buying out the customer base
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 1
That was a good theory for IBM's attempt to purchase Sun. It doesn't work so well for Oracle, since there isn't that much overlap between Oracle and Sun's product portfolio. Worse for this theory is that there is already a huge overlap between Sun and Oracle *customers*. So, according to your theory, Oracle bought Sun, so that it can sell to Sun customers products they already own. Try again.
JDeveloper forked from JBuilder (Borland)
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
You mentioned the cat ate your homework:
"I don't think JDeveloper is based on Eclipse though."
I swear to God man, I've heard exactly that same line of shit from many a dweeb trying to convince some manager that Windows was going to be just as good as (UNIX, Linux, Solaris, AIX, Mac OS X, BSD, etc.) Did you cut and paste the Windows dweeb argument from an old UNIX vs. Windows flame war?
No, Java is not poison to Apple. Apple went so far as to elevate Java to a primary development environment and strongly hint to its development community that Java would ultimately replace Objective C. Unfortunately for Java advocates, Java didn't mature fast enough, and eventually Java was dropped from the list of first tier GUI languages. It had been unsuitable for the task for so long that eventually it became irrelevant. At the same time, you see the rise of Python, which looks poised to become a first tier GUI programming language in XCode at some point. Is Python any less about homogenization than Java?
Mod parent funny! The flip side of this coin is that gcc has placed certain shackles on what's possible for Apple and others to do. LLVM is about to break those chains.
I, for one, welcome our new really-truly-freely-licensed-compiler-(not-kinda-sorta-free-as-in-gcc) overlords.
The fascinating thing about the LLVM architecture is that you can bolt any language on the front end, and still benefit from a mountain of hardware-specific optimizations on the back end, without the need to figure them out and implement them yourself. Erlang, D, and Occam front ends for LLVM are just some code away... just a shout away, just a kiss away... kiss away... kiss away, hey, hey-ya...
"Personally, I hate it - I intensely dislike the fact that when you get under the covers, it looks like UN*X but it isn't UN*X in a lot of ways that matter. It's essentially NeXT Step, and I hated that, too."
There are lots of things that one might not like about Mac OS X, but it's not because the system isn't really UNIX. That statement (and others like it) are quite common hereabouts, but they demonstrate a certain type of parochial ignorance about UNIX which is common among people (even sometimes very talented systems administrators) who have experience typically with a single platform, and very limited experience with others. UNIX is defined by a common set of programming API which let programs compile and run on multiple systems. (see: POSIX and UNIX 03)
UNIX has evolved a lot since birth, yet maintained it's UNIX identity because it was designed to evolve. There are things I loved about various BSD and SysV UNIX variants over the years, but I was very happy to see them go when something better came along. But hey, it's still UNIX. It still has that marvelous modular design philosophy, and you only need to know enough about vi to compile and install emas, right?
Microsoft won. Didn't anybody send Ballmer the memo? Regarding Linux... the Linux "desktop" is it's own worst enemy. Ballmer doesn't even register as a threat on the scale of "make it print" to "configure X-Windows for my graphics card".
Joking aside, Microsoft seems finally to have noticed the most important thing about Apple's market share growth in the past few years. People no longer believe the myth that they need to use the same type of computer at home as they do at work. The Macintosh is dramatically "over represented" in certain market segments, too, notably college students, working professionals, and corporate executives.
Most fascinating is that this growth has happened even though Apple has had zero market share growth in the enterprise, which accounts for about half the market. Apple's market share growth, in the "home, school, and small business" segments (where their share is above zero percent) is basically double the official numbers, so it's probably much closer to 20% in those markets. That's what has Ballmer's attention.
Note: The actual numbers also reveal that Ballmer is cleverly lying, in an attempt to minimize the gestalt impression of what's really going on. Apple's market share is about 3 times what it was five or six years ago. Sure, Apple's market share grew by "a point", but that was just in the last quarter or two.
What Ballmer fears most is a similar breakout in the enterprise desktop market. Unlikely? Perhaps not. I think it becomes more and more likely every day, almost inevitable, as a result of several factors.
Safari, FireFox, and the Acid Test have wrested control of the internet back from the intentionally broken standards stranglehold that Microsoft had on it.
Executives of much of the Fortune 500 using Macs now.
An apparently huge portion of the college graduate market are kids that used Macs all the way through school, and
a non-trivial percentage of CS/MIS graduates have been using Linux since they were in their mid teens.
iPhone and iPod Touch have the attention of the Enterprise, largely due to the decade long failure of Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, to deliver the goods. The iPhone Halo Effect will be selling Mac OS X Server into the enterprise, soon enough, and the enterprise desktop will find itself under siege as the last bastion of Windows mediocrity.
