I just posted this Brian Krow's blog, but it's caught in moderation:
I agree with a lot of your perspective here. I somewhat have to given your own contributions to the code ecosystem. But I don't see how this is incompatible with what KEI is arguing. Their letter is about a specific event with a specific company, whereas you are discussing general notions of what is better.
I don't see how RMS et al suffered from a lack of imagination. They are making a very credible case about the likely outcome of what is going to happen here and how that might impact end users, i.e. the general public, i.e. EU citizens. I'm not as close to the issue as you might be, but their case sounds right to me. And I hope the EU takes this into consideration. KEI is arguing that what was once MySQL AB can continue as an entity - whether a subsidiary or independent company - just not fairly under ownership by Oracle.
While their letter doesn't pass judgement on the MySQL project's choice of license, I read their case as a warning for people like you and I who care about software freedom: taking out the "and future versions" clause while offering the code under another licence will inhibit future contributions from the community at large. As others have noted, many were vaguely reluctant to trust MySQL's model from the beginning.
But, that's where the project now is, and that's where the company now is, and the decision to be made isn't about whether this is a cathedral or a bazaar - it's over whether Oracle should own that company and its assets (i.e. code copyright).
To which I would add: KEI's letter says nothing about a copyright holder's right to re-issue code under multiple business licenses, nor about any interpretation of a license's suitability for any business or community organizing model.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet: adherence to PCI-DSS does not necessarily guarantee that your system cannot be cracked or broken into. PCI-DSS provides a set of guidelines - created by the banks and cc companies themselves - which must be met in order to be considered safe enough to be allowed to process transactions. Now, if the auditor was negligent or deceptive in certifying the system as compliant, this seems like a no-brainer lawsuit. However, it is entirely possible that the system *was* compliant, but got cracked anyway.
I'm no fancy expert like this guy, but here are two obvious problems that invalidate the theory as far as I'm concerned:
1. It's impossible to measure. Ergo, it's useless.
2. There is value in potential uses, not just actual transactions. For example, how much is 911 service worth? Zero until you break your arm? No. There is a value in knowing that you can reach 911, regardless of whether you use it. Similarly, networks provide value by creating opportunity, even if that opportunity is unrealized.
Reading the review, I have to wonder whether the author has any first-hand experience with Zembly. I certainly do not. But this review reads like part standard review commentary, part press release, near-zero insight.
While many good points have been raised so far about how this will play out commercially, I'm surprised to see a key technical issue overlooked - TLD's require changes to the root nameservers. In my view, opening this up to the whims of the teeming masses will undoubtedly put a strain on those 12 servers which will eventually lead to irreparable degradation of the DNS system as a whole. Unless the zone transfers for the root servers are on Internet2, and then, only if all of that bandwidth is reserved for those transfers.
While this deal might be good news for RH and anyone up/down stream using the code base, I fear it's counter to the spirit of the F/OSS movement. Yes, I'm actually one of those people who thinks RMS and the GNU Manifesto make sense and raise important considerations. The problem is this: as an intermediate coder (I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer, fwiw), I will now hesitate to look at the source of some "open source" code for ideas and methods. If I do, I might cherry-pick a method which is encumbered, even though its implementation is open. Will the GPL eventually be as useful as MSFT's "shared source" license? I hope not.
I stopped reading at "... new risks in the irreconcilable conflict between open source software and its widespread use by for-profit companies."
There are people out there who know law *and* understand reality. I can't say much about the author's relation to the former, but on the latter count... Waste of my time.
I was going to use a mod point to rate this up, but I wanted to reply instead... You make a great point, but I actually don't think it's 100% true. If you go back to what RMS was writing In The Beginning (c.f. Gnu Manifesto), the principles did precede the code. The notion of having the power of computing - for whatever purpose - freely available to anyone and everyone is a political notion, and the writing of tools like GCC and bison were labours of love. And, praise the Noodly One that this hard work was done, because it's created the foundation for every other open source project to exist. Think I'm going too far? See:
Zonk posts something relevant and interesting, that's not a blatant shill for some corporation or corporate pet cause. Way to go Zonk! Keep 'em coming.
First, there is a very big line that separates science from public policy. This line comes into play in issues like climate change, as well as whether people should get, or be forced to get, vaccinations. I don't know which videos this research is looking at, but there needs to be a clear distinction between science and evidence, and any dictation of what actions our institutions should take as a result.
Ever since UofT's board of regents sided with drug maker Apotex and against their own whistleblower, Dr. Nancy Olivieri, I've been very hesitant to trust any of the conclusions announced through the entrenched medical establishment at UofT and it's semi-commercial "partnerships". I'd urge interested readers to google up on that affair, because I think it's instructive to the entire collapse of public trust in the way science is carried out.
