A few comments... The most noticible and glaring issue is the "independant study" was (surprise, surprise) commissioned by Great Bridge, and great bridge's reason for existance is to sell support and services for postgres. Not the strongest indicator of impartiality. The entire press release is designed to sell postgres, not to provide a fair comparison.
Issue two. They compared the bleeding edge postgres (7.0) with the old-as-heck mysql (3.22) - they're now up to revision *22* of the development series for mysql - that's a pretty huge amount of changes. I would have been much more impressed with this if they had ran the comparison between 3.23.22 and 7.0. As with everything, folks, don't believe benchmarks, especially ones in press releases. Believe real-world tests. I've used both, and I'm using MySQL 3.23.22 for my site.
a classic - I'm amazed you haven't mentioned it or Akira. I just wateched the DVD and it was really awe-inspiring to see what they could do 5 years ago - really revolutionary stuff. Anyone who's even a vague fan should check it out.
UCLALUG (http://www.linux.ucla.edu/) created their own distro, also. It's called Bruin Linux (for obvious reasons), and is basically Redhat + bug fixes, security advisories, and some development tools. It's also got UCLA networking stuff pre-configured. I think this is a great idea for users of big organizations where pre-configuring network stuff or custom apps is really helpful. UCLALUG also uses the distro for their install-fests - they've had a lot of sucess in that, and having everything in one easy ISO makes the install-fest a lot easier. I applaud their efforts, as they should be congratulated for what they've done. (You can find Bruin Linux here)
This is very disappointing... Basically, this is a case of this one person, "Fare", wanting some publicity. Why didn't Roblimo read the thread? The entire "discussion" about the "hole" was started by "Fare" in the first place, with a leading question for RMS. RMS replies "Sure, that sounds about right", and then "Fare" goes into a tirade about how this means the GPL is worthless. RMS's response? "Um. Not really."
One of the main participants? He is *the* participant! Seriously, slashdot editors need to email RMS or other gnu people before posting stuff like this. Getting people all worked up because joe random decides that the GPL is worthless is a waste of our collective eyeball time.
The rest of it is meaningless. Since an economy is a closed system, you say it may be beneficial to pirate software since your money stays in your wallet for other uses. So by that rationale, even if you stole stuff it is fine, since the $ stay in your wallet and are used productively elsewhere.
There's a very big difference between "piracy" of intellectual goods, and stealing physical goods... Comparing the two is apples and oranges, the route you took to "prove" me wrong. There is a fixed cost associated with producing a physical good. If I go steal a candy bar in a store and eat it, it absolutely costs the manufacturer (well, really the store owner probably, but still) whatever amount of money it took to create the candy bar in the first place. For intellectual property, like software or music, if I go and "pirate" a copy of MS office, it costs microsoft *absolutely nothing*. There's a theoretical profit loss, but there's no corresponding fixed cost that's being lost because the original investment money to create MS office is a sunk cost - it has no bearing on the profit/loss of each sale. Hence my points about software piracy not being quite the scourage on society that the software companies make it out to be.
Hijacking a truck with 5000 msoffice boxes in it, then reselling them at a computer swap sale is bad. Period. You're stealing a physical box + cd that cost microsoft $3.50 to make. This is called stealing. Putting up MSOffice on an FTP warez site is not the same thing at all, even if you charged people five bucks to access the site. Every downloaded copy is not a loss to microsoft... it's a *potential* loss, yes, but the whole point of my argument was that the potential is much smaller than the software companies would have you believe.
It's stuff like this that results in slashdotters being called crackpots. Here, let's think about the positive aspects of sneaking in and watching movies for free, or shoplifting magazines - if you like the product, it creates awareness of it and makes you likely to buy more of it! Woo hoo!
First, if you want to be insulting, don't post as an AC. Second, we're back to apples and oranges. There is an absolute loss if you steal a magazine, because you're walking away with something physical. If you sneak into a movie, presuming you're not taking up a paying customer's seat, you cost the theatre *absolutely nothing*. Is there a potential benefit to you being there? Absolutely. Does that benefit outweight the theoretical cost of you not paying? Maybe... And that's my point. Maybe. Not absolutely not.
. Yes, I know banks loan out money, which is why they pay interest. Does that have anywhere near the same economic benefit as if people were out there using the money? Not at all. We have recessions when people are hoarding their money in the bank, not when they're out there consuming. You're not looking at the whole picture here.