The OS/2 "boom" days were exactly that -- days, not years. Yeah, sure, certain parts of IBM, maybe even much of it, used OS/2, for a few, very few, years. However, IBM spent more years trying, and failing to sell OS/2 outside the company than they spent using it inside the company.
I glossed over the sordid OS/2 history because point of this isn't to debate the exact timetable of OS/2 use within IBM. Nobody really cares about the details of that ancient history.
The outcome of that history, however, is not in dispute. IBM uses, and has used for many years now, Windows everywhere inside of IBM. OS/2 was a tiny blip on the chart. IBM makes zillions of dollars selling Windows based "solutions". IBM's own operating systems darling, OS/2, on which the company was "betting the farm" according to others in this thread, was strangled, largely due to internal struggles within IBM.
The odds of Solaris surviving an acquisition by IBM approach zero arbitrarily close.
IBM isn't the only company which would chew off it's own leg, rather than eat it's own dog food. Motorola, during the height of it's PowerPC era, ran most of the company on Windows (on x86).
You have nothing to fear from this scenario. IBM never (as a rule) integrates any of their acquired products with any other IBM product -- at least not for delivery as a standard feature of the products in question. Instead, they sell you consultants to do custom glue for your unique environment.
It's not the code, it's the people, the brand name, the work in progress, the various other Java assets Sun may have acquired from 3rd parties over the years, the patent portfolio (required mainly to protect Java from Microsoft), and so forth.
Personally, I doubt that Java is the entire motivation for the acquisition talks, but it certainly could be. The rest of Sun is mostly a liability for IBM, which already has several too many operating systems, and more than enough hardware, for example. IBM will spent an enormous fortune, after the acquisition, trying to figure out how to keep Sun customers, who will, by and large, be shopping around for alternatives.
IBM managers are smart enough to know that they cannot and will not run Sun as a separate division indefinitely, and thereby magically capture another big chunk of the server market. Oh, they may announce that intention, and pretend to do that for a few years, all the while slowly strangling Sun by depriving it of the R&D that would be required to keep its technologies alive, and its customers happy.
"I don't think so, IBM makes mainframes and has a very large services effort, neither of which compete with MS. If there were no MS, IBM would still continue to exist."
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing, "You Bet Your Geek Card!" Now, please hand it over.
You can't even find the word "mainframe" in most IBM quarterly earning reports. Why not? Because it's a tiny fraction of the $125 Billion in revenue that IBM generates in a year.
Sales of "System Z" (they change the name every few years to try to keep it sounding fresh) are presently so small that they don't even break it out. It's bundled in with the UNIX systems sales, which include AIX and others, and with the AS/400 sales (the name of this platform and it's operating system changes about every 18 months, but it's presently called IBM i).
I maintain that IBM makes more money from Windows, by orders of magnitude, than they do from "mainframes". If you're going to convince me otherwise, you're going to need to do your own homework.
It seems to be "common geek knowledge" that IBM has this unified corporate animosity to Microsoft -- often blamed on fallout from their split during the OS/2, Windows NT days. This is a seriously naive impression of IBM. It's a giant corporation with entire business units (some probably bigger than Sun) which make enormous sums of money by introducing complexity into the customer environment, and up-selling integration services to "manage" that complexity.
IBM LOVES LOVES LOVES the fact that Windows is a font of unnecessary complexity.
IBM exists as a giant IT behemoth today, precisely because Windows sucks, and they know it. They will do nothing to jeopardize the Windows cash cow.
Even back in that brief window of time when OS/2 could be perceived as a viable alternative, IBM was busily rolling out their internal Windows-based desktop systems infrastructure, in most cases replacing an X-Term infrastructure. OS/2 never even had a chance in the real world, even though it had strong proponents for many years, they were all outside of IBM. Inside of IBM, OS/2 was relegated to a POS terminal system, then trimmed back to an ATM system when the POS systems went Windows.
As recently as a few years ago, when IBM senior managers were betting big on Linux, and bragging publicly about investing a billion dollars a year (and probably more these days) on Linux, IBM customers couldn't even get IBM to submit proposals based on Linux for simple tasks for which Linux was very well suited. IBM instead proposed convoluted, unstable Windows-based "solutions" which cost more. Customers could BEG IBM for Linux based solutions and not get them. IBM actively fought against efforts at their customers to actually use Linux.
