Exactly, when I read the part about Berlin enforcing MVC I knew that there was no way that Berlin was ever going to take off.
X is here today, it works, it is improving, and it allows you to write your application however you want (even if it is the wrong way to approach the problem). Besides, the biggest problem with X is the fact that it is too low level to really promote code reuse, but both KDE and Gnome are frantically at work trying to fix this. Honestly, what new GUIfied software being written today for Linux doesn't rely on either the KDE or Gnome libraries for much of the heavy lifting?
If Berlin + GGI would have been available when X was still crusty and before KDE and Gnome existed then possibly it might have generated a following, especially if it would have included a legacy X compatibility so that I could still run all my X applications (there is no way I am using a desktop that doesn't include Emacs).
As my grandmother always says, "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride." The reality is quite different.
The Berlin folks are welcome to prove me wrong though. Competition is always good. And it's their time and effort.
If you honestly think that Python's signficant whitespace is a serious problem, then my advice to you is to get a real text editor.
Honestly, Emacs's Python mode is so straightforward that it's almost comical. I missed the semi-colons and braces for approximately five seconds. Vim will also do all the "hard" work of indenting for you. I suppose if you are still editting in ed Python might be problematic, but that's not Python's fault.
Yes, I read all that as well (after posting the first response).
However, it isn't just Python that is lacking decent SOAP tools. Apparently it is quite difficult to get any two SOAP tools to interoperate. Python's SOAP tools are just especially non-interoperable:). In the meantime XML-RPC works today, and SOAP will almost certainly be available for Python if and when SOAP actually becomes an important protocol.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft is not going to be able to keep.NET a Microsoft only incantation, and I would bet that they won't even be substantial front-runners.
Ballmer can pretend that Microsoft is simply being magnamanious, and giving the tech to Linux and these other OSes, but that's not even remotely the case. Microsoft is building their next big piece of tech on a fairly open set of protocols, and the Open Source community is happy to take their research and turn it into working tools.
I personally am more interested in using XML-RPC with Zope, but the fine folks at PythonWare have a sample implementation of the Soap 1.1 protocol (or so they claim).
Take a look at it here
Heck, the open source community stands a good chance of getting to.NET before Microsoft does. After all, what is.NET running applications over the Internet with SOAP.
It might come as a surprise, but the open source community is well on it's way to having application servers that are.NET compatible right now. Apache's working on SOAP, Ximian is working on SOAP-based SOUP, there are SOAP clients and servers for every scripting language that runs on Linux, and the list goes on and on.
Ballmer has to mention that these services are available for Linux, otherwise the folks in the media will realize that the Open Source community is building the infrastructure without Microsoft's help. At least this way Ballmer can pretend that the Open Source community is following MS's tail-lights.
And you are the first person in this discussion to get to the REAL heart of this matter -- it's not 'point-n-drool', it's the fact that MS's patch system is horrific. As NT4 became overly-long in the tooth, it got even worse and worse.
Exactly, Unix admins like to think that they are more on the ball, but the fact of the matter is that they simply have superior tools. In some cases vastly superior tools. Adding the security updates to Debian's apt system makes staying current so incredibly easy that a child could do it. And even crufty old tar balls are better than Microsoft's service pack dance. At least that way you can update only the software that you need to update.
And that's the other part of the problem with Microsoft's Service Packs. Instead of simply fixing the problems that you have and being done with it Microsoft insists on foisting new software updates on their users as well. Nearly every service pack has had some added functionality. This functionality generally wasn't overly helpful either. Many times it served as nothing more than a way for Microsoft to force sysadmins to install software that was important to Microsoft's long term strategy. Why, for example, do I need a web browser on my database server?
Fortunately there is a cure for this madness, and that is to simply avoid Microsoft software where possible. This is emminently practical when it comes to systems that actually face the Internet. Heck, at the very least you could shield your NT servers behind an OpenBSD box with port 80 forwarded to your Windows box. That way if you really felt like you need to use Windows development tools you could shield your vulnerable Windows machines with something specifically designed to thwart attacks.
This is what always gets me about Windows NT. It is absolutely insane the crazy dancing-in-the-moonlight, chickenbones-waving stuff that you have to do to get it to work. Every update requires a reboot, or three. And half of the fixes break more things than they fix.
