"What if the invention is a flop" In this case the entire patent process is inconsequential and not needed. Who would try to patent a proven failure? The businesses also assume an amount of risk when they fund R&D efforts. Profitable results from R&D are never guaranteed.
"Patents have never been a promise to the inventor that he will recover his expenses, or turn a profit" Patents provide the incentive to continue funding R&D. If you spend a lot of money to develop a profitable technology knowing that it can be immediately used by your competitors, basically providing others with the results of your efforts, it would decrease the amount of money a company is willing to commit to R&D efforts from a pure profit/loss perspective.
What acts of war were committed? The people killed trying to run the legal blockade were egged on by Turkey. The people killed by Israel in their response to a border attack which killed Israeli citizens was organised and carried out in Egyptian territory. Nobody every seems to mention the fact that those who attacked Israel also killed a couple of Egyptian police men and used thier uniforms as part of their strategy to enter Israeli territory. After the initial knee jerk response from the Egyptian government to satisfy the mob they backed away from further complaints unusually fast. Can't have any inconvenient facts messing up the protesting masses. You have madman in Syria methodically going city to city killing anyone who disagrees with their government policies and the Israeli critics and peace protesters seem to have no problem with that. Turkey killed 140 Kurds 2 weeks ago during an air strike in Iraqi territory and I have not seen anyone condemning this breech of sovereignty or mentioning the breakdown of the number of civilian versus combatant deaths in the attack. Anytime the US or Israel executes a military attack the first thing mentioned is how many civilians were hurt. Apparently Turkey has some advanced tech in their US made F-16's that can clearly identify combatants and civilians from 8000 feet.
"criminal and inhumane state" This accurately describes every middle eastern country that has been trying to remove the Jews for the past 70+ years. Since their military efforts showed that they could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag they switched strategies by abandoning those who where living in the sovereign territories that Jordan and Egypt controlled leaving them stateless. A small sacrifice to make sure Israel has to deal with all the problems. If the Palestinians are really suffering as much as people claim why has Egypt, Jordon, Lebanon, or Syria never allowed the Palestinians to settle in their lands? Why have all the Arab countries not kept their promise of providing financial aid? Of course they would never do this because it would mean putting an end to their relentless harassment of Israel. The Arabs are only using the Palestinians as a tool to provoke Israel into violent confrontations that result in Palestinian casualties so they can loudly proclaim to the world about the evils of Israel. They don't give a shit about the people being killed they just want feed their propaganda machines. Anti-US and anti-Israel rhetoric is the only issue that the entire Arab world can agree with and their politicians take full advantage of this to distract the masses and keep them from looking at their own government corruption and incompetence.
Adding the amount of time and money that was required to develop a patent should be added as an qualifying factor in the patent approval process. If a company spent millions of dollars creating a new medicine the length of the patent protection should at least be long enough to recover those expenses. The patents awarded in the software environment should require the patent owner to actually implement the patent themselves instead of just using the patent to shakedown those who use the patented idea. Shutting down companies whose sole business model is based on purchasing patents from others to shakedown the people using the patented idea should also be done. And the people making the decisions on whether to grant a patent should be required to include independent subject matter experts in the decision process. The current patent process appears to only require filling out the correct forms.
I found my trip to China very enlightening when it came to interacting with the actual citizens. The people I encountered during my 3 week stay were friendly and showed no disdain or animosity towards me even when they found out I was from the US. Granted there are billions of Chinese citizens so my experiences do not carry much weight but I enjoyed the visit. I encountered the exact opposite experience when I was in France, England, and Germany. The people I met there were quite eager to point out all of the US faults. Once I explained I wasn't the one running things in the US and kindly told them to shut the fuck up before I demonstrated the stereotypical American propensity towards using violence to settle any disagreements they seemed to warm up considerably.
This successes this group claim have relied on sloppy system admin and equally sloppy security patching. Their SQL injection attacks, which are old news, are mostly caused by lazy developers. These guys use tools built by others and exploit weaknesses that have been public for a while. The initial Sony hack exploited an Apache flaw that had been patched for more than a year. These guys are not script kiddies but they are not far from it. O-day exploits, self modifying bot-nets, and attacks like Stuxnext are on a whole different level.