I read your article on microsoft's failed attempt to crack down on piracy, and was a bit disturbed about your figures... Time and time again, there are figures released about the staggering amounts of jobs/money software/music/whatever piracy costs the state, and they're all nonsense. The vast majority of these "statistics" are released/publicized by software companies themselves. Even worse, none of the statistics truely address the ramifications of software piracy. All they do is go "we think there are roughly X number of pirated copies out there." (which is *always* a wild guess) "each copy of software costs $Y." "Thus, we've lost $X * Y, which is a huge amount of money, and just think about how many jobs that could have funded."
First, the reality is, 90%, if not more, of the people who are "pirating" software wouldn't be using the software in the first place. The gentleman who was listed in your article as giving his copy of chessmaster 3000 out to his friends had every right to do that if each person was using the software consecutively. And how many of those friends would have actually paid $49.95 for their own copy of chessmaster if they didn't have access to it for free? Very, very few. Yet, all of those people are counted as posessing pirated software for the statistics.
Second, even if there is a large theoretical cost from software piracy, why is it an issue? Our economy is a closed system. If all of a sudden all of the supposed pirates went out and bought copies of the software, the money they used to pay for the software had to come from somewhere. The statistics the public sees imply it magically appears, to then be used for the benefit of all concerned. Not true... it comes from private individual's pockets, one way or another. Would there be more benefit if it remained in those pockets? Maybe. Maybe not. It could be positive or negative, but it certainly isn't as clear as we're supposed to believe.
Third, even if all of those pirates went out and bought software, and it wouldn't be more useful in their hands, why would it be beneficial to give it to the software companies? They have zero obligation or interest to use it for anything resembling the public good, and the directors of those companies would and should be fired if they used it for anything but the benefit of their company. Microsoft, the biggest crier of wolf, has over (if I remember correctly) 10 BILLION dollars sitting in banks earning interest. How does this provide jobs? Does an extra 500 million mean an extra 10 thousand jobs? Or does it mean a big bonus for the directors and a 2 cents per share dividend? How, then, is software piracy a *problem* for the public?
Finally, none of the statistics or articles I read deal at all with the *positive* aspects of piracy. Software piracy increases awareness of the software. Period. Going back to the chessmaster 3000 example above, is it likely that the ten other individuals who "pirated" chessmaster 3000 will go out and buy a full version? Not really. However, is it *more* likely than if they had never used it? Depends on the quality of the software, doesn't it? If someone "pirates" a piece of software, and then finds it to be the best, most highly-crafted, most stable, etc. etc., piece of software they've ever used, odds are they'll go out and buy a copy of the software, for the documentation, or for the next upgrade, or even out of a sense of thanks for the great value they got. Who will software piracy absolutely not benefit? Companys who make critical (people have to have it), but crappy (people have a low, if not negative perception of it's value) software. Ring a bell? Microsoft's operating system, perhaps? And surprise, microsoft is one of the biggest fighters of software piracy.
Software piracy is not an issue if the software's percieved value matches or exceeds the value the customer is forced to fork over. The negative aspects of software piracy are overinflated, and the fight is entirely one-sided. It really makes you wonder what the "cost" of all that copy-protecting and lawsuits is...
And it's proven to be a great technology. If you're working on something that won't be publically released for a month or two, wait for PHP4 - the features and speedups are incredible. My recommendation is start using PHP4 beta2 for your business logic app, and as that becomes stable, start switching over your CF stuff to PHP. CF has some benefits, and it's certainly better than ASP (shudder), but fundamentally, you don't have the source code, so if something goes wrong, you're screwed. Period. I've been doing web development for over a year and a half, most of which was ASP, with some CF, and now recently pretty much all PHP3. My clients don't want to hear why the site isn't working... they just want it to work. And time and time again, I've had bizzare problems with ASP where I have *no idea* what went wrong. And there's nothing I can do to fix it.
Also, if you're switching over to PHP, buy a cheap box, throw linux on it, and use it for testing and getting familiar with linux and PHP... and try using mySQL or mSQL, rather than msSQL... MS's SQL server proved to be a whole new kettle of crap while I was using it.
I worked on a project at UCLA that was microsoft sponsored, so I have a unique view into microsoft's world of academic sponsorship.
I'm a CS student at UCLA, now on leave to work fulltime, but during the last year and a half or so, I was working with one of the professors in the CS department and some other CS students to build a departmental infrastructure using ASP and SQL Server... We ended up getting sponsored by microsoft (they donated a few machines and more software than we could shake a stick at.)