The fact of the matter is that Windows is much harder to keep up to date than even the cruftiest of *nix boxes (well, maybe not the cruftiest).
In some countries the job of deciding what is justified falls on a small group of people. This is almost universally regarded as a "bad" thing (except by those people who get to decide).
However, in most civilized countries questions like these are answered by a complex balance of existing laws and a number of legislative, judicial, and executive bodies that work against each other in the creation of new laws and ordinances and the modification of existing laws. If you are old enough to have taken a civics class you can probably fill in most of the details that correspond with your particular country of origin.
The reason that this sort of a system is superior to each of us deciding on our own what is justified is quite straightforward. Some people are clearly insane. If we left each of us to determine what is right and wrong, legal and illegal, there would be no stopping those folks that feel that they are justified in shooting up my house and carrying off my wife and child.
I am sure that Timothy McVey and the punk kid involved in the recent San Diego school shootings both felt that their actions were justified. However, their actions clearly weren't justifiable.
This does not mean, of course, that the systems that we currently have in place are perfect, and that unjust laws are not created. However, this does not justify our breaking the law, and it certainly doesn't justify the destruction of someone else's property. As long as there are legal means to have your voice be heard that is the strategy that should be employed. If you truly do have a valid point chances are good that others will be interested in what you have to say without the need to turn over any cars, or paint on any walls.
Unfortunately, immature minds equate violence and political activity. They feel that unless they can burn something down, or paint grafitti on it, that their voice is being ignored. In the end they almost invariably do more harm to their cause than good.
So, while it is certainly true that each of us has to determine what we believe in, deciding what is justifiable is something that must be decided as a group.
The consumer market PC isn't going anywhere. Everytime someone thinks that they have a gizmo that would fit the average consumer's needs (for less) someone else comes up with another killer use for the PC.
It used to be that all a PC replacement needed to do was some word processing, and perhaps a spreadsheet. Then it was office type stuff and web browsing. Now it's all that and be a multimedia center as well. Who knows what will be next, but whatever it is it will almost certainly require a general purpose machine. And you can bet that Microsoft isn't going to think of it first.
Remember, a few years ago pundits were telling us that the future was WebTVs. Now we look back and realize that the WebTV was a total dud, and the reason that it failed is obvious. WebTVs suck! They can only do a handful of things, and they can't do them as fast or as easily as a modern PC (and they aren't even really that much cheaper).
The open nature and the general usefulness of the PC is the reason for its success. For most tasks the PC isn't the fastest or the least expensive solution, but it solves more problems than anything else, and it does it fast enough, and at a low enough price. Companies that try to make the PC less useful are bound to fail. For these CPRM devices to work, they are going to require drivers that trigger their special properties. I personally am hoping that Microsoft builds as much content protection as possible into their OS. I hope that they make it impossible to access a single solitary piece of digital content without someone's approval. The less generally useful Windows becomes, the easier it will be to replace Windows with something else.
That what I thought when I first read the article, but apparently it is fairly common for some mom and pop e-commerce sites to simple have a form that posts to someone else's SSL site.
You have probably seen sites like this. When the time comes to actually pay for the stuff the URLs are all at some other site. The information has got to get to the SSL site somehow, and apparently someone thought that "hidden" fields in a form would be a good idea, Yow!
The worst part is that someone almost certainly paid money for that!
When I read the article I thought the same thing. I don't write shopping carts for a living, but it seems to me like that would be the sort of thing that you would want to get out of your own database, and not pass around some other way. After all, it's fairly likely that you are going to know how much the items you are selling cost.
What amazes me is that someone almost certainly paid money for that shopping cart. And commercial software vendors wonder why Free Software is doing so well nowadays.
I also have been tinkering with PostgreSQL since it was Postgres95, and I couldn't agree more. If you haven't checked out PostgreSQL for a while you owe it to yourself to download the newest 7.1 betas and try it out. PostgreSQL has gotten a lot faster. In fact, unless your application is extremely select heavy PostgreSQL will almost certainly give MySQL a run for it's money.
It also has a great many of the nifty features that make the commercial databases so expensive, and the mailing lists are amazingly helpful. It certainly doesn't hurt to give it a try.
But they are giving them 5 years until it is not supported. If you can't hack that, well, your business has got larger problems.