Ah! You must be Mr. Super Programmer! The "ability to fix it yourself" has always been one of the least important reasons to support the open source licensing model. The most important benefits have been reducing your problems if your closed source vendor goes out of business leaving you with an unsupported and stagnant application. Open source has also provided a large code base that developers are free to access and use in their own projects. There are a lot more developers who take advantage of this resource for their work but do not contribute their changes back into the community source pool unless absolutely required to by the license type. A lot of developers have no problems with using open sourced code to build applications that are only used internally. There is simply not a lot of non-IT businesses staffed with developers capable of modifying open sourced operating systems, modifying or creating hardware level interfaces, or understanding let alone enhance complex systems like browsers. The most prominent open source systems such as Linux and FireFox use full time dedicated developers working for companies who leverage those systems in their business models. Your average small, medium, or large business developers just use these systems as part of their application stack. They have plenty of sharp application developers and even developers capable of programming at the system level instead of relying solely on framework run times like Java or.NET. to handle the low level abstracted system functionality. Developers capable of realistically and economically able to modify operating systems are rare. Once upon a time C/C++ and Assembly code expertise was a standard requirement in normal business i any type of application development but the bulk of new developers today capable of programming at that level is shrinking. Scripting languages, pre-built frameworks, and client side web programming skills have replaced the need for low level programming skills.
The percentage of programmers capable of fixing the problems like this themselves is minuscule. Same thing applies to any major open source applications such as browsers. Identifying the flaw, fixing the flaw, and performing regression testing to make sure you have not introduced new problems requires an expert skill set that is quite different than the skill set needed to develop web and console user applications.The easy fixes have been done but the remaining bugs are causing the people who work on these applications full time difficulties.
You don't get out of the house very often do you? Some developers actually have to produce working applications that sometimes require a GUI instead of a command line. If you are smart enough to know all the methods,events, and properties of a particular platform and related API's than by all means use Notepad.
There is plenty of Science fiction refuting your statement about humans always being portrayed as the best balanced species. Chances are any exterrestrial capable of reaching earth would most likely ignore us as primitive savages and continue thier explorations else where in their search for intelligent life.
There is not a single video game capable of displaying the true horrors in war. The vast majority of those who blithely speak of the horrors in war have never experienced the reality. And no one should be the least surprised that civilians get injured and killed in war. Destruction and death is the purpose of waging a war and no one is immune to the violence.
The US government can slap tariffs on Chinese imports anytime they feel like it. If China makes any aggressive moves either militarily or economically you can count on it. I never said China did not have non-US markets I said the US represents a sizable portion of theirs. They are facing rising competition from other countries such as Vietnam and India who are able to compete with China on low labor costs. Also as labor costs rise around the world the US has began to see some manufacturing jobs returning to the states because the price advantages corporate PR problems. China has also increased food imports from the US by a factor of 5 over the past 6 years, recorded their first trade deficits in over 15 years, and are struggling with inflation which is raising the cost of their exports faster than their government can correct by artificially manipulating their currency. All this talk of "Power" is 100% BS. People exaggerate a countries "Power" when it suits them. The US or China are not the overlords of creation in the world. It's convenient for most of the world to exaggerate US power so they can have someone to blame for their own incompetence. The US economy is going through a rough patch but it is nothing that has not occurred in the past and the world economy is cyclical in nature if you actually study history.
The US can torpedo the Chinese economy anytime they want. The US represents 30% of China's export market. Sure it would cause short term damage to the US economy but the US imports nothing from China that can not be obtained from somewhere else or produced domestically. And before anyone mentions China "owning" the US because of their bond and security investments should realize that those ownership claims are vastly exaggerated and losing those investments would damage China more than the US. Chinese and American interests are best served by maintaining stable relationships. I have visited a lot of countries and I was surprised by the Chinese society when I traveled there. I found the people friendly and even though they do have to put up with government restrictions in some areas I did not encounter any overt Chinese repression.
