> Unless they add something vital to the workings of the system that make it LSB compatible and keep that closed source requiring you to use per-seat licensing
You have a point here. But LSB compliance is mostly a point of configuration, not code.
> You are assuming that the "UnitedLinux" product (installation CD, name, installer, etc) and all parts thereof are covered by the GPL.
I am not.
> the GPL states basically that you must publish changes to the code and provide the source to those that you distribute the product to. I don't remember any part that forces you to distribute the code to anyone and everyone
Correct.
> How is this restricting your freedom?
By limiting the number of people that can use the software. In a per-seat licensing arrangement, even if you buy a license to use the software, only you can use it – you can’t allow other people to use it. Mind you, it’s not about distribution, but use.
> Most of these companies give back to the community it a big way
So what? If they give code with one hand but subtract freedom with the other, the net balance is negative.
The real issue here is if UnitedLinux really is planning per-seat licensing or not. If yes, it is bad. If not, good luck for them.
> The loophole which makes "UnitedLinux" viable legally is the option of offering a warranty.
Your point is quite good, but not enough. That would be selling warranty – in effect, seeling support. It wouldn’t be a per-seat licensing, but per-seat support.
If they change their mind and sell per-seat support instead of licensing, I’m all for it.
> Okay, so this "per-seat licensing" consists of them not offering the binaries for free download.
If it was, it wouldn’t be per-seat. Per-seat means each potential user has to pay to have the right to use. Even if it’s binaries, GNU GPL software can’t have its use restricted in this way. Distributing GNU GPL’d software under such a condition automatically revokes your rights to use and distribute GNU GPL’d software, thus making such lincensing illegal.
> The source will still be "freely available".
Unless it’s available in a manner compliant with the GNU GPL, that is not enough.
> it's RMS, so the problem must be someone might make money off of software
Don’t put words in anyone’s mouth. RMS doesn’t object to people making money, he (and I) does object to restricting other people’s freedom.
> When we sell a system, we give em a cd of software and one of the kernel source (and a few other gnu utils we use) but basically we don't give them ANY source to our software...
So you are complying with other people’s software lincenses. That’s good. And some of these licenses are copyleft. That’s good too. RMS has nothing against that.
> So now since that company has basically put much more of their software under the gpl compared to what we did, why is RMS going nuts on them compared to going nuts on the hundreds of houses like ours???
Now if you imposed a per-seat licensing scheme on the GNU software you happen to distribute, that would be a violation of the GNU GPL, and it would cease your rights to distribute it. That’s what UnitedLinux has said it will do, and that answers your question.
You need to learn both logic and the facts before commenting.
> how can RMS say that all software should be free
Should but isn’t. Only software whose copyright owners released under the GNU GPL or some other free license is free.
> what he really means is free unless it is going to be used or distributed by someone he doesn't like?
It should be obvious from my last paragraph, but here it goes: copyleft does not mean free for all. It means free for those who will respect others’ freedom. Per-seat licensing schemes are a violation of freedom, and besides a violation of GNU GPL licensing. Also, it’s not about not liking someone, but what licensing someone uses to restrict someone else's freedom.
> I find it amusing that RMS and the other GPL zealots
How do you define a zealot? Why is being a zealot bad? What is a GPL zealot? Why is RMS one of them? Remember, a zealot is one who has zeal, and zeal in itself is a good thing.
> want unlimited freedom, unless of course such freedom would result in a choice or course of action that they might disagree with...
That RMS doesn’t want “unlimited freedom” I already proved, and anyway if he wanted that he wouldn’t have created copyleft and the GNU GPL, which are based on copyright, which in itself is a denial of absolute freedom, being an extension of property to the intellectual realm.
Now, denying the freedom to restrict others’ freedom somehow strikes me as completely reasonable.
> I cant understand why they would create a linux standard without inviting Red Hat or even Debian to the table.
If they wanted to do business with Debian they would adopt dpkg, Debian’s policies, start contributing and do their own derivative distribution. Debian does what it thinks right, it won’t switch courses for profit because it is a community.