Let's imagine that I just spent the money and rolled OpenMail over my entire enterprise. Now, HP tells me that they have discontinued development of the product, and they are only going to support it for five more years. Basically they have just guaranteed that the time and effort that I spent migrating to OpenMail was wasted, and I now have to do the same thing again.
This is a bad thing.
Now, granted five years is plenty of time to make the move. But it's still time and effort that could have spent on something else. Having to switch because HP didn't want to support their software going forward wouldn't make me more inclined to buy from HP in the future. Basically, HP has proven that their software is not a safe bet.
While patches and support for a product are certainly better than nothing, I am sure that you will agree that OpenMail clients probably were hoping for a great deal more than this.
And now HP has loyal customers looking for alternatives. In many cases this probably means alternatives for the operating system running their OpenMail servers as well.
Instead of turning these loyal customers out in the street HP could make several of them even more loyal customers by releasing the source code. What do they have to lose?
What are you nuts? Just because they are discontinuing a product does not mean that they close the doors and never mention it again. By announcing that this is the last version, they give their customers PLENTY of time to research and implement a new solution, while still having a supported version. Unlike a company like IBM, which sells you a server and then promptly stops supporting it the next week, (no lie, this just happened to me).
I know that if I just spent time and effort migrating from some other groupware product to OpenMail, I would be ticked. Saying that IBM is worse doesn't really help matters. Especially since hardware and software are two entirely different creatures. If a hardware platform gets cancelled you simply move your project to another platform and type 'make.' Hopefully you didn't use too many extensions that were hardware specific.
Software, especially something as fundamental as your groupware software, is entirely different. Lots of people have almost certainly built their businesses around OpenMail, and have added on stuff to make it fit their particular needs. Now they get to start over from scratch. Sure, HP has at least warned their users, but that doesn't make the reality any less daunting. Thanks to HP they now have the privilege of migrating their email (one of their computer systems most vital functions) to some other platform. Any customization projects that they have going right now need to be stopped "pronto," and they need to find another product that is comparable (and some way to migrate all their information to the new platform).
If it was me, I would give Sun a call and find out what it would take to move the whole kit and caboodle to Solaris.
This is one of the best things that a company can do, and it builds trust. I think it is clear that you don't know what you're talking about.
Clearly it is one of the best things that HP could do, but there are lots of better things:
1) They could continue to develop the product (duh).
2) They could sell (or even give) OpenMail to another company that is willing to continue development. This washes HP's hands of OpenMail, but it doesn't leave customers high and dry.
3) They could release the source code. Most customers would still be annoyed by this decision. After all, they didn't sign up for source code, they signed up for continued product development from HP. However, this would be much better than just telling their customers that they have five years to migrate from OpenMail (good luck).
I think that it is safe to say that publicly discontinuing products never builds trust. All this type of action says is that you are more than willing to discontinue products. While this is better than privately discontinuing a product, it certainly isn't anything like what the consumer had in mind when he purchased the product. If a software vendor had a history of such announcements I would be very concerned.
I agree. Why not license it out to another company? It would continue to provide a source of revenue (which every company kills for - especially its share holders!!). Going so far as to open source it would probably not happen. If HP spent X years and $Y millions developing it, they are not gonna just release it to OpenSource folks. While I agree that would be a great thing, it just doesnt make business sense. And as we all know, just because it makes sense to us tech folks, doesnt mean the people upstairs agree. To them it seems(IMHO) that the only thing that makes sense is the bottom-line and share holder value. Hopefully I am wrong (it wouldnt be the first time and definatly not the last), but I doubt it goes OpenSource.
There are several reasons why a hardware company like HP might want to open source a software product when it has reached the point where it is no longer generating revenue. The most obvious reason that they might want to do this is discontinuing support for a product upsets your customers. I imagine there are a whole pile of HP customers right now that are vowing to never trust HP again. After all, they have poured time, effort, and money into implementing HP's software product and now HP is announcing plans to leave them high and dry. I imagine that if I was in their shoes I would take a serious look migrating completely away from HP. I almost certainly would at least give the Sun salesman who has been pestering me a call and see what Sun could do for me.
Sure, it's hard to let go of source code that has you have spent so much money on over the years, but don't overlook the fact that HP has almost certainly made money on OpenMail over all of those years. Opening the source code would allow them to cut down costs associated with the ongoing maintenance of the code, while still allowing them to leverage the code to sell hardware and support. They could easily turn it into a selling point for HPUX (now with a free unlimited license for OpenMail).