They did release Level DB under a BSD license but it only uses the same basic non-sql database principles and methodologies but it does not contain the same Google functionality or capabilities that they actually use.
This story is not supported by any verifiable facts but of course the lack of verifiable facts has become the norm in today's golden global information age. Iran has claimed downing multiple drones and repeatedly promised to produce proof but for some reason never has. This incident supposedly happened over 4 months ago during war games with the S Korean forces so why is it just now being revealed?
Linux enjoys more than SOME corporate backing. Look at the shear number of web servers and all of the Linux derived operating systems currently being used in the mobile device market and you will see quite a few big corporations supporting the platform even if they don't distribute their applications or make their changes available to the OS community. Your little guy labor of love argument disappeared about 10 years ago.
Google is an advertising and marketing company who create technology advances to support their primary business model. And they do not open source or share any specifics relating to the key technologies that actually give them an edge over their competition. Things like their database technology, specialized OS kernels, and custom CPU chip designs.
I have not noticed any democrats making a serious effort to attack corporations. They get their political funding the same way the republicans do. Corporations learned a long time ago that funding all the political parties allows them to get support no matter who wins the elections.
The Leftist, Progressive, and all other parties use the exact same propaganda strategies to support their causes. The Internet is a propagandists paradise which allows the dissemination of pure bullshit at light speed. Also people seem to have a hard time separating the news outlets editorial lines and the facts being used to create the editorial lines. If people spent more time studying the actual facts instead of focusing all of their attention on commentaries and "expert" opinions they could come to their own conclusions. As it is nobody ever debates the facts anymore they only debate the different opinions from an "us versus them" prospective. And while this happens the actual facts get lost in the background noise.
I got the information from an interview with the Israeli tank commander in the battle and it was a night time attack so he wasn't standing up looking out the hatch for approaching enemies. . At the time night time attacks were considered impractical because you couldn't be sure you were aiming at the enemy or your own forces.The Israelis suffered a catastrophic intelligence failure and the attack took them completely by surprise. The Israelis had night vision binoculars but they were not tied into the weapons systems in the tanks and were useless to the tank driver and gunners. The Syrians had Soviet supplied integrated night time vision systems their tanks and had a great advantage over the Israelis. The Soviets were famous for deploying their most modern weapon systems to their allies to see how they fared in a real war. They also supplied Egypt with advanced SAM technology and Sanger guided wire anti-tank weapons. The Russians used the same tactic in Spain before WW2 to see how their war tech matched up against the tech supplied to Spain by the Germans, The Arabs had all of the advantages in the 1973 war and by all accounts they should have won or at least gained some territory but instead they lost and forfeited more territory to Israel in the end. The US was not supplying Israel with advanced weapon systems when the 1973 war started, they only re-supplied the Israelis with airplanes and ammunition after the fighting had already been in progress for days. The Arabs lost because of their military incompetence. They halted their attack on the Golan Heights and they did not re-position their SAM sites as their ground troops advanced out of the coverage area. The Arab loses in 67 and 73 are the primary reasons for the animosity that exists today.
"Nobody wants to, "stick it to the man", people don't want to promote open source (or the GPL) to support a "cause" or "movement".
Is this the first time you have looked at the posts on slashdot and any other tech related websites? A vast majority of open source discussions are not about the technology it is about people advocating open source as way to attack MS or other proprietary vendors.
"Considering that the government hardly ever distributes software this is pure FUD"
This is just just one example out of the thousands of companies who do distribute software and must satisfy the licensing agreements. The GPL and BSD licenses have not prevented Oracle, Google, and other large companies from challenging these requirements in court. And your definition of "restrictions" might not be the same as those challenging the license in court. And it is usually the definitions in these licenses that form the base of of the challenges in court. I am NOT arguing against using Open Source I just feel that there are a lot of factors involved in transitioning from proprietary to open source. Developers, even good ones, are only human and if they include GPL protected code in their distributed products either on purpose or by accident it can put the company at risk.
