What I've noticed more and more lately, is that movie reviews all sound the same. Maybe one reviewer likes a given movie and another doesn't, but the rest of the review -- what movie does this resemble? what are the themes? who is this character like? -- all that stuff seems to be the same. It's as if the reviewer is incapable of any critical thinking beyond "thumbs up" and "thumbs down", and someone (the producers?) are supplying the meat of the review.
Maybe edtv producers didn't want to stress the relationship to Truman?
IBM has many parts, many of which are doing the same thing, few of which even know about the existence of these other groups. Furthermore, many of the IBM folks I've dealt with over the years have a severe case of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. (If it's NIH it can't be good.)
I can easily imagine an AS/400 manager thinking that Linux is his chance to make his machine even more relevant to the world. I can also imagine anyone who sells CICS or IMS or other highly proprietary software seeing Linux as just another enemy. (Someone in this position would be an ally of Java and EJB, however.)
IBM will never be "on our side". Their interests may, in some situations, align with ours. Let's hope there are many such situations.
I strongly recommend "Big Blues, The Unmaking of IBM" by Paul Carroll. It shows how a combination of arrogance, incompetence, and infighting led to the dominance of Microsoft at IBMs expense. You can't read this and not begin to see Microsoft emulating IBM. The book is also fascinating because it shows how a big, scary company can do such a consistent and thorough job of shooting itself in its foot over an extended period of time. Due, primarily, to "not getting it".
The patent owner can also refuse to license the patent, and they can sue us for an infringement that has already taken place - so I could be sued for principles that are used in my free software today.
Suing you would be completely ineffectual. You can't compensate the patent's owner, and you can't fix the problem either, since you don't own the source code.
Who exactly would the patent owner sue? The only answer that makes sense to me is: some company that competes with the patent owner, and which uses the open-source software that contains the patented idea. (But who ever said that patent law makes sense?)
Let Evil Co. have its patent. The question is whether anyone else, say dude2, who wants to use the idea is blocked from doing so. Dude2 can always claim "but I just got the idea from this article", or "I just read this here source code".
The worrisome case is: what happens if dude2 works for a reasonably large company, that Evil Co. perceives as a threat? Can Evil Co. really sue? Is the public availability of the idea enough to get the case thrown out? I don't know. Any IP lawyers out there?
Software patents are a waste of everyone's time. They don't do anything for anyone (except for IP lawyers).
If you have a great idea, publish it or demo it fast. Then no one can patent the idea. The right to patent an idea expires one year after public disclosure.
No, that was Ridley Scott's movie. I can't give a source, but I have heard it stated that, in Kubrick's opinion, Blade Runner was the most beautiful movie ever made.
In software, a patent is one of two things: 1) A marketing gimmick, which doesn't fool anyone but investors and the lower IQ part of the customer base. 2) A bargaining chip. If your company threatens my company by waving a patent at us, then my company can respond by waving a patent back at your company.
Your argument makes some sense in the physical world. But in software, there are lots of ways to solve a given problem, and it's just too easy to code around a patent. Especially the notoriously lightweight software patents that are routinely awarded. Also, by the time a patent is issued (probably 2-3 years after the application date), the patented technology is likely to be obsolete.
Do you really think Microsoft or IBM got rich from their patents? Or that Microsoft would not have written Word or Windows but for the protection of its patents? Or that patents are really preventing anyone from competing with those companies? I suggest you tune in to the Microsoft antitrust trial.
No, the only guys making money from patents are patent attorneys. Three years ago I left my job and wrote some software to start a new business. My major expense was paying a patent attorney several thousand dollars to get an "opinion letter" which does nothing but buy some insurance in the extremely unlikely case that a patent infringement case does get to the point of a court verdict. That was quite enough for me; I couldn't even begin to contemplate obtaining a patent on my own work.
Here's a suggestion that should appeal to the open source crowd: If you have a patentable idea, PUBLISH IT. Then no one gets to patent it.
I've found SQL Anywhere very nice to use on all Windows platforms. It's fast and easy to run. There's supposedly a standalone UNIX version, but I have no experience with it.
Object Design's products should also be considered. They sell a variety of object database systems and related tools. These can be thought of more as providing persistence for programming language data structures (C++ or Java), than as traditional relational database systems. database.
Your boss is right, although maybe he doesn't know why.
At my day job, we build a pure-Java product that is supposed to work with any database and JDBC driver. JDBC drivers suck. The ingenuity of driver vendors in finding new ways to suck is never-ending. There are major bugs in metadata support. Translations of database types to Java types are often buggy, especially for types such as date, time and timestamp. We've found that many native code drivers (types 1-3) have problems with memory corruption, memory leaks, and multithreading.
In the specific case of the Oracle drivers, foreign key metadata access is unbelievably slow. We had to write our own monster SQL statement to fix the problem. The OCI driver had problems with multithreading, (last time we checked -- over a year ago). I spoke to a vendor of a 3rd party JDBC driver for Oracle, which used OCI, and they described the problems they had with multithreading and OCI.
We found the thin driver to survive our stress tests much better than the OCI driver.