Of course, if HP could find a buyer for OpenMail that would probably be better. The customers wouldn't be completely stranded (although the would probably still resent HP for ditching them), and it might make them some money. But if not, then they should seriously consider opening the source code. After all, what does it hurt them to do so? They aren't going to be using that code, and they don't have another email suite that competes with it.
I am not one bit interested in giving the ad-men any more information about myself than absolutely necessary. And I certainly am not interested in "rating" advertisements. If I am interested in an advertisement I click on it, if I am not, I don't.
Slashdot is actually a good example of how this can work correctly. I find that many of the ads here on/. are quire interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I have on occassion actually clicked on their advertising link to find one of their sponsors. Slashdot may not get the amount of raw views that Yahoo! does, but it is fairly easy to guess what the denizens of/. are going to be interested in.
The LDS church believes that the family is ordained of God, and that the roles of husband and wife are designed of God for our benefit. To them the idea of the nuclear family is a pretty big deal.
Currently US law recognizes such a union as special. Can you blame people that hold the term "marriage" as sacred from defending it from being co-opted by people who would change it to mean something else entirely? The LDS Church has every right in the world to use its resources to protect those laws that it sees as important. Just like you have every right to use your resources to overturn those laws that you feel are not right.
That's just part of living in a representative democracy.
The State Liquor Commision is made up primarily of non-drinking Mormons.
Hrmmm... It seems that there might be one or two Mormons in the state of Utah. In fact, apparently 70% of the population of that state is Mormon (with a great many of them abstaining from alcohol). I imagine that even if they appointed people to the State Liquor Commission out of a random sampling of the population it would be made up of primarily non-drinking Mormons.
Somehow it was still possible to get a drink in Utah last time I passed through. This might possibly be because most Mormons (the wacky few aside) believe that people should be able to decide for themselves what to do with their lives.
The Church as able to buy a section of main street without any public vote, which they turned into a pseudo-public park with very specific rules as far as conduct and what you can do there.
Wow, imagine a country in which people are allowed to sell and purchase property at will! What an amazingly subversive idea! The LDS church has a big fat pile of money, I imagine that when they want to buy something, they can come up with the cash. Not too mention the fact that they probably own most of downtown Salt Lake City outright anyhow. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if most of the property near Temple Square was leased from the church. I imagine you would rather there were separate rules for property belonging to the Mormon church and its members. That would certainly clear up problems with them purchasing important parts of Salt Lake City and turning them into parks.
The reason that they can specify conduct on their "park" is that it is their own private property. Just because I plant grass on my front lawn doesn't mean you can come over and play soccer there.
I would certainly agree that Utah's unique culture takes more than a little getting used to (I don't live there anymore, nor am I inclined to move back), but saying that there is no separation of church and state is simply ridiculous.
First of all, Nick is currently employed by Caldera (which isn't Debian based), so it isn't necessarily a question of him asking to standardize on what he has chosen. It's actually a pretty brave stance.
But Nick isn't really arguing that for the universal acceptance of Debian Linux. What Nick is essentially doing is arguing for a "binary" Linux Standard Base. This has been a fairly constant theme since before the LSB was even born. He contends that unless there is an installable distribution against which commercial software developers can build and test their software there will continue to be problems for Linux distributors and Linuxers in general.
Debian Linux provides a perfect base on which to standardize. All of it's software is freely redistributable, and it is technically an excellent distribution. More importantly, it isn't a commercial institution itself, and therefore it makes sense as a "common ground."
The other choice that makes sense (IMHO) is RedHat. RedHat Linux is also useable in it's freely redistributable form (there are no proprietary pieces that are absolutely necessary), and it already has quite a bit of market share. In fact, to my mind Nick's article is simply pointing out to the non-RedHat distributors their one and only chance of checking RedHat from becoming the standard. The other commercial Linux distributors are not very likely to want RedHat Linux accepted as the binary standard for Linux (they already have enough problems with it being the de-facto binary standard). If all of the non-RedHat distributions threw their weight behind Debian as the binary standard then RedHat would maybe be force to follow their lead.
Otherwise the rest of the Linux distributions are probably all in for a very long trip off a very short pier.
While I certainly wish that Emacs were a little leaner, I am not about to give up any of it's features (well, at least any of the ones *I* use), nor am I willing to give up it's flexibility.