IBM figured out how to make money from Java, which is something Sun still hasn't done. IBM in this merger could be perceived as attempting to prevent their huge investment in Java from going down the tubes, in the not-unlikely event of a catastrophic Sun failure, or as preventing acquisition of Sun's Java team by a competitor.
Yes, you nailed it. Nobody should build any apps for iPhone which cost more than $990 to build. Oh, wait ! Even better! The cost should be limited to $500 to build (so they can still make 100% profit, so as not to deprive the wieners at Slashdot who may therefore still whine about the absurd profit margin).
Whining wieners want wafting wares without waggish wvender wages.
By running advertisements, some of the pirate sites are making more money than most of the applications they pirate. Their objective is to pirate *every* application at the app store. It happens so quickly after the release of a new app that one must assume that the process is now automated.
I have no interest in the pseudo-scientific babble of "most creationists", so I'm going to ignore that particular bait.
You next attempt to construct a straw man thusly:
"Also, you imply that the religious did not have anything whatsoever to do with advancing science."
I imply no such thing. Begin again. Free your mind.
Then you suggest:
"Something else that you seem to miss is that the ancients knew about seasons - actually, they had very accurate knowledge of the cosmos and were able to track the path of the sun and the stars very accurately. Just read up about the Inca, the Maya and the Egyptian pyramids. Also, read up on the temples in Asia and how many of them were really astronomical observatories."
I find it strange that you have an interest in this, but fail to see how this evidence directly challenges your primitive creationist world view. "The ancients" as you call them "knew about the seasons" because they had astronomers. They knew a lot more than the seasons. Any primitive person paying attention would figure out seasons. Knowing that you can plant and harvest, and when to plant, however, that takes a little more thought, and that is most likely the birth of science.
Early science may have been entangled with various local superstitions, as some astronomical knowledge was entangled with astrology, but to be most useful it must shed superstition.
Consider the Antikythera Device which demonstrates not only advanced astronomy but mechanical engineering knowledge which was lost, and remained unsurpassed for hundreds of years.
Science clearly has deep roots, deeper even than Christianity. Why didn't you cite any examples of scientists who were religious but not Christian? Possibly because the intellectual tradition of Christianity largely ignores the non-Christian and typically conflates religion and Christianity. They are not the same. You should "read up" on non-Christian scientists. Start here:
Consider also the Archimedes Palimpsest. The great works of ancient scientists were considered valueless by Christians for hundreds of years. In a bit of irony, one such work has been revealed by modern science, hidden beneath the superstition painted over it. The paper was more valuable to the Christians than the knowledge on it. (This is an important fact tossed around as a throw away observation in most accounts of this palimpsest. However, it's worthy of some consideration. Christianity participated in and contributed to a collapse of the scientific understanding of the world. The paper was so valuable to them most likely because they couldn't easily make more themselves. That's how deep the collapse really was.) Thankfully the obsessive monks didn't burn it for warmth, and rather scraped it off and painted over it -- leaving the tiny ghost images of the original text below, for advanced X-Ray imaging to reveal, centuries later.
In fairness, two observations. Firstly, Christianity isn't the only religion which feels threatened by science (aka objective reality, aka factual truth which can be verified by observation). This seems to be a pretty common characteristic of most religion. Consider Scientology, which seems to be downright paranoid about outsider's attempts to learn about it. Modern Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban and Al Quaeda have demonstrated that knowledge and science are their greatest enemy, scientists, doctors, and teachers are to be killed, schools converted to instruments of their own particular religious dogma.
Creationists are parasites, happily sucking the benefits of a modern scientific and technological society, all the while working to undermine it, and openly hoping to cause its collapse without realizing the ramifications. Heck, most of them openly hope that the end of the world will come soon to end their suffering (see: armageddon, rapture, etc.)
There was a brilliant Doonesbury on this irony a few years ago. A doctor discovers his patient has drug resistant TB, and asks him if he is a creationist (knowing the answer in advance, presumably from previous discussion). The patient says, "Why yes, I am. Why do you ask?" The Doctor replies:
People who want to "believe" superstitious whatnot can certainly do so, but when they insist we teach this in schools, society should revoke their rights to use the fruits of science to sustain their standard of living, until they evolve their thinking. (That prohibition to include guns, which would remain strictly under the control of those who do not believe in armageddon or any other such garbage.)
They can have access to educational materials, but they really need to get back in touch with their superstitious roots, which include praying all winter for warmer weather, as structural engineering requires a scientific understanding of the world which is in conflict with their belief in a benevolent god who magically provides them with whatever they need.