I am not arguing that only transitioning from a proprietary closed source platform to an open source platform is difficult. Transitioning any system from one platform to another presents difficulties and challenges across the board. I was just commenting on those that evangelize open source as the savior of IT without considering the entire picture of what is involved in attempting such a large change. A lot of developers have made the open source/propriety source argument into an "us versus them" conflict with an emphasis on praising any action as long as it harms MS or any other large software vendor. That type of argument will not automatically ensure success and can end up creating problems. As an example I built a Windows application for the banking industry but after a few years our sales people had encountered existing and potential customers who liked the system functionality but wanted to transition from a MS based architecture to an open source based architecture using the Linux/Apache/MySQL stack. I created a new version of the application using this application stack and we had around 8 existing customers wanting to deploy this version. With that immediate demand I thought the development costs to build another version was justified and well worth the effort because of this trend. However, after deploying the application we had 6 out of our 8 customers contact us asking us to transition them back to the MS stack because their system overall system conversion failed. They encountered several critical applications that when replaced with Open Source equivalents did not even come close to meeting the basic functionality requirements. They wasted large sums of money in the conversion process but in the end gained no return on their investment and efforts. It turned out that the non-IT management of these companies relied on the the development group which included a lot of gung ho developers who justified their recommendations not on the functionality but on the fact they could save money by eliminating the cost of MS software licensing. Their tunnel vision in this particular case created expectations that in the end were never fulfilled. The technology was not the problem. With enough time and money they probably could have achieved their goal but there are limits on a companies ability fund and sustain an effort that in the end only provides a replacement system of a all ready functioning system.
The Israelis stopped a Syrian tank night attack by using the night vision binoculars to identify the infrared targeting lasers the Syrians were using at the time (the was accidentally discovered by an Israeli tank commander who opened his hatch to take a smoke break and play around with their night vision binoculars). The Syrians also had the most advanced night vision systems in their tanks at the time thanks to the USSR. The Israelis at the time were outnumbered 6 to 1 in tanks and were still able to slow down the attack to reinforcements got there 12 hours later. I am pretty sure the binoculars were a hell of a lot cheaper than the systems the Syrians were using at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
"What if the invention is a flop" In this case the entire patent process is inconsequential and not needed. Who would try to patent a proven failure? The businesses also assume an amount of risk when they fund R&D efforts. Profitable results from R&D are never guaranteed. "Patents have never been a promise to the inventor that he will recover his expenses, or turn a profit" Patents provide the incentive to continue funding R&D. If you spend a lot of money to develop a profitable technology knowing that it can be immediately used by your competitors, basically providing others with the results of your efforts, it would decrease the amount of money a company is willing to commit to R&D efforts from a pure profit/loss perspective.
What acts of war were committed? The people killed trying to run the legal blockade were egged on by Turkey. The people killed by Israel in their response to a border attack which killed Israeli citizens was organised and carried out in Egyptian territory. Nobody every seems to mention the fact that those who attacked Israel also killed a couple of Egyptian police men and used thier uniforms as part of their strategy to enter Israeli territory. After the initial knee jerk response from the Egyptian government to satisfy the mob they backed away from further complaints unusually fast. Can't have any inconvenient facts messing up the protesting masses. You have madman in Syria methodically going city to city killing anyone who disagrees with their government policies and the Israeli critics and peace protesters seem to have no problem with that. Turkey killed 140 Kurds 2 weeks ago during an air strike in Iraqi territory and I have not seen anyone condemning this breech of sovereignty or mentioning the breakdown of the number of civilian versus combatant deaths in the attack. Anytime the US or Israel executes a military attack the first thing mentioned is how many civilians were hurt. Apparently Turkey has some advanced tech in their US made F-16's that can clearly identify combatants and civilians from 8000 feet.
Does the world really need another failed Arab state to deal with?