While it is better than nothing, it sounds like duplication of effort — why keeping improving a proprietary piece of software if eventually GNU/Linux and the Hurd are bound to overcome whatever advantage it currently has?
OTOH, this could be trying to give Solaris a lease of life while they prepare a real migration plan to GNU software.
Those who refuse to learn History are bound to repeat it – as a farce. Can’t remember who said that, nor exactly in which words.
BSD was hoarded by proprietary vendors before, and this almost killed free software at that time. That’s why copyleft, being so restrictive, got so popular: so that free software wouldn’t be hoarded again.
The same goes for X. XFree hackers even refused a deal to have it GPL’d by the X Group. It’s a kind of idealism, but one which endangers the very continuance of the freedoms we all have come to cherish.
One thing that may be very difficult to understand for all you anglo-saxons out there is the distinction between your common law and the Latin world’s objective law – especially as more and more the Latin system of objective law has been contaminating your system of common law.
One of the many reasons why the law in the North European culture – which includes most of North America and Oceania – is so well obeyed, or was before the objective law system began encroaching, is that the common law encodes the common practice and beliefs of the people; it was the Saxon baron’s defence against their Norman conquestor, and the common people defence against any powerful bully. It was, and it still is to some measure, accepted by all, understood by many and respected by most.
On the other hand, the objective law, under the pretense of being issued from a high moral ground, in fact becomes very complex, fit only for lawyers; it encodes what the legislators understand of the world and of Natural Law, or of any philosophical system of justice happened to be in vogue at the time of the law's drafting; and the end effect, specially in cesaropapist countries like the Iberican culture ones – that includes not only the Iberic peninsula but also all of Latin America –, is that it bears little resemblance of its eventual implementation.
That is to say, it may be a very good law. But if the people don’t understand it and believe in it, it won’t be followed at all, or it may even be followed in letter but not in spirit. Or, turning the argument around, educations must precede legislation.
> IDE drives are fine in a desktop machine. It isn't likely to be heavily stressed and any reads and writes are likely to be from a single application at a time and a single user at a time with a CPU that is typically 99% idle.
If you use any modern OS you’re supposed to have virtual memory paging and multitasking that poses very serious data integrity issues for IDE, as stated in FreeBSD’s tuning(7) manpage.
> in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source
Only some states and municipalities are requiring free software in Brazil. The mostly important sphere of government, the federal (Union) one, still is deeply commited to Microsoft, to the point of preferring it to Brazil’s own Conectiva GNU/Linux. You can read more about it at CIPSGA’s old stories.
This helps nothing with the standards issue. Porgrams created for Aqua still won’t run under X, unless GNUStep actually gets popular and can keep binary and source code compatibility.
And Aqua alone is already bloated, with X running gets still worse count also the bloatedness of single-server Mach, and you get Apple and Motorolla selling lots of hardware people wouldn’t need if it was a simple BSD or GNU/Linux system with OpenStep, X and a nice window manager with good tools and configuration.
Why inferior? It’s faster, more flexible, and can do everything Aqua can do. Anything else is just tools and configuration.
> Windows is also a "real standard"
It isn’t any kind of standard – there was even an alliance called OpenWin32 or something the like that included IBM and called for the API standardization, but Microsoft refused claiming it was proprietary. Windows is only popular, not a standard by any means – if it was the barrier to entry in the market wouldn’t be so high, even with all the OEM strongarming Microsoft does.
> It is this kind of this attitude that validates proprietary systems for the benefit of the end user.
Which kind of attitude? And how proprietariness benefits users, by locking them in costlier and inferior systems, denying them choice?
> And that's what really counts.
So you don’t like freedom I’d suggest you move to Syria, Arabia, Libia, Tunisia, Iraq, North Korea, China, Cuba
>> Apart from that, indeed my next CPU will no more be an AMD.
> I'll assume that to mean that previously, you've bought AMD rather than Intel for political reasons. And I'll also assume that to mean that in the future you won't buy AMD because they've sunken down, politically, to an Intel-like level (although I wouldn't go that far, myself).
