds of reasonable law (even though there are plenty of snake-oil-salesman lawyers who are trying to sell you control that is impossible to grant you in the sense that it is impossible to legislate the value of pi).
The market place is a community. You can't demand the right to keep your product out of the market and exercise that right and expect your product to be in the market.
Publishing puts the work into the common market. When you publish, you give up a certain amount of control.
Now, if you're still reading, the question you should be asking is this:
Can google provide the index that makes for a more effective market, and still provide some interface to that index so that individual can veto the index if he or she chooses? Can there be other options besides simple veto?
And if you can see the question, you should see the answer: the current "artists associations" weren't and aren't doing their jobs, relative to the internet. Google (along with Yahoo and others) is doing part of what was once their job.
Go looking on Google (and/or Yahoo) and you will find the answer. Yes, you can veto, and maybe even do some other things at the search sites.
And if the artist's associations want to get their jobs back, they need to start producing index sites that are more effective. It's that simple.
What percentage of Red Hat installations are running Oracle?
What percentage of those are running OCFS, as opposed to GFS?
And so forth.
So far, they've been lucky with their patches, and haven't been too far behind the bugs the customer sees. But lucky is not proper support. Putting their own support crew on the phones is great, and showing their confidence in (the enterprise market leader) Red Hat is nice in some ways, but there is a sense that they should do more.
Maybe it really isn't necessary, maybe the patches are al that are necessary, but it seems to me that they could doing a lot more work (and releasing that work to the community) if they built their own distribution.
The differentiation gained from the fork should make their contributions much more accessible. As it is, everybody has to look at the patches and scratch their heads and do some real research to figure out how to use them. (Or do you have the impression that the community should just trust Oracle and apply all the patches?)
I am way too sleepy to be doing this, but here's how I resolved it in my mind.
Think of a graph of density of the sun versus radius from center.
Turn the rubber sheet upside down and take a cross-section. Now it looks like your graph of density, except it extends out along the x axis in both directions.
BSD or GPL, it makes no difference. The GPL makes the obligation explicit, but a BSD class license does not remove the consequence of failing to give back. In the end, you lose if you fail to give back.
No, Red Hat can't take Oracle's patches, most of them, because they are completely useless to Red Hat. The patches are specifically to support Oracle, and do not generalize.
How do you fail to see what Red Hat gives back to the community?
When you call the GPL a virus, you appear admit that you prefer to be able to ignore the obligation, and the effect of ignoring on the future of the tools you use.
I'd suggest you re-think what you choose to be annoyed by. The BSD class licenses do not buy you any better future than the GPL licenses, even if they may give you a little more leeway in the present.
I ranted a bit more completely elsewhere, but I'm basically saying that I don't think Oracle is doing this the right way.
I am reminded of this.
Conceptually, it is a good idea to have their own distribution.
Conceptually, Red Hat would be a good choice of a distribution to fork.
Conceptually, it's a good idea.
But, practically speaking, they're screwing it all up.
No, it is not good business to take without giving.
No, it doesn't reduce the price of Oracle's server stack significantly to cut Red Hat out.
Not significantly, not with what they lose by cutting Red Hat out.
No, it isn't business savvy. It's cutting off their nose to spite their face. And it's totally misunderstanding the meaning of free as in freedom, not as in beer.
In essence, it's trying to give their customers free beer and put it on Red Hat's tab.
Now, maybe they hope to absorb enough of Red Hat's business to induce Red Hat to sell the company. But that kind of predatory business always comes back around to bite you in the end, and it eventually destroys your own business.
Maybe they are actually feeding some of the revenue back to Red Hat. If that's the case, I'll take back part of this rant. But they still have said a lot of things publicly that sound more like a spoiled rich kid celebrating that he gets to legally take the poor kid's candy. And the AC who said it was business savvy seems to be doing the same thing.
It's hard to provide a covenant to protect people who haven't entered into a covenant with you. Only God can do that, and His protection is not what you seem to think protection is.
Besides, this kind of patent is valuable only as a part of a big bundle of patents to drop on the table in front of Microsoft when they bring their big bundle of the same kind of patents and try to scare you with them. Everybody around the table knows that these patents would disappear in a brief six months or so, if challenged, but the act of challenging invites the challenge. It's for inducing the 800 pound gorilla to think twice before they try abusing the courts.