"criminal and inhumane state" This accurately describes every middle eastern country that has been trying to remove the Jews for the past 70+ years. Since their military efforts showed that they could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag they switched strategies by abandoning those who where living in the sovereign territories that Jordan and Egypt controlled leaving them stateless. A small sacrifice to make sure Israel has to deal with all the problems. If the Palestinians are really suffering as much as people claim why has Egypt, Jordon, Lebanon, or Syria never allowed the Palestinians to settle in their lands? Why have all the Arab countries not kept their promise of providing financial aid? Of course they would never do this because it would mean putting an end to their relentless harassment of Israel. The Arabs are only using the Palestinians as a tool to provoke Israel into violent confrontations that result in Palestinian casualties so they can loudly proclaim to the world about the evils of Israel. They don't give a shit about the people being killed they just want feed their propaganda machines. Anti-US and anti-Israel rhetoric is the only issue that the entire Arab world can agree with and their politicians take full advantage of this to distract the masses and keep them from looking at their own government corruption and incompetence.
Adding the amount of time and money that was required to develop a patent should be added as an qualifying factor in the patent approval process. If a company spent millions of dollars creating a new medicine the length of the patent protection should at least be long enough to recover those expenses. The patents awarded in the software environment should require the patent owner to actually implement the patent themselves instead of just using the patent to shakedown those who use the patented idea. Shutting down companies whose sole business model is based on purchasing patents from others to shakedown the people using the patented idea should also be done. And the people making the decisions on whether to grant a patent should be required to include independent subject matter experts in the decision process. The current patent process appears to only require filling out the correct forms.
I found my trip to China very enlightening when it came to interacting with the actual citizens. The people I encountered during my 3 week stay were friendly and showed no disdain or animosity towards me even when they found out I was from the US. Granted there are billions of Chinese citizens so my experiences do not carry much weight but I enjoyed the visit. I encountered the exact opposite experience when I was in France, England, and Germany. The people I met there were quite eager to point out all of the US faults. Once I explained I wasn't the one running things in the US and kindly told them to shut the fuck up before I demonstrated the stereotypical American propensity towards using violence to settle any disagreements they seemed to warm up considerably.
This successes this group claim have relied on sloppy system admin and equally sloppy security patching. Their SQL injection attacks, which are old news, are mostly caused by lazy developers. These guys use tools built by others and exploit weaknesses that have been public for a while. The initial Sony hack exploited an Apache flaw that had been patched for more than a year. These guys are not script kiddies but they are not far from it. O-day exploits, self modifying bot-nets, and attacks like Stuxnext are on a whole different level.
Ah! You must be Mr. Super Programmer! The "ability to fix it yourself" has always been one of the least important reasons to support the open source licensing model. The most important benefits have been reducing your problems if your closed source vendor goes out of business leaving you with an unsupported and stagnant application. Open source has also provided a large code base that developers are free to access and use in their own projects. There are a lot more developers who take advantage of this resource for their work but do not contribute their changes back into the community source pool unless absolutely required to by the license type. A lot of developers have no problems with using open sourced code to build applications that are only used internally. There is simply not a lot of non-IT businesses staffed with developers capable of modifying open sourced operating systems, modifying or creating hardware level interfaces, or understanding let alone enhance complex systems like browsers. The most prominent open source systems such as Linux and FireFox use full time dedicated developers working for companies who leverage those systems in their business models. Your average small, medium, or large business developers just use these systems as part of their application stack. They have plenty of sharp application developers and even developers capable of programming at the system level instead of relying solely on framework run times like Java or .NET. to handle the low level abstracted system functionality. Developers capable of realistically and economically able to modify operating systems are rare. Once upon a time C/C++ and Assembly code expertise was a standard requirement in normal business i any type of application development but the bulk of new developers today capable of programming at that level is shrinking. Scripting languages, pre-built frameworks, and client side web programming skills have replaced the need for low level programming skills.
The percentage of programmers capable of fixing the problems like this themselves is minuscule. Same thing applies to any major open source applications such as browsers. Identifying the flaw, fixing the flaw, and performing regression testing to make sure you have not introduced new problems requires an expert skill set that is quite different than the skill set needed to develop web and console user applications.The easy fixes have been done but the remaining bugs are causing the people who work on these applications full time difficulties.
You don't get out of the house very often do you? Some developers actually have to produce working applications that sometimes require a GUI instead of a command line. If you are smart enough to know all the methods,events, and properties of a particular platform and related API's than by all means use Notepad.