Further, I think there's some disengenuity lumping in "childhood vaccinations", which have 20 years plus of widespread use, fine-tuning, and knowledge about their long-term effects, with these brand new vaccinations which are being literally rammed down the public's throats. Dr. Wilson's own research has shown serious cause for concern regarding flu vaccinations, for example.
Dude! Many of the condemnations of NK, Iran and China apply to the USA! What country has a larger per-capita incarceration rate? Which of the countries on that list has started an illegal invasion of another country in the past decade? Which countries use napalm, low-grade radioactive weapons, or phosphorous incendiaries?
I thought there always had to be at least two. Maybe Debian will escape to a remote planet, and HURD will watch over Gentoo (daniel's spawn) while it grows up and learns the ways of the RMS.
Granted, I did realize that it would suffice to have the code already in memory, ready to dump to a *separate* filesystem using a sufficiently low-level call. Having it dump onto the swapspace is good enough, I suppose. Many of the posts up here seemed to be talking about writing to a mounted partition in the usual way, though; which would probably be ugly.
Having a little nvram cache for just this purpose *is* a cool way to get a similar result, and is probably even safer than even touching a disk.
I could look this up, but you could to, so I won't.;-) Iirc, postgres was still randomly deleting data when mysql was feature-bare but stable. It got adopted. postgres has been slowly climbing in adoption ever since, but still lagging.
If I'm writing a php app for some guy who's going to put it on a vhosted box, they're likely going to have MSSQL *shudder* or mysql. If I'm just picking up php on a need-to-know basis, I'm not going to bother even setting up postgres in my test suite at home; and the vicious cycle continues.
That said, mysql is a very savvy company, but they seem to not be resting on the early adoption - they are constantly putting out a new, better project, and I can only imagine what kind of benefits their paid service could provide to the right project. mysql is no vhs-cabal. Betamax got buried under the brooklyn bridge.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, look! It's Javascript!
Dammit, I wish I had mod points to give you for that one. "+1 Explaining human nature to a geek"
I just posted this Brian Krow's blog, but it's caught in moderation:
I agree with a lot of your perspective here. I somewhat have to given your own contributions to the code ecosystem. But I don't see how this is incompatible with what KEI is arguing. Their letter is about a specific event with a specific company, whereas you are discussing general notions of what is better.
I don't see how RMS et al suffered from a lack of imagination. They are making a very credible case about the likely outcome of what is going to happen here and how that might impact end users, i.e. the general public, i.e. EU citizens. I'm not as close to the issue as you might be, but their case sounds right to me. And I hope the EU takes this into consideration. KEI is arguing that what was once MySQL AB can continue as an entity - whether a subsidiary or independent company - just not fairly under ownership by Oracle.
While their letter doesn't pass judgement on the MySQL project's choice of license, I read their case as a warning for people like you and I who care about software freedom: taking out the "and future versions" clause while offering the code under another licence will inhibit future contributions from the community at large. As others have noted, many were vaguely reluctant to trust MySQL's model from the beginning.
But, that's where the project now is, and that's where the company now is, and the decision to be made isn't about whether this is a cathedral or a bazaar - it's over whether Oracle should own that company and its assets (i.e. code copyright).
To which I would add: KEI's letter says nothing about a copyright holder's right to re-issue code under multiple business licenses, nor about any interpretation of a license's suitability for any business or community organizing model.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet: adherence to PCI-DSS does not necessarily guarantee that your system cannot be cracked or broken into. PCI-DSS provides a set of guidelines - created by the banks and cc companies themselves - which must be met in order to be considered safe enough to be allowed to process transactions. Now, if the auditor was negligent or deceptive in certifying the system as compliant, this seems like a no-brainer lawsuit. However, it is entirely possible that the system *was* compliant, but got cracked anyway.
I'm no fancy expert like this guy, but here are two obvious problems that invalidate the theory as far as I'm concerned:
1. It's impossible to measure. Ergo, it's useless.
2. There is value in potential uses, not just actual transactions. For example, how much is 911 service worth? Zero until you break your arm? No. There is a value in knowing that you can reach 911, regardless of whether you use it. Similarly, networks provide value by creating opportunity, even if that opportunity is unrealized.
Reading the review, I have to wonder whether the author has any first-hand experience with Zembly. I certainly do not. But this review reads like part standard review commentary, part press release, near-zero insight.
While many good points have been raised so far about how this will play out commercially, I'm surprised to see a key technical issue overlooked - TLD's require changes to the root nameservers. In my view, opening this up to the whims of the teeming masses will undoubtedly put a strain on those 12 servers which will eventually lead to irreparable degradation of the DNS system as a whole. Unless the zone transfers for the root servers are on Internet2, and then, only if all of that bandwidth is reserved for those transfers.