Besides, it's not that bad. Heck, it's not half as bad as Mozilla (or Visual Studio for that matter). And the fact that I can use basically start it once and use it as a "daemon" for ages is sort of cool, it's not like it is prone to crashing.
Every once in a while I dust off gvim and give it a whirl as a programming environment, and I find it an impressive piece of work, but once you have gotten used to running your whole life from inside of Emacs, even gvim is pretty spartan.
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Exactly, when I read the part about Berlin enforcing MVC I knew that there was no way that Berlin was ever going to take off.
X is here today, it works, it is improving, and it allows you to write your application however you want (even if it is the wrong way to approach the problem). Besides, the biggest problem with X is the fact that it is too low level to really promote code reuse, but both KDE and Gnome are frantically at work trying to fix this. Honestly, what new GUIfied software being written today for Linux doesn't rely on either the KDE or Gnome libraries for much of the heavy lifting?
If Berlin + GGI would have been available when X was still crusty and before KDE and Gnome existed then possibly it might have generated a following, especially if it would have included a legacy X compatibility so that I could still run all my X applications (there is no way I am using a desktop that doesn't include Emacs).
As my grandmother always says, "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride." The reality is quite different.
The Berlin folks are welcome to prove me wrong though. Competition is always good. And it's their time and effort.
If you honestly think that Python's signficant whitespace is a serious problem, then my advice to you is to get a real text editor.
Honestly, Emacs's Python mode is so straightforward that it's almost comical. I missed the semi-colons and braces for approximately five seconds. Vim will also do all the "hard" work of indenting for you. I suppose if you are still editting in ed Python might be problematic, but that's not Python's fault.
mod_gzip works with most non-ancient browsers, YMMV. Check it out
Yes, I read all that as well (after posting the first response).
However, it isn't just Python that is lacking decent SOAP tools. Apparently it is quite difficult to get any two SOAP tools to interoperate. Python's SOAP tools are just especially non-interoperable :). In the meantime XML-RPC works today, and SOAP will almost certainly be available for Python if and when SOAP actually becomes an important protocol.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft is not going to be able to keep .NET a Microsoft only incantation, and I would bet that they won't even be substantial front-runners.
Ballmer can pretend that Microsoft is simply being magnamanious, and giving the tech to Linux and these other OSes, but that's not even remotely the case. Microsoft is building their next big piece of tech on a fairly open set of protocols, and the Open Source community is happy to take their research and turn it into working tools.
I personally am more interested in using XML-RPC with Zope, but the fine folks at PythonWare have a sample implementation of the Soap 1.1 protocol (or so they claim). Take a look at it here
Heck, the open source community stands a good chance of getting to .NET before Microsoft does. After all, what is .NET running applications over the Internet with SOAP.
It might come as a surprise, but the open source community is well on it's way to having application servers that are .NET compatible right now. Apache's working on SOAP, Ximian is working on SOAP-based SOUP, there are SOAP clients and servers for every scripting language that runs on Linux, and the list goes on and on.
Ballmer has to mention that these services are available for Linux, otherwise the folks in the media will realize that the Open Source community is building the infrastructure without Microsoft's help. At least this way Ballmer can pretend that the Open Source community is following MS's tail-lights.
Exactly, Unix admins like to think that they are more on the ball, but the fact of the matter is that they simply have superior tools. In some cases vastly superior tools. Adding the security updates to Debian's apt system makes staying current so incredibly easy that a child could do it. And even crufty old tar balls are better than Microsoft's service pack dance. At least that way you can update only the software that you need to update.
And that's the other part of the problem with Microsoft's Service Packs. Instead of simply fixing the problems that you have and being done with it Microsoft insists on foisting new software updates on their users as well. Nearly every service pack has had some added functionality. This functionality generally wasn't overly helpful either. Many times it served as nothing more than a way for Microsoft to force sysadmins to install software that was important to Microsoft's long term strategy. Why, for example, do I need a web browser on my database server?
Fortunately there is a cure for this madness, and that is to simply avoid Microsoft software where possible. This is emminently practical when it comes to systems that actually face the Internet. Heck, at the very least you could shield your NT servers behind an OpenBSD box with port 80 forwarded to your Windows box. That way if you really felt like you need to use Windows development tools you could shield your vulnerable Windows machines with something specifically designed to thwart attacks.