There is plenty of Science fiction refuting your statement about humans always being portrayed as the best balanced species. Chances are any exterrestrial capable of reaching earth would most likely ignore us as primitive savages and continue thier explorations else where in their search for intelligent life.
There is not a single video game capable of displaying the true horrors in war. The vast majority of those who blithely speak of the horrors in war have never experienced the reality. And no one should be the least surprised that civilians get injured and killed in war. Destruction and death is the purpose of waging a war and no one is immune to the violence.
The US government can slap tariffs on Chinese imports anytime they feel like it. If China makes any aggressive moves either militarily or economically you can count on it. I never said China did not have non-US markets I said the US represents a sizable portion of theirs. They are facing rising competition from other countries such as Vietnam and India who are able to compete with China on low labor costs. Also as labor costs rise around the world the US has began to see some manufacturing jobs returning to the states because the price advantages corporate PR problems. China has also increased food imports from the US by a factor of 5 over the past 6 years, recorded their first trade deficits in over 15 years, and are struggling with inflation which is raising the cost of their exports faster than their government can correct by artificially manipulating their currency. All this talk of "Power" is 100% BS. People exaggerate a countries "Power" when it suits them. The US or China are not the overlords of creation in the world. It's convenient for most of the world to exaggerate US power so they can have someone to blame for their own incompetence. The US economy is going through a rough patch but it is nothing that has not occurred in the past and the world economy is cyclical in nature if you actually study history.
The US can torpedo the Chinese economy anytime they want. The US represents 30% of China's export market. Sure it would cause short term damage to the US economy but the US imports nothing from China that can not be obtained from somewhere else or produced domestically. And before anyone mentions China "owning" the US because of their bond and security investments should realize that those ownership claims are vastly exaggerated and losing those investments would damage China more than the US. Chinese and American interests are best served by maintaining stable relationships. I have visited a lot of countries and I was surprised by the Chinese society when I traveled there. I found the people friendly and even though they do have to put up with government restrictions in some areas I did not encounter any overt Chinese repression.
They did release Level DB under a BSD license but it only uses the same basic non-sql database principles and methodologies but it does not contain the same Google functionality or capabilities that they actually use.
This story is not supported by any verifiable facts but of course the lack of verifiable facts has become the norm in today's golden global information age. Iran has claimed downing multiple drones and repeatedly promised to produce proof but for some reason never has. This incident supposedly happened over 4 months ago during war games with the S Korean forces so why is it just now being revealed?
Linux enjoys more than SOME corporate backing. Look at the shear number of web servers and all of the Linux derived operating systems currently being used in the mobile device market and you will see quite a few big corporations supporting the platform even if they don't distribute their applications or make their changes available to the OS community. Your little guy labor of love argument disappeared about 10 years ago.
Google is an advertising and marketing company who create technology advances to support their primary business model. And they do not open source or share any specifics relating to the key technologies that actually give them an edge over their competition. Things like their database technology, specialized OS kernels, and custom CPU chip designs.
I have not noticed any democrats making a serious effort to attack corporations. They get their political funding the same way the republicans do. Corporations learned a long time ago that funding all the political parties allows them to get support no matter who wins the elections.
The Leftist, Progressive, and all other parties use the exact same propaganda strategies to support their causes. The Internet is a propagandists paradise which allows the dissemination of pure bullshit at light speed. Also people seem to have a hard time separating the news outlets editorial lines and the facts being used to create the editorial lines. If people spent more time studying the actual facts instead of focusing all of their attention on commentaries and "expert" opinions they could come to their own conclusions. As it is nobody ever debates the facts anymore they only debate the different opinions from an "us versus them" prospective. And while this happens the actual facts get lost in the background noise.