Northern climates are effective at demonstrating that god (for lack of a better term) is ambivalent. Let's set aside a portion of a national forest where they can evolve their belief in science from first principles, like making fire and skinning bears with stone knives.
There exist open source projects with thriving communities of contributors which include individuals and companies. Those tend to be BSD or MIT licensed, however, so perhaps they are not relevant to this current discussion.
*ducks*
I suspect that the author of the article summary was thinking about Snow Leopard features. There are no indications that Snow Leopard is shedding features to make this possible, however. I've seen speculation that the disk savings come from either dropping support for Universal Binaries (PPC + Intel), or storing the multiple platform code in some more efficient way. So far as I know, the following is the only public statement from Apple on this topic.
Snow Leopard
"Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos."
Additional details may be known to some outside of Apple, but are very likely to be covered by NDA until Snow Leopard ships.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a good theory for IBM's attempt to purchase Sun. It doesn't work so well for Oracle, since there isn't that much overlap between Oracle and Sun's product portfolio. Worse for this theory is that there is already a huge overlap between Sun and Oracle *customers*. So, according to your theory, Oracle bought Sun, so that it can sell to Sun customers products they already own. Try again.
JDeveloper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JDeveloper
I assure you, many of his supporters are deeply disappointed in this.
You parsed that wrong. Your frat boy is only getting 96% of the way to home base. That last 4% is pretty important.
I swear to God man, I've heard exactly that same line of shit from many a dweeb trying to convince some manager that Windows was going to be just as good as (UNIX, Linux, Solaris, AIX, Mac OS X, BSD, etc.) Did you cut and paste the Windows dweeb argument from an old UNIX vs. Windows flame war?
No, Java is not poison to Apple. Apple went so far as to elevate Java to a primary development environment and strongly hint to its development community that Java would ultimately replace Objective C. Unfortunately for Java advocates, Java didn't mature fast enough, and eventually Java was dropped from the list of first tier GUI languages. It had been unsuitable for the task for so long that eventually it became irrelevant. At the same time, you see the rise of Python, which looks poised to become a first tier GUI programming language in XCode at some point. Is Python any less about homogenization than Java?
Mod parent funny! The flip side of this coin is that gcc has placed certain shackles on what's possible for Apple and others to do. LLVM is about to break those chains.
I, for one, welcome our new really-truly-freely-licensed-compiler-(not-kinda-sorta-free-as-in-gcc) overlords.
The fascinating thing about the LLVM architecture is that you can bolt any language on the front end, and still benefit from a mountain of hardware-specific optimizations on the back end, without the need to figure them out and implement them yourself. Erlang, D, and Occam front ends for LLVM are just some code away... just a shout away, just a kiss away... kiss away... kiss away, hey, hey-ya...
There are lots of things that one might not like about Mac OS X, but it's not because the system isn't really UNIX. That statement (and others like it) are quite common hereabouts, but they demonstrate a certain type of parochial ignorance about UNIX which is common among people (even sometimes very talented systems administrators) who have experience typically with a single platform, and very limited experience with others. UNIX is defined by a common set of programming API which let programs compile and run on multiple systems. (see: POSIX and UNIX 03)
UNIX has evolved a lot since birth, yet maintained it's UNIX identity because it was designed to evolve. There are things I loved about various BSD and SysV UNIX variants over the years, but I was very happy to see them go when something better came along. But hey, it's still UNIX. It still has that marvelous modular design philosophy, and you only need to know enough about vi to compile and install emas, right?
Joking aside, Microsoft seems finally to have noticed the most important thing about Apple's market share growth in the past few years. People no longer believe the myth that they need to use the same type of computer at home as they do at work. The Macintosh is dramatically "over represented" in certain market segments, too, notably college students, working professionals, and corporate executives.
Most fascinating is that this growth has happened even though Apple has had zero market share growth in the enterprise, which accounts for about half the market. Apple's market share growth, in the "home, school, and small business" segments (where their share is above zero percent) is basically double the official numbers, so it's probably much closer to 20% in those markets. That's what has Ballmer's attention.
Apple Market Share Continues to Climb to nearly 10%, Windows Share Falling.
Note: The actual numbers also reveal that Ballmer is cleverly lying, in an attempt to minimize the gestalt impression of what's really going on. Apple's market share is about 3 times what it was five or six years ago. Sure, Apple's market share grew by "a point", but that was just in the last quarter or two.