This is what always gets me about Windows NT. It is absolutely insane the crazy dancing-in-the-moonlight, chickenbones-waving stuff that you have to do to get it to work. Every update requires a reboot, or three. And half of the fixes break more things than they fix.
The fact of the matter is that Windows is much harder to keep up to date than even the cruftiest of *nix boxes (well, maybe not the cruftiest).
Perhaps the can come up with a good icon for the Spanish Inquisition.
Nobody ever expects that...
I would actually vote for Sir Hissss... Jungle Book is a nice movie, but Robin Hood is probably my favorite Disney Movie of all time.
In some countries the job of deciding what is justified falls on a small group of people. This is almost universally regarded as a "bad" thing (except by those people who get to decide).
However, in most civilized countries questions like these are answered by a complex balance of existing laws and a number of legislative, judicial, and executive bodies that work against each other in the creation of new laws and ordinances and the modification of existing laws. If you are old enough to have taken a civics class you can probably fill in most of the details that correspond with your particular country of origin.
The reason that this sort of a system is superior to each of us deciding on our own what is justified is quite straightforward. Some people are clearly insane. If we left each of us to determine what is right and wrong, legal and illegal, there would be no stopping those folks that feel that they are justified in shooting up my house and carrying off my wife and child.
I am sure that Timothy McVey and the punk kid involved in the recent San Diego school shootings both felt that their actions were justified. However, their actions clearly weren't justifiable.
This does not mean, of course, that the systems that we currently have in place are perfect, and that unjust laws are not created. However, this does not justify our breaking the law, and it certainly doesn't justify the destruction of someone else's property. As long as there are legal means to have your voice be heard that is the strategy that should be employed. If you truly do have a valid point chances are good that others will be interested in what you have to say without the need to turn over any cars, or paint on any walls.
Unfortunately, immature minds equate violence and political activity. They feel that unless they can burn something down, or paint grafitti on it, that their voice is being ignored. In the end they almost invariably do more harm to their cause than good.
So, while it is certainly true that each of us has to determine what we believe in, deciding what is justifiable is something that must be decided as a group.
The consumer market PC isn't going anywhere. Everytime someone thinks that they have a gizmo that would fit the average consumer's needs (for less) someone else comes up with another killer use for the PC.
It used to be that all a PC replacement needed to do was some word processing, and perhaps a spreadsheet. Then it was office type stuff and web browsing. Now it's all that and be a multimedia center as well. Who knows what will be next, but whatever it is it will almost certainly require a general purpose machine. And you can bet that Microsoft isn't going to think of it first.
Remember, a few years ago pundits were telling us that the future was WebTVs. Now we look back and realize that the WebTV was a total dud, and the reason that it failed is obvious. WebTVs suck! They can only do a handful of things, and they can't do them as fast or as easily as a modern PC (and they aren't even really that much cheaper).
The open nature and the general usefulness of the PC is the reason for its success. For most tasks the PC isn't the fastest or the least expensive solution, but it solves more problems than anything else, and it does it fast enough, and at a low enough price. Companies that try to make the PC less useful are bound to fail. For these CPRM devices to work, they are going to require drivers that trigger their special properties. I personally am hoping that Microsoft builds as much content protection as possible into their OS. I hope that they make it impossible to access a single solitary piece of digital content without someone's approval. The less generally useful Windows becomes, the easier it will be to replace Windows with something else.
That what I thought when I first read the article, but apparently it is fairly common for some mom and pop e-commerce sites to simple have a form that posts to someone else's SSL site.
You have probably seen sites like this. When the time comes to actually pay for the stuff the URLs are all at some other site. The information has got to get to the SSL site somehow, and apparently someone thought that "hidden" fields in a form would be a good idea, Yow!
The worst part is that someone almost certainly paid money for that!
When I read the article I thought the same thing. I don't write shopping carts for a living, but it seems to me like that would be the sort of thing that you would want to get out of your own database, and not pass around some other way. After all, it's fairly likely that you are going to know how much the items you are selling cost.
What amazes me is that someone almost certainly paid money for that shopping cart. And commercial software vendors wonder why Free Software is doing so well nowadays.