Actually Intel is somewhat critical of Microsoft sometimes, and is supportive of GNU/Linux, but it’s relations to employees, competitors and customers is worse than AMD’s. So I wouldn’t say it’s a clear ranking. Depends on how much importance you give to supporting Microsoft in particular and proprietary software in general.
> If so, however, why wouldn't you buy AMD, if they are (at the time of purchase) producing the best chips? Unless you're gonna go Alpha or Sparc or something.
Actually Alpha is now owned by Intel, HP (PA-RISC) is allied to Intel, and MIPS has given up, so the only realistic options are Sparc, PowerPC, Crusoe and Cyrix – even so, if you buy Crusoe and Cyrix you’re validating the x86-compatible market, so I wouldn’t count them as options.
Too bad even Tim O’Reilly says Aqua’s “widely accepted” it’s accepted only in Mac OS, because it’s proprietary to Apple and not compatible with the real standard, the X Window System. It is this kind of attitude that validates proprietary systems like Wintel or the Mac.
> - Bash IS available for OS X. You don't even have to recompile anything. [osxgnu.org] It took me 5 seconds to find this on Google.
>- Vim IS available for OS X. Again, no recompile needed. [imdat.de] About 3 seconds, again Google.
Bash, Vim and many others are available, together with Debian's dpkg, from Fink. That means everything from one place together with package management.
Fink fails short of being Debian for Mac OS X, but it’s the second best thing next to Debian itself you can get running in a Mac, perhaps together with NetBSD.
> Well, when 7 dead astronauts are traced to SQL flaws, then perhaps the "real relational" model will finally get the attention that it allegedly deserves.
You should read the authors you criticize before being ironic about them anyway, my example was purposefully overshooted to try to bring your attention to the fact that theory is practical, and there is more than one book about that, but you seem to have also purposefully missed the point.
> What you need to sell it is catchy buzzwords and toy examples and techno-cliches that inject half-baked ideas (or even those that happen to be full-baked) to PHB's.
Here I agree with you. But all this can come just after an implementation of the relational model gains some acceptance. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem which was broken for the basic relational ideas by IBM Future System’s System R prototype which eventually became SQL/DS. BS12 could have been it for the full relational compliance, but perhaps now it’s too late for it, even with IBM newfound open source friendliness. But Alphora Dataphor could be it, too bad slashdotters don’t want to hear about it. There were at least two rejected submissions about it.
> I agree that NULL stinks overall. It's few benefits are not with the myriad frustrations it causes.
You get the point relating to NULLs. You can say about the same about duplicates, inconsistent language design, lack of closure, arbitrary restrictions, broken types and domains system, mistaken object support (the relvar == class blunder), and the list goes ever on that’s why it’s way better to ditch SQL and start all over again, and that’s why we need The Third Manifesto.
> Codd's ideas were intially pretty much ignored. What finally triggered something was that he started showing how his ideas made queries simpler, or at least smaller.
If you have any reference to this piece of history I‘d like very much to read it. As far as I know what triggered the wholesale migration to SQL was on one hand IBM‘s restricted release of SQL/DS validating Relational Software’s crappy first version of Oracle, and on the other Berkeley‘s Ingres and its associated QUEL validating the applicability of relational model.
In fact it was when Codd tried to market his ideas thru ‘The Relational Model for Database Management: Version 2’ that his writing lost some technical qualities – for example terseness and strict adherence to a clean implementation of sound theoretical principles – and so he lost much of his influence. It was a pity, because before that many more people were hearing him when he delineated his still disregarded rules to evaluate a DBMS compliance with the relational model and the still not implemented RM/T.
> Others took the ideas and made them a bit more palettable to the mainstream.
> If some new thing is truly better, then one is going to have to do the same thing: show how it makes things better, faster, shorter, cheaper, etc. significantly *enuf* to justify tossing the current standards.
> Until then, it will just be considered an intellectual toy.
First, your ‘current standards’ – I take that to mean ISO SQL 92 and its successors – are so substandard that they are mostly disregarded. Try, for example, run some simple queries on Oracle‘s data dictionary with the SQL flagger turned on, even to the SQL 92 Entry level. Almost everything will fail to run, because not even data types are compliant.