While this deal might be good news for RH and anyone up/down stream using the code base, I fear it's counter to the spirit of the F/OSS movement. Yes, I'm actually one of those people who thinks RMS and the GNU Manifesto make sense and raise important considerations. The problem is this: as an intermediate coder (I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer, fwiw), I will now hesitate to look at the source of some "open source" code for ideas and methods. If I do, I might cherry-pick a method which is encumbered, even though its implementation is open. Will the GPL eventually be as useful as MSFT's "shared source" license? I hope not.
Hmmm.... does answering the same question over and over count as repetitive strain? If so, I think I've got RSI of the head.
I stopped reading at "... new risks in the irreconcilable conflict between open source software and its widespread use by for-profit companies."
There are people out there who know law *and* understand reality. I can't say much about the author's relation to the former, but on the latter count... Waste of my time.
I was going to use a mod point to rate this up, but I wanted to reply instead... You make a great point, but I actually don't think it's 100% true. If you go back to what RMS was writing In The Beginning (c.f. Gnu Manifesto), the principles did precede the code. The notion of having the power of computing - for whatever purpose - freely available to anyone and everyone is a political notion, and the writing of tools like GCC and bison were labours of love. And, praise the Noodly One that this hard work was done, because it's created the foundation for every other open source project to exist. Think I'm going too far? See:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html
Zonk posts something relevant and interesting, that's not a blatant shill for some corporation or corporate pet cause. Way to go Zonk! Keep 'em coming.
First, there is a very big line that separates science from public policy. This line comes into play in issues like climate change, as well as whether people should get, or be forced to get, vaccinations. I don't know which videos this research is looking at, but there needs to be a clear distinction between science and evidence, and any dictation of what actions our institutions should take as a result.
Ever since UofT's board of regents sided with drug maker Apotex and against their own whistleblower, Dr. Nancy Olivieri, I've been very hesitant to trust any of the conclusions announced through the entrenched medical establishment at UofT and it's semi-commercial "partnerships". I'd urge interested readers to google up on that affair, because I think it's instructive to the entire collapse of public trust in the way science is carried out.
Further, I think there's some disengenuity lumping in "childhood vaccinations", which have 20 years plus of widespread use, fine-tuning, and knowledge about their long-term effects, with these brand new vaccinations which are being literally rammed down the public's throats. Dr. Wilson's own research has shown serious cause for concern regarding flu vaccinations, for example.
Err, *some* drug dealers end up incarcerated.... Others end up in charge of the country.
t m
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/bush-cheney-drugs.h
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1706934
Dude! Many of the condemnations of NK, Iran and China apply to the USA! What country has a larger per-capita incarceration rate? Which of the countries on that list has started an illegal invasion of another country in the past decade? Which countries use napalm, low-grade radioactive weapons, or phosphorous incendiaries?
Somebody'd better go and liberate them, quick!
I thought there always had to be at least two. Maybe Debian will escape to a remote planet, and HURD will watch over Gentoo (daniel's spawn) while it grows up and learns the ways of the RMS.
Daniel! You were supposed to be the chosen one!
If that was their only copy of my records, I wouldn't be so sad. No matter who ended up with it.
Granted, I did realize that it would suffice to have the code already in memory, ready to dump to a *separate* filesystem using a sufficiently low-level call. Having it dump onto the swapspace is good enough, I suppose. Many of the posts up here seemed to be talking about writing to a mounted partition in the usual way, though; which would probably be ugly.
Having a little nvram cache for just this purpose *is* a cool way to get a similar result, and is probably even safer than even touching a disk.
... sometimes, doesn't it help to design Hardware and Software as a single 'experience'?
I guess you'd need to do that as a nested query to get the "here" part in there.
I could look this up, but you could to, so I won't. ;-) Iirc, postgres was still randomly deleting data when mysql was feature-bare but stable. It got adopted. postgres has been slowly climbing in adoption ever since, but still lagging.
If I'm writing a php app for some guy who's going to put it on a vhosted box, they're likely going to have MSSQL *shudder* or mysql. If I'm just picking up php on a need-to-know basis, I'm not going to bother even setting up postgres in my test suite at home; and the vicious cycle continues.
That said, mysql is a very savvy company, but they seem to not be resting on the early adoption - they are constantly putting out a new, better project, and I can only imagine what kind of benefits their paid service could provide to the right project. mysql is no vhs-cabal. Betamax got buried under the brooklyn bridge.
... more like a boxer playing chess
for every time that name will ever get mentioned, why not call it comp.db ???