I also have been tinkering with PostgreSQL since it was Postgres95, and I couldn't agree more. If you haven't checked out PostgreSQL for a while you owe it to yourself to download the newest 7.1 betas and try it out. PostgreSQL has gotten a lot faster. In fact, unless your application is extremely select heavy PostgreSQL will almost certainly give MySQL a run for it's money.
It also has a great many of the nifty features that make the commercial databases so expensive, and the mailing lists are amazingly helpful. It certainly doesn't hurt to give it a try.
Let's imagine that I just spent the money and rolled OpenMail over my entire enterprise. Now, HP tells me that they have discontinued development of the product, and they are only going to support it for five more years. Basically they have just guaranteed that the time and effort that I spent migrating to OpenMail was wasted, and I now have to do the same thing again.
This is a bad thing.
Now, granted five years is plenty of time to make the move. But it's still time and effort that could have spent on something else. Having to switch because HP didn't want to support their software going forward wouldn't make me more inclined to buy from HP in the future. Basically, HP has proven that their software is not a safe bet.
While patches and support for a product are certainly better than nothing, I am sure that you will agree that OpenMail clients probably were hoping for a great deal more than this.
And now HP has loyal customers looking for alternatives. In many cases this probably means alternatives for the operating system running their OpenMail servers as well.
Instead of turning these loyal customers out in the street HP could make several of them even more loyal customers by releasing the source code. What do they have to lose?
I know that if I just spent time and effort migrating from some other groupware product to OpenMail, I would be ticked. Saying that IBM is worse doesn't really help matters. Especially since hardware and software are two entirely different creatures. If a hardware platform gets cancelled you simply move your project to another platform and type 'make.' Hopefully you didn't use too many extensions that were hardware specific.
Software, especially something as fundamental as your groupware software, is entirely different. Lots of people have almost certainly built their businesses around OpenMail, and have added on stuff to make it fit their particular needs. Now they get to start over from scratch. Sure, HP has at least warned their users, but that doesn't make the reality any less daunting. Thanks to HP they now have the privilege of migrating their email (one of their computer systems most vital functions) to some other platform. Any customization projects that they have going right now need to be stopped "pronto," and they need to find another product that is comparable (and some way to migrate all their information to the new platform).
If it was me, I would give Sun a call and find out what it would take to move the whole kit and caboodle to Solaris.
Clearly it is one of the best things that HP could do, but there are lots of better things:
1) They could continue to develop the product (duh).
2) They could sell (or even give) OpenMail to another company that is willing to continue development. This washes HP's hands of OpenMail, but it doesn't leave customers high and dry.
3) They could release the source code. Most customers would still be annoyed by this decision. After all, they didn't sign up for source code, they signed up for continued product development from HP. However, this would be much better than just telling their customers that they have five years to migrate from OpenMail (good luck).
I think that it is safe to say that publicly discontinuing products never builds trust. All this type of action says is that you are more than willing to discontinue products. While this is better than privately discontinuing a product, it certainly isn't anything like what the consumer had in mind when he purchased the product. If a software vendor had a history of such announcements I would be very concerned.
There are several reasons why a hardware company like HP might want to open source a software product when it has reached the point where it is no longer generating revenue. The most obvious reason that they might want to do this is discontinuing support for a product upsets your customers. I imagine there are a whole pile of HP customers right now that are vowing to never trust HP again. After all, they have poured time, effort, and money into implementing HP's software product and now HP is announcing plans to leave them high and dry. I imagine that if I was in their shoes I would take a serious look migrating completely away from HP. I almost certainly would at least give the Sun salesman who has been pestering me a call and see what Sun could do for me.
Sure, it's hard to let go of source code that has you have spent so much money on over the years, but don't overlook the fact that HP has almost certainly made money on OpenMail over all of those years. Opening the source code would allow them to cut down costs associated with the ongoing maintenance of the code, while still allowing them to leverage the code to sell hardware and support. They could easily turn it into a selling point for HPUX (now with a free unlimited license for OpenMail).
Of course, if HP could find a buyer for OpenMail that would probably be better. The customers wouldn't be completely stranded (although the would probably still resent HP for ditching them), and it might make them some money. But if not, then they should seriously consider opening the source code. After all, what does it hurt them to do so? They aren't going to be using that code, and they don't have another email suite that competes with it.
I am not one bit interested in giving the ad-men any more information about myself than absolutely necessary. And I certainly am not interested in "rating" advertisements. If I am interested in an advertisement I click on it, if I am not, I don't.