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What I've noticed more and more lately, is that movie reviews all sound the same. Maybe one reviewer likes a given movie and another doesn't, but the rest of the review -- what movie does this resemble? what are the themes? who is this character like? -- all that stuff seems to be the same. It's as if the reviewer is incapable of any critical thinking beyond "thumbs up" and "thumbs down", and someone (the producers?) are supplying the meat of the review.
Maybe edtv producers didn't want to stress the relationship to Truman?
IBM has many parts, many of which are doing the same thing, few of which even know about the existence of these other groups. Furthermore, many of the IBM folks I've dealt with over the years have a severe case of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. (If it's NIH it can't be good.)
I can easily imagine an AS/400 manager thinking that Linux is his chance to make his machine even more relevant to the world. I can also imagine anyone who sells CICS or IMS or other highly proprietary software seeing Linux as just another enemy. (Someone in this position would be an ally of Java and EJB, however.)
IBM will never be "on our side". Their interests may, in some situations, align with ours. Let's hope there are many such situations.
I strongly recommend "Big Blues, The Unmaking of IBM" by Paul Carroll. It shows how a combination of arrogance, incompetence, and infighting led to the dominance of Microsoft at IBMs expense. You can't read this and not begin to see Microsoft emulating IBM. The book is also fascinating because it shows how a big, scary company can do such a consistent and thorough job of shooting itself in its foot over an extended period of time. Due, primarily, to "not getting it".
The patent owner can also refuse to license the patent, and they can sue us for an infringement that has already taken place - so I could be sued for principles that are used in my free software today.
Suing you would be completely ineffectual. You can't compensate the patent's owner, and you can't fix the problem either, since you don't own the source code.
Who exactly would the patent owner sue? The only answer that makes sense to me is: some company that competes with the patent owner, and which uses the open-source software that contains the patented idea. (But who ever said that patent law makes sense?)
Let Evil Co. have its patent. The question is whether anyone else, say dude2, who wants to use the idea is blocked from doing so. Dude2 can always claim "but I just got the idea from this article", or "I just read this here source code".
The worrisome case is: what happens if dude2 works for a reasonably large company, that Evil Co. perceives as a threat? Can Evil Co. really sue? Is the public availability of the idea enough to get the case thrown out? I don't know. Any IP lawyers out there?
Software patents are a waste of everyone's time. They don't do anything for anyone (except for IP lawyers).
If you have a great idea, publish it or demo it fast. Then no one can patent the idea. The right to patent an idea expires one year after public disclosure.
No, that was Ridley Scott's movie. I can't give a source, but I have heard it stated that, in Kubrick's opinion, Blade Runner was the most beautiful movie ever made.
In software, a patent is one of two things: 1) A marketing gimmick, which doesn't fool anyone but investors and the lower IQ part of the customer base. 2) A bargaining chip. If your company threatens my company by waving a patent at us, then my company can respond by waving a patent back at your company.
Your argument makes some sense in the physical world. But in software, there are lots of ways to solve a given problem, and it's just too easy to code around a patent. Especially the notoriously lightweight software patents that are routinely awarded. Also, by the time a patent is issued (probably 2-3 years after the application date), the patented technology is likely to be obsolete.
Do you really think Microsoft or IBM got rich from their patents? Or that Microsoft would not have written Word or Windows but for the protection of its patents? Or that patents are really preventing anyone from competing with those companies? I suggest you tune in to the Microsoft antitrust trial.
No, the only guys making money from patents are patent attorneys. Three years ago I left my job and wrote some software to start a new business. My major expense was paying a patent attorney several thousand dollars to get an "opinion letter" which does nothing but buy some insurance in the extremely unlikely case that a patent infringement case does get to the point of a court verdict. That was quite enough for me; I couldn't even begin to contemplate obtaining a patent on my own work.
Here's a suggestion that should appeal to the open source crowd: If you have a patentable idea, PUBLISH IT. Then no one gets to patent it.
I've found SQL Anywhere very nice to use on
all Windows platforms. It's fast and easy to
run. There's supposedly a standalone UNIX
version, but I have no experience with it.
Object Design's products should also be
considered. They sell a variety of object
database systems and related tools. These
can be thought of more as providing
persistence for programming language data structures (C++ or Java), than as traditional relational database systems.
database.
Your boss is right, although maybe he doesn't
know why.
At my day job, we build a pure-Java product
that is supposed to work with any database
and JDBC driver. JDBC drivers suck. The
ingenuity of driver vendors in finding new
ways to suck is never-ending. There are
major bugs in metadata support. Translations
of database types to Java types are often
buggy, especially for types such as date,
time and timestamp. We've found that many
native code drivers (types 1-3) have
problems with memory corruption, memory leaks,
and multithreading.
In the specific case of the Oracle drivers, foreign key metadata access is unbelievably slow. We had to write our own monster SQL statement to fix the problem. The OCI driver had problems with
multithreading, (last time we checked -- over a year ago). I spoke to a vendor of a 3rd party JDBC driver for Oracle, which used OCI, and they described the problems they had with multithreading and OCI.
We found the thin driver to survive our stress tests much better than the OCI driver.