What Ballmer fears most is a similar breakout in the enterprise desktop market. Unlikely? Perhaps not. I think it becomes more and more likely every day, almost inevitable, as a result of several factors.
The OS/2 "boom" days were exactly that -- days, not years. Yeah, sure, certain parts of IBM, maybe even much of it, used OS/2, for a few, very few, years. However, IBM spent more years trying, and failing to sell OS/2 outside the company than they spent using it inside the company.
I glossed over the sordid OS/2 history because point of this isn't to debate the exact timetable of OS/2 use within IBM. Nobody really cares about the details of that ancient history.
The outcome of that history, however, is not in dispute. IBM uses, and has used for many years now, Windows everywhere inside of IBM. OS/2 was a tiny blip on the chart. IBM makes zillions of dollars selling Windows based "solutions". IBM's own operating systems darling, OS/2, on which the company was "betting the farm" according to others in this thread, was strangled, largely due to internal struggles within IBM.
The odds of Solaris surviving an acquisition by IBM approach zero arbitrarily close.
IBM isn't the only company which would chew off it's own leg, rather than eat it's own dog food. Motorola, during the height of it's PowerPC era, ran most of the company on Windows (on x86).
Oh dear. I just thought again about what you said. If IBM actually thought about this stuff the way you do...
*shudder*
You have nothing to fear from this scenario. IBM never (as a rule) integrates any of their acquired products with any other IBM product -- at least not for delivery as a standard feature of the products in question. Instead, they sell you consultants to do custom glue for your unique environment.
It's not the code, it's the people, the brand name, the work in progress, the various other Java assets Sun may have acquired from 3rd parties over the years, the patent portfolio (required mainly to protect Java from Microsoft), and so forth.
Personally, I doubt that Java is the entire motivation for the acquisition talks, but it certainly could be. The rest of Sun is mostly a liability for IBM, which already has several too many operating systems, and more than enough hardware, for example. IBM will spent an enormous fortune, after the acquisition, trying to figure out how to keep Sun customers, who will, by and large, be shopping around for alternatives.
IBM managers are smart enough to know that they cannot and will not run Sun as a separate division indefinitely, and thereby magically capture another big chunk of the server market. Oh, they may announce that intention, and pretend to do that for a few years, all the while slowly strangling Sun by depriving it of the R&D that would be required to keep its technologies alive, and its customers happy.
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing, "You Bet Your Geek Card!" Now, please hand it over.
You can't even find the word "mainframe" in most IBM quarterly earning reports. Why not? Because it's a tiny fraction of the $125 Billion in revenue that IBM generates in a year.
IBM Reports 2008 First-Quarter Results
Sales of "System Z" (they change the name every few years to try to keep it sounding fresh) are presently so small that they don't even break it out. It's bundled in with the UNIX systems sales, which include AIX and others, and with the AS/400 sales (the name of this platform and it's operating system changes about every 18 months, but it's presently called IBM i).
I maintain that IBM makes more money from Windows, by orders of magnitude, than they do from "mainframes". If you're going to convince me otherwise, you're going to need to do your own homework.
It seems to be "common geek knowledge" that IBM has this unified corporate animosity to Microsoft -- often blamed on fallout from their split during the OS/2, Windows NT days. This is a seriously naive impression of IBM. It's a giant corporation with entire business units (some probably bigger than Sun) which make enormous sums of money by introducing complexity into the customer environment, and up-selling integration services to "manage" that complexity.
IBM LOVES LOVES LOVES the fact that Windows is a font of unnecessary complexity.
IBM exists as a giant IT behemoth today, precisely because Windows sucks, and they know it. They will do nothing to jeopardize the Windows cash cow.
Even back in that brief window of time when OS/2 could be perceived as a viable alternative, IBM was busily rolling out their internal Windows-based desktop systems infrastructure, in most cases replacing an X-Term infrastructure. OS/2 never even had a chance in the real world, even though it had strong proponents for many years, they were all outside of IBM. Inside of IBM, OS/2 was relegated to a POS terminal system, then trimmed back to an ATM system when the POS systems went Windows.
As recently as a few years ago, when IBM senior managers were betting big on Linux, and bragging publicly about investing a billion dollars a year (and probably more these days) on Linux, IBM customers couldn't even get IBM to submit proposals based on Linux for simple tasks for which Linux was very well suited. IBM instead proposed convoluted, unstable Windows-based "solutions" which cost more. Customers could BEG IBM for Linux based solutions and not get them. IBM actively fought against efforts at their customers to actually use Linux.