Eight years is still a long time, but much better than twenty. And they say you can require an examination before the patent owner comes after you with it. I didn't know Australia was doing that.
So, yeah, it was granted, but it could never have been used in adversarial action without an examination first, and it appears it would expire this year.
Oracle is probably trying to position itself against IBM.
But they really should be passing some of their revenue stream back upstream, instead of pretending to be predatory towards Red Hat.
Maybe they plan to eventually make a play for Red Hat. That would be a shame, because, unless Oracle changes a lot internally, they would not know what to do with Red Hat.
Even IBM knows better than to try that.
Oracle's Linux is tuned for Oracle's primary product. More than half of your servers do not run Oracle's database. Saying, "Let's run Oracle Linux!" for anything but Oracle's database servers could be bordering on incompetence.
And if your management is still saying "What's that?" when someone suggests implementing servers on Red Hat's OS, maybe you need to communicate more positively with management about the state of the OS marketplace.
Just saying.
Oracle is the source of the controversy. They are the ones strutting around saying, look what we're getting for free!
I suppose it is because many of their big customers expect them to play the predator. It's not the money saved. That's peanuts.
It's the image. Oracle provides a buffer between the dog-eat-dog corporate world and the touchy-feely alternate corporate world.
Hmm. Maybe they should be charging more so that they can afford the manpower to move the updates and patches down-stream?
Or maybe their users should be donating more?
Wondering if Red Hat's sales department needs more people who understand how to sell "free" software.
I mean, maybe there are two problems here:
One, maybe they are too short-handed to meet demand.
And, two, maybe they are short-handed because many people who understand the benefits of free software would rather be using it than selling it.
My company has been moving from Solaris to Oracle Linux recently.
Sad :(
grep wtfismystorage /proc/scsi/scsi; nohup stabselfinface &
<nods-head/>
This is one of the reasons I'd prefer Oracle to have a good, cooperative relationship with Red Hat, rather than a parasitic relationship.
They could be working together to keep the APIs the same.
I will admit, however, that where I might use an Oracle server, I'm most likely to be accessing that server through Oracle. On the other hand, there is peace of mind in the sense of being able to fix it yourself if you know that SAP, JBoss, etc. can get around Oracle if necessary.
Right. If you can't afford support you don't need and you can't afford the time Fedora takes, CentOS is great.
Ordering red hat licenses is one way to make sure the OS is still there for you next year. If you're using it in business and making much profit (or just saving money) by using their data products, you should be recognizing that you need to give them (or canonical or one of the others) money because you need them to be there next year.
Same with feeding bugs back by using Fedora. If you rely on the OS as a tool in your job, you want to help keep the project alive and healthy.
So, actually, even if you are using CentOS, your self-interest will induce you to support the community in whatever ways you can afford to, maybe even just by helping others start using open source.
(And while it would actually make sense for Oracle to have their own distribution based on Red Hat, it does not make sense for them to be effectively dissing Red Hat. Unless, I suppose, their share-holders and/or primary customers expect Ellison to put on the dog.)
No it isn't smart. It's just very short-sighted, the same way that lots of "smart" things being done in financials the last ten years were just very short-sighted.
You get what you give.
Well, yeah, but I'm not sure I'd call it profit.
Ill-gotten gains have the baggage of having been gotten by ill means. When you start taking from other people, you start forgetting how to make your own.
I know the economy is bad. It's always bad. That's part of the puzzle we are trying to solve, how to provide for ourselves and our own in an adversarial economy. When we solve that puzzle well, we add value to the economy and to our own state of being. When we steal, we take away from both.
Of course, the bad guys don't understand this, and maybe it isn't worth quibbling over words, but I think I would have said "rake in" instead of "make", and not said profit. What to say instead of profit, I'm not sure. Any ideas?
Well, you know, if I start wanting to do something else with the hardware, I can always install RedHat. (And probably migrate to postgresql.)
The one thing that bugs me about Oracle's customization of RedHat is the question of whether they are giving back, both to RedHat and to the community. Maybe I don't look in the right places to know, but it sure isn't obvious that they do.
Actually, I'll go a little further and put it this way: From a potential customer's point of view, if I'm going to dedicate a lot of my infrastructure budget to Oracle's products, I would be a lot more comfortable if I knew that Oracle and RedHat had a good working relationship, both technically and economically.
(Cannibalizing the market is really not in a company's own best interests, any more than relying on the schoolyard bully to protect you is.)