Second, that the relational model can ‘make things better, faster, shorter, cheaper, etc significantly’ has already been widely demonstrated by Codd, Date, Darwen, Pascal in their various writings, by Darwen‘s in his BS12 and now by Nathan Allan in his Alphora Dataphor. But it is difficult to argue with a disinformed climate of opinion, because people don’t want to do their homework, do their reading, their understanding, even buying the relevant books.
Finally, it’s a pity that users suffer so much because current products are so limited and frustrating to use, and still the blueprint that would make life easier &ndash and didn’t before because it was disregarded – gets dismissed as ‘an intellectual toy’. When the Columbia space shuttle exploded, I don’t think anyone still considered physical and chemical theories, models and experiments intellectual toys, if one ever did.
> I meant "street relational", not Codd theory-book relational.
The problem is that street relational is no relational at all, since it violates the basic theoretical principles of the relational model. BTW it’s not only Codd, but also Christopher J Date, Hugh Darwen, Fabian Pascal and now Nathan Allan.
It makes no sense to speak about Codd theory-book relational. There is a post-Euclidian Math with is still Mathematics, and indeed superseeds Euclid; but it evolves from the Euclidian fundamentals to the point of redefining them. SQL, OODBMSs and other database models up to this day are either pre-relational or just plain confusion of mind which seems works just because people never considered they could have something much better &ndash -- that they could have had it for twenty years already.
Slashdot Mirror
> Unless they add something vital to the workings of the system that make it LSB compatible and keep that closed source requiring you to use per-seat licensing
You have a point here. But LSB compliance is mostly a point of configuration, not code.
> You are assuming that the "UnitedLinux" product (installation CD, name, installer, etc) and all parts thereof are covered by the GPL.
I am not.
> the GPL states basically that you must publish changes to the code and provide the source to those that you distribute the product to. I don't remember any part that forces you to distribute the code to anyone and everyone
Correct.
> How is this restricting your freedom?
By limiting the number of people that can use the software. In a per-seat licensing arrangement, even if you buy a license to use the software, only you can use it – you can’t allow other people to use it. Mind you, it’s not about distribution, but use.
> Most of these companies give back to the community it a big way
So what? If they give code with one hand but subtract freedom with the other, the net balance is negative.
The real issue here is if UnitedLinux really is planning per-seat licensing or not. If yes, it is bad. If not, good luck for them.
> you're working on implementing Tutorial D?
Unfortunately, it’s stalled. No one else took the lead while I sort out residence issues as an immigrant in Switzerland. Someday.
> Best of luck, the world really needs a real DB language! I really hope you do well.
Thanks! Would you like to take the lead? :-)
> The loophole which makes "UnitedLinux" viable legally is the option of offering a warranty.
Your point is quite good, but not enough. That would be selling warranty – in effect, seeling support. It wouldn’t be a per-seat licensing, but per-seat support.
If they change their mind and sell per-seat support instead of licensing, I’m all for it.
> If you buy Caldera Linux, powered by UnitedLinux, you are free to copy, modify and distribute any of the GPL code that comes with it.
You are also free to run it as you like, including let several people access it. That makes a per-seat restriction in GNU GPL a breach of contract.
> Okay, so this "per-seat licensing" consists of them not offering the binaries for free download.
If it was, it wouldn’t be per-seat. Per-seat means each potential user has to pay to have the right to use. Even if it’s binaries, GNU GPL software can’t have its use restricted in this way. Distributing GNU GPL’d software under such a condition automatically revokes your rights to use and distribute GNU GPL’d software, thus making such lincensing illegal.
> The source will still be "freely available".
Unless it’s available in a manner compliant with the GNU GPL, that is not enough.
> it's RMS, so the problem must be someone might make money off of software
Don’t put words in anyone’s mouth. RMS doesn’t object to people making money, he (and I) does object to restricting other people’s freedom.