IBM figured out how to make money from Java, which is something Sun still hasn't done. IBM in this merger could be perceived as attempting to prevent their huge investment in Java from going down the tubes, in the not-unlikely event of a catastrophic Sun failure, or as preventing acquisition of Sun's Java team by a competitor.
The cool kids are working on LLVM and L4.
Yes, you nailed it. Nobody should build any apps for iPhone which cost more than $990 to build. Oh, wait ! Even better! The cost should be limited to $500 to build (so they can still make 100% profit, so as not to deprive the wieners at Slashdot who may therefore still whine about the absurd profit margin).
Whining wieners want wafting wares without waggish wvender wages.
By running advertisements, some of the pirate sites are making more money than most of the applications they pirate. Their objective is to pirate *every* application at the app store. It happens so quickly after the release of a new app that one must assume that the process is now automated.
You next attempt to construct a straw man thusly:
I imply no such thing. Begin again. Free your mind.
Then you suggest:
I find it strange that you have an interest in this, but fail to see how this evidence directly challenges your primitive creationist world view. "The ancients" as you call them "knew about the seasons" because they had astronomers. They knew a lot more than the seasons. Any primitive person paying attention would figure out seasons. Knowing that you can plant and harvest, and when to plant, however, that takes a little more thought, and that is most likely the birth of science.
Early science may have been entangled with various local superstitions, as some astronomical knowledge was entangled with astrology, but to be most useful it must shed superstition.
Consider the Antikythera Device which demonstrates not only advanced astronomy but mechanical engineering knowledge which was lost, and remained unsurpassed for hundreds of years.
Science clearly has deep roots, deeper even than Christianity. Why didn't you cite any examples of scientists who were religious but not Christian? Possibly because the intellectual tradition of Christianity largely ignores the non-Christian and typically conflates religion and Christianity. They are not the same. You should "read up" on non-Christian scientists. Start here:
Lost History: the Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists
Consider also the Archimedes Palimpsest. The great works of ancient scientists were considered valueless by Christians for hundreds of years. In a bit of irony, one such work has been revealed by modern science, hidden beneath the superstition painted over it. The paper was more valuable to the Christians than the knowledge on it. (This is an important fact tossed around as a throw away observation in most accounts of this palimpsest. However, it's worthy of some consideration. Christianity participated in and contributed to a collapse of the scientific understanding of the world. The paper was so valuable to them most likely because they couldn't easily make more themselves. That's how deep the collapse really was.) Thankfully the obsessive monks didn't burn it for warmth, and rather scraped it off and painted over it -- leaving the tiny ghost images of the original text below, for advanced X-Ray imaging to reveal, centuries later.
In fairness, two observations. Firstly, Christianity isn't the only religion which feels threatened by science (aka objective reality, aka factual truth which can be verified by observation). This seems to be a pretty common characteristic of most religion. Consider Scientology, which seems to be downright paranoid about outsider's attempts to learn about it. Modern Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban and Al Quaeda have demonstrated that knowledge and science are their greatest enemy, scientists, doctors, and teachers are to be killed, schools converted to instruments of their own particular religious dogma.
Secondly, Christianity isn't a mon
If we had worked on cheaper access to space first, we could have both.
There was a brilliant Doonesbury on this irony a few years ago. A doctor discovers his patient has drug resistant TB, and asks him if he is a creationist (knowing the answer in advance, presumably from previous discussion). The patient says, "Why yes, I am. Why do you ask?" The Doctor replies:
It gets even funnier from there.
People who want to "believe" superstitious whatnot can certainly do so, but when they insist we teach this in schools, society should revoke their rights to use the fruits of science to sustain their standard of living, until they evolve their thinking. (That prohibition to include guns, which would remain strictly under the control of those who do not believe in armageddon or any other such garbage.)
They can have access to educational materials, but they really need to get back in touch with their superstitious roots, which include praying all winter for warmer weather, as structural engineering requires a scientific understanding of the world which is in conflict with their belief in a benevolent god who magically provides them with whatever they need.
Northern climates are effective at demonstrating that god (for lack of a better term) is ambivalent. Let's set aside a portion of a national forest where they can evolve their belief in science from first principles, like making fire and skinning bears with stone knives.
There exist open source projects with thriving communities of contributors which include individuals and companies. Those tend to be BSD or MIT licensed, however, so perhaps they are not relevant to this current discussion. *ducks*
Additional details may be known to some outside of Apple, but are very likely to be covered by NDA until Snow Leopard ships.