Slashdot is actually a good example of how this can work correctly. I find that many of the ads here on /. are quire interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I have on occassion actually clicked on their advertising link to find one of their sponsors. Slashdot may not get the amount of raw views that Yahoo! does, but it is fairly easy to guess what the denizens of /. are going to be interested in.
The LDS church believes that the family is ordained of God, and that the roles of husband and wife are designed of God for our benefit. To them the idea of the nuclear family is a pretty big deal.
Currently US law recognizes such a union as special. Can you blame people that hold the term "marriage" as sacred from defending it from being co-opted by people who would change it to mean something else entirely? The LDS Church has every right in the world to use its resources to protect those laws that it sees as important. Just like you have every right to use your resources to overturn those laws that you feel are not right.
That's just part of living in a representative democracy.
Hrmmm... It seems that there might be one or two Mormons in the state of Utah. In fact, apparently 70% of the population of that state is Mormon (with a great many of them abstaining from alcohol). I imagine that even if they appointed people to the State Liquor Commission out of a random sampling of the population it would be made up of primarily non-drinking Mormons.
Somehow it was still possible to get a drink in Utah last time I passed through. This might possibly be because most Mormons (the wacky few aside) believe that people should be able to decide for themselves what to do with their lives.
Wow, imagine a country in which people are allowed to sell and purchase property at will! What an amazingly subversive idea! The LDS church has a big fat pile of money, I imagine that when they want to buy something, they can come up with the cash. Not too mention the fact that they probably own most of downtown Salt Lake City outright anyhow. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if most of the property near Temple Square was leased from the church. I imagine you would rather there were separate rules for property belonging to the Mormon church and its members. That would certainly clear up problems with them purchasing important parts of Salt Lake City and turning them into parks.
The reason that they can specify conduct on their "park" is that it is their own private property. Just because I plant grass on my front lawn doesn't mean you can come over and play soccer there.
I would certainly agree that Utah's unique culture takes more than a little getting used to (I don't live there anymore, nor am I inclined to move back), but saying that there is no separation of church and state is simply ridiculous.
First of all, Nick is currently employed by Caldera (which isn't Debian based), so it isn't necessarily a question of him asking to standardize on what he has chosen. It's actually a pretty brave stance.
But Nick isn't really arguing that for the universal acceptance of Debian Linux. What Nick is essentially doing is arguing for a "binary" Linux Standard Base. This has been a fairly constant theme since before the LSB was even born. He contends that unless there is an installable distribution against which commercial software developers can build and test their software there will continue to be problems for Linux distributors and Linuxers in general.
Debian Linux provides a perfect base on which to standardize. All of it's software is freely redistributable, and it is technically an excellent distribution. More importantly, it isn't a commercial institution itself, and therefore it makes sense as a "common ground."
The other choice that makes sense (IMHO) is RedHat. RedHat Linux is also useable in it's freely redistributable form (there are no proprietary pieces that are absolutely necessary), and it already has quite a bit of market share. In fact, to my mind Nick's article is simply pointing out to the non-RedHat distributors their one and only chance of checking RedHat from becoming the standard. The other commercial Linux distributors are not very likely to want RedHat Linux accepted as the binary standard for Linux (they already have enough problems with it being the de-facto binary standard). If all of the non-RedHat distributions threw their weight behind Debian as the binary standard then RedHat would maybe be force to follow their lead.
Otherwise the rest of the Linux distributions are probably all in for a very long trip off a very short pier.
While I certainly wish that Emacs were a little leaner, I am not about to give up any of it's features (well, at least any of the ones *I* use), nor am I willing to give up it's flexibility.
Besides, it's not that bad. Heck, it's not half as bad as Mozilla (or Visual Studio for that matter). And the fact that I can use basically start it once and use it as a "daemon" for ages is sort of cool, it's not like it is prone to crashing.
Every once in a while I dust off gvim and give it a whirl as a programming environment, and I find it an impressive piece of work, but once you have gotten used to running your whole life from inside of Emacs, even gvim is pretty spartan.
Yes, and the US Government does so much better. If they keep it they will undoubtedly invest it in a $400 claw hammer or a $500 toilet seat.
If you aren't smart enough to keep your own money out of goofy investments, then that is your problem, not mine. I want my money back!