> When we sell a system, we give em a cd of software and one of the kernel source (and a few other gnu utils we use) but basically we don't give them ANY source to our software...
So you are complying with other people’s software lincenses. That’s good. And some of these licenses are copyleft. That’s good too. RMS has nothing against that.
> So now since that company has basically put much more of their software under the gpl compared to what we did, why is RMS going nuts on them compared to going nuts on the hundreds of houses like ours???
Now if you imposed a per-seat licensing scheme on the GNU software you happen to distribute, that would be a violation of the GNU GPL, and it would cease your rights to distribute it. That’s what UnitedLinux has said it will do, and that answers your question.
You need to learn both logic and the facts before commenting.
> how can RMS say that all software should be free
Should but isn’t. Only software whose copyright owners released under the GNU GPL or some other free license is free.
> what he really means is free unless it is going to be used or distributed by someone he doesn't like?
It should be obvious from my last paragraph, but here it goes: copyleft does not mean free for all. It means free for those who will respect others’ freedom. Per-seat licensing schemes are a violation of freedom, and besides a violation of GNU GPL licensing. Also, it’s not about not liking someone, but what licensing someone uses to restrict someone else's freedom.
> I find it amusing that RMS and the other GPL zealots
How do you define a zealot? Why is being a zealot bad? What is a GPL zealot? Why is RMS one of them? Remember, a zealot is one who has zeal, and zeal in itself is a good thing.
> want unlimited freedom, unless of course such freedom would result in a choice or course of action that they might disagree with...
That RMS doesn’t want “unlimited freedom” I already proved, and anyway if he wanted that he wouldn’t have created copyleft and the GNU GPL, which are based on copyright, which in itself is a denial of absolute freedom, being an extension of property to the intellectual realm.
Now, denying the freedom to restrict others’ freedom somehow strikes me as completely reasonable.
> I cant understand why they would create a linux standard without inviting Red Hat or even Debian to the table.
If they wanted to do business with Debian they would adopt dpkg, Debian’s policies, start contributing and do their own derivative distribution. Debian does what it thinks right, it won’t switch courses for profit because it is a community.
> mythologist Joseph Campbell (who helped Lucas craft the Skywalker/Vader saga)
This is not true, as well documented by Salon.
While it is better than nothing, it sounds like duplication of effort — why keeping improving a proprietary piece of software if eventually GNU/Linux and the Hurd are bound to overcome whatever advantage it currently has?
OTOH, this could be trying to give Solaris a lease of life while they prepare a real migration plan to GNU software.
Those who refuse to learn History are bound to repeat it – as a farce. Can’t remember who said that, nor exactly in which words.
BSD was hoarded by proprietary vendors before, and this almost killed free software at that time. That’s why copyleft, being so restrictive, got so popular: so that free software wouldn’t be hoarded again.
The same goes for X. XFree hackers even refused a deal to have it GPL’d by the X Group. It’s a kind of idealism, but one which endangers the very continuance of the freedoms we all have come to cherish.
One thing that may be very difficult to understand for all you anglo-saxons out there is the distinction between your common law and the Latin world’s objective law – especially as more and more the Latin system of objective law has been contaminating your system of common law.
One of the many reasons why the law in the North European culture – which includes most of North America and Oceania – is so well obeyed, or was before the objective law system began encroaching, is that the common law encodes the common practice and beliefs of the people; it was the Saxon baron’s defence against their Norman conquestor, and the common people defence against any powerful bully. It was, and it still is to some measure, accepted by all, understood by many and respected by most.
On the other hand, the objective law, under the pretense of being issued from a high moral ground, in fact becomes very complex, fit only for lawyers; it encodes what the legislators understand of the world and of Natural Law, or of any philosophical system of justice happened to be in vogue at the time of the law's drafting; and the end effect, specially in cesaropapist countries like the Iberican culture ones – that includes not only the Iberic peninsula but also all of Latin America –, is that it bears little resemblance of its eventual implementation.
That is to say, it may be a very good law. But if the people don’t understand it and believe in it, it won’t be followed at all, or it may even be followed in letter but not in spirit. Or, turning the argument around, educations must precede legislation.