I got the information from an interview with the Israeli tank commander in the battle and it was a night time attack so he wasn't standing up looking out the hatch for approaching enemies. . At the time night time attacks were considered impractical because you couldn't be sure you were aiming at the enemy or your own forces.The Israelis suffered a catastrophic intelligence failure and the attack took them completely by surprise. The Israelis had night vision binoculars but they were not tied into the weapons systems in the tanks and were useless to the tank driver and gunners. The Syrians had Soviet supplied integrated night time vision systems their tanks and had a great advantage over the Israelis. The Soviets were famous for deploying their most modern weapon systems to their allies to see how they fared in a real war. They also supplied Egypt with advanced SAM technology and Sanger guided wire anti-tank weapons. The Russians used the same tactic in Spain before WW2 to see how their war tech matched up against the tech supplied to Spain by the Germans, The Arabs had all of the advantages in the 1973 war and by all accounts they should have won or at least gained some territory but instead they lost and forfeited more territory to Israel in the end. The US was not supplying Israel with advanced weapon systems when the 1973 war started, they only re-supplied the Israelis with airplanes and ammunition after the fighting had already been in progress for days. The Arabs lost because of their military incompetence. They halted their attack on the Golan Heights and they did not re-position their SAM sites as their ground troops advanced out of the coverage area. The Arab loses in 67 and 73 are the primary reasons for the animosity that exists today.
"Nobody wants to, "stick it to the man", people don't want to promote open source (or the GPL) to support a "cause" or "movement". Is this the first time you have looked at the posts on slashdot and any other tech related websites? A vast majority of open source discussions are not about the technology it is about people advocating open source as way to attack MS or other proprietary vendors.
"Considering that the government hardly ever distributes software this is pure FUD" This is just just one example out of the thousands of companies who do distribute software and must satisfy the licensing agreements. The GPL and BSD licenses have not prevented Oracle, Google, and other large companies from challenging these requirements in court. And your definition of "restrictions" might not be the same as those challenging the license in court. And it is usually the definitions in these licenses that form the base of of the challenges in court. I am NOT arguing against using Open Source I just feel that there are a lot of factors involved in transitioning from proprietary to open source. Developers, even good ones, are only human and if they include GPL protected code in their distributed products either on purpose or by accident it can put the company at risk.
I am not arguing that only transitioning from a proprietary closed source platform to an open source platform is difficult. Transitioning any system from one platform to another presents difficulties and challenges across the board. I was just commenting on those that evangelize open source as the savior of IT without considering the entire picture of what is involved in attempting such a large change. A lot of developers have made the open source/propriety source argument into an "us versus them" conflict with an emphasis on praising any action as long as it harms MS or any other large software vendor. That type of argument will not automatically ensure success and can end up creating problems. As an example I built a Windows application for the banking industry but after a few years our sales people had encountered existing and potential customers who liked the system functionality but wanted to transition from a MS based architecture to an open source based architecture using the Linux/Apache/MySQL stack. I created a new version of the application using this application stack and we had around 8 existing customers wanting to deploy this version. With that immediate demand I thought the development costs to build another version was justified and well worth the effort because of this trend. However, after deploying the application we had 6 out of our 8 customers contact us asking us to transition them back to the MS stack because their system overall system conversion failed. They encountered several critical applications that when replaced with Open Source equivalents did not even come close to meeting the basic functionality requirements. They wasted large sums of money in the conversion process but in the end gained no return on their investment and efforts. It turned out that the non-IT management of these companies relied on the the development group which included a lot of gung ho developers who justified their recommendations not on the functionality but on the fact they could save money by eliminating the cost of MS software licensing. Their tunnel vision in this particular case created expectations that in the end were never fulfilled. The technology was not the problem. With enough time and money they probably could have achieved their goal but there are limits on a companies ability fund and sustain an effort that in the end only provides a replacement system of a all ready functioning system.
The Israelis stopped a Syrian tank night attack by using the night vision binoculars to identify the infrared targeting lasers the Syrians were using at the time (the was accidentally discovered by an Israeli tank commander who opened his hatch to take a smoke break and play around with their night vision binoculars). The Syrians also had the most advanced night vision systems in their tanks at the time thanks to the USSR. The Israelis at the time were outnumbered 6 to 1 in tanks and were still able to slow down the attack to reinforcements got there 12 hours later. I am pretty sure the binoculars were a hell of a lot cheaper than the systems the Syrians were using at the time.