> IDE drives are fine in a desktop machine. It isn't likely to be heavily stressed and any reads and writes are likely to be from a single application at a time and a single user at a time with a CPU that is typically 99% idle.
If you use any modern OS you’re supposed to have virtual memory paging and multitasking that poses very serious data integrity issues for IDE, as stated in FreeBSD’s tuning(7) manpage.
> in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source
Only some states and municipalities are requiring free software in Brazil. The mostly important sphere of government, the federal (Union) one, still is deeply commited to Microsoft, to the point of preferring it to Brazil’s own Conectiva GNU/Linux. You can read more about it at CIPSGA’s old stories.
> you can run X-Windows and Aqua at the same time
This helps nothing with the standards issue. Porgrams created for Aqua still won’t run under X, unless GNUStep actually gets popular and can keep binary and source code compatibility.
And Aqua alone is already bloated, with X running gets still worse count also the bloatedness of single-server Mach, and you get Apple and Motorolla selling lots of hardware people wouldn’t need if it was a simple BSD or GNU/Linux system with OpenStep, X and a nice window manager with good tools and configuration.
> the X Window System is clearly inferior
Why inferior? It’s faster, more flexible, and can do everything Aqua can do. Anything else is just tools and configuration.
> Windows is also a "real standard"
It isn’t any kind of standard – there was even an alliance called OpenWin32 or something the like that included IBM and called for the API standardization, but Microsoft refused claiming it was proprietary. Windows is only popular, not a standard by any means – if it was the barrier to entry in the market wouldn’t be so high, even with all the OEM strongarming Microsoft does.
> It is this kind of this attitude that validates proprietary systems for the benefit of the end user.
Which kind of attitude? And how proprietariness benefits users, by locking them in costlier and inferior systems, denying them choice?
> And that's what really counts.
So you don’t like freedom I’d suggest you move to Syria, Arabia, Libia, Tunisia, Iraq, North Korea, China, Cuba
>> Apart from that, indeed my next CPU will no more be an AMD.
> I'll assume that to mean that previously, you've bought AMD rather than Intel for political reasons. And I'll also assume that to mean that in the future you won't buy AMD because they've sunken down, politically, to an Intel-like level (although I wouldn't go that far, myself).
Actually Intel is somewhat critical of Microsoft sometimes, and is supportive of GNU/Linux, but it’s relations to employees, competitors and customers is worse than AMD’s. So I wouldn’t say it’s a clear ranking. Depends on how much importance you give to supporting Microsoft in particular and proprietary software in general.
> If so, however, why wouldn't you buy AMD, if they are (at the time of purchase) producing the best chips? Unless you're gonna go Alpha or Sparc or something.
Actually Alpha is now owned by Intel, HP (PA-RISC) is allied to Intel, and MIPS has given up, so the only realistic options are Sparc, PowerPC, Crusoe and Cyrix – even so, if you buy Crusoe and Cyrix you’re validating the x86-compatible market, so I wouldn’t count them as options.
Too bad even Tim O’Reilly says Aqua’s “widely accepted” it’s accepted only in Mac OS, because it’s proprietary to Apple and not compatible with the real standard, the X Window System. It is this kind of attitude that validates proprietary systems like Wintel or the Mac.
> - Bash IS available for OS X. You don't even have to recompile anything. [osxgnu.org] It took me 5 seconds to find this on Google.
>- Vim IS available for OS X. Again, no recompile needed. [imdat.de] About 3 seconds, again Google.
Bash, Vim and many others are available, together with Debian's dpkg, from Fink. That means everything from one place together with package management.
Fink fails short of being Debian for Mac OS X, but it’s the second best thing next to Debian itself you can get running in a Mac, perhaps together with NetBSD.
> Mono was mostly focused on implementing C#.
Not really, their focus is on C# plus the .Net virtual machine and classes that go with it.
> MS pays its employees less than the industry average and compensate with employee stock options
The best report on this I’ve seen up to this day is by Bill Parish.
> Well, when 7 dead astronauts are traced to SQL flaws, then perhaps the "real relational" model will finally get the attention that it allegedly deserves.
You should read the authors you criticize before being ironic about them anyway, my example was purposefully overshooted to try to bring your attention to the fact that theory is practical, and there is more than one book about that, but you seem to have also purposefully missed the point.
> What you need to sell it is catchy buzzwords and toy examples and techno-cliches that inject half-baked ideas (or even those that happen to be full-baked) to PHB's.
Here I agree with you. But all this can come just after an implementation of the relational model gains some acceptance. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem which was broken for the basic relational ideas by IBM Future System’s System R prototype which eventually became SQL/DS. BS12 could have been it for the full relational compliance, but perhaps now it’s too late for it, even with IBM newfound open source friendliness. But Alphora Dataphor could be it, too bad slashdotters don’t want to hear about it. There were at least two rejected submissions about it.
> I agree that NULL stinks overall. It's few benefits are not with the myriad frustrations it causes.
You get the point relating to NULLs. You can say about the same about duplicates, inconsistent language design, lack of closure, arbitrary restrictions, broken types and domains system, mistaken object support (the relvar == class blunder), and the list goes ever on that’s why it’s way better to ditch SQL and start all over again, and that’s why we need The Third Manifesto.
> Codd's ideas were intially pretty much ignored. What finally triggered something was that he started showing how his ideas made queries simpler, or at least smaller.
If you have any reference to this piece of history I‘d like very much to read it. As far as I know what triggered the wholesale migration to SQL was on one hand IBM‘s restricted release of SQL/DS validating Relational Software’s crappy first version of Oracle, and on the other Berkeley‘s Ingres and its associated QUEL validating the applicability of relational model.
In fact it was when Codd tried to market his ideas thru ‘The Relational Model for Database Management: Version 2’ that his writing lost some technical qualities – for example terseness and strict adherence to a clean implementation of sound theoretical principles – and so he lost much of his influence. It was a pity, because before that many more people were hearing him when he delineated his still disregarded rules to evaluate a DBMS compliance with the relational model and the still not implemented RM/T.
> Others took the ideas and made them a bit more palettable to the mainstream.
> If some new thing is truly better, then one is going to have to do the same thing: show how it makes things better, faster, shorter, cheaper, etc. significantly *enuf* to justify tossing the current standards.
> Until then, it will just be considered an intellectual toy.
First, your ‘current standards’ – I take that to mean ISO SQL 92 and its successors – are so substandard that they are mostly disregarded. Try, for example, run some simple queries on Oracle‘s data dictionary with the SQL flagger turned on, even to the SQL 92 Entry level. Almost everything will fail to run, because not even data types are compliant.
Second, that the relational model can ‘make things better, faster, shorter, cheaper, etc significantly’ has already been widely demonstrated by Codd, Date, Darwen, Pascal in their various writings, by Darwen‘s in his BS12 and now by Nathan Allan in his Alphora Dataphor. But it is difficult to argue with a disinformed climate of opinion, because people don’t want to do their homework, do their reading, their understanding, even buying the relevant books.
Finally, it’s a pity that users suffer so much because current products are so limited and frustrating to use, and still the blueprint that would make life easier &ndash and didn’t before because it was disregarded – gets dismissed as ‘an intellectual toy’. When the Columbia space shuttle exploded, I don’t think anyone still considered physical and chemical theories, models and experiments intellectual toys, if one ever did.
> I meant "street relational", not Codd theory-book relational.
The problem is that street relational is no relational at all, since it violates the basic theoretical principles of the relational model. BTW it’s not only Codd, but also Christopher J Date, Hugh Darwen, Fabian Pascal and now Nathan Allan.
It makes no sense to speak about Codd theory-book relational. There is a post-Euclidian Math with is still Mathematics, and indeed superseeds Euclid; but it evolves from the Euclidian fundamentals to the point of redefining them. SQL, OODBMSs and other database models up to this day are either pre-relational or just plain confusion of mind which seems works just because people never considered they could have something much better &ndash -- that they could have had it for twenty years already.