While trying to get sponsored by microsoft, I got to talk a few times with their VP in charge of academic development (he works for microsoft research, the quasi-independant research side of MS). All of their academic programs are run through there, presumably to give them the stamp of independance. According to him, Microsoft's starting to get big in the university sponsorship area. Their plan is to have five "premiere" university partnerships (UCLA being one of them). I have no idea what the others are, but it sounds like indiana university is another one. Once they've created the premiere partner relationship, they start funding university projects, bringing down MS speakers to give talks (the talks usually revolve around presenting the latest microsoft products, surprisingly), and working their way into the system. I'm not sure what pressures UCLA faces to convert over to NT, but I know a *lot* of their systems use it. Microsoft also has a campus representative, a student who gets paid to run around promoting microsoft, coordinating presentations on site, and being the student side of the public face for microsoft.
On the plus side, the LUG at ucla is pretty darn active, www.linux.ucla.edu although they can always use more help. Aspiring college students, if you want a challenge, head on over to UCLA...
I'm writing an open source PHP cart that works with mysql and cybercash... If people are interested in being involved, or have already done this, I'd love to hear from you....
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A few comments... The most noticible and glaring issue is the "independant study" was (surprise, surprise) commissioned by Great Bridge, and great bridge's reason for existance is to sell support and services for postgres. Not the strongest indicator of impartiality. The entire press release is designed to sell postgres, not to provide a fair comparison.
Issue two. They compared the bleeding edge postgres (7.0) with the old-as-heck mysql (3.22) - they're now up to revision *22* of the development series for mysql - that's a pretty huge amount of changes. I would have been much more impressed with this if they had ran the comparison between 3.23.22 and 7.0. As with everything, folks, don't believe benchmarks, especially ones in press releases. Believe real-world tests. I've used both, and I'm using MySQL 3.23.22 for my site.
a classic - I'm amazed you haven't mentioned it or Akira. I just wateched the DVD and it was really awe-inspiring to see what they could do 5 years ago - really revolutionary stuff. Anyone who's even a vague fan should check it out.
UCLALUG (http://www.linux.ucla.edu/) created their own distro, also. It's called Bruin Linux (for obvious reasons), and is basically Redhat + bug fixes, security advisories, and some development tools. It's also got UCLA networking stuff pre-configured. I think this is a great idea for users of big organizations where pre-configuring network stuff or custom apps is really helpful. UCLALUG also uses the distro for their install-fests - they've had a lot of sucess in that, and having everything in one easy ISO makes the install-fest a lot easier. I applaud their efforts, as they should be congratulated for what they've done. (You can find Bruin Linux here)
This is very disappointing... Basically, this is a case of this one person, "Fare", wanting some publicity. Why didn't Roblimo read the thread? The entire "discussion" about the "hole" was started by "Fare" in the first place, with a leading question for RMS. RMS replies "Sure, that sounds about right", and then "Fare" goes into a tirade about how this means the GPL is worthless. RMS's response? "Um. Not really."
One of the main participants? He is *the* participant! Seriously, slashdot editors need to email RMS or other gnu people before posting stuff like this. Getting people all worked up because joe random decides that the GPL is worthless is a waste of our collective eyeball time.
The rest of it is meaningless. Since an economy is a closed system, you say it may be beneficial to pirate software since your money stays in your wallet for other uses. So by that rationale, even if you stole stuff it is fine, since the $ stay in your wallet and are used productively elsewhere.
There's a very big difference between "piracy" of intellectual goods, and stealing physical goods... Comparing the two is apples and oranges, the route you took to "prove" me wrong. There is a fixed cost associated with producing a physical good. If I go steal a candy bar in a store and eat it, it absolutely costs the manufacturer (well, really the store owner probably, but still) whatever amount of money it took to create the candy bar in the first place. For intellectual property, like software or music, if I go and "pirate" a copy of MS office, it costs microsoft *absolutely nothing*. There's a theoretical profit loss, but there's no corresponding fixed cost that's being lost because the original investment money to create MS office is a sunk cost - it has no bearing on the profit/loss of each sale. Hence my points about software piracy not being quite the scourage on society that the software companies make it out to be.
Hijacking a truck with 5000 msoffice boxes in it, then reselling them at a computer swap sale is bad. Period. You're stealing a physical box + cd that cost microsoft $3.50 to make. This is called stealing. Putting up MSOffice on an FTP warez site is not the same thing at all, even if you charged people five bucks to access the site. Every downloaded copy is not a loss to microsoft... it's a *potential* loss, yes, but the whole point of my argument was that the potential is much smaller than the software companies would have you believe.
It's stuff like this that results in slashdotters being called crackpots. Here, let's think about the positive aspects of sneaking in and watching movies for free, or shoplifting magazines - if you like the product, it creates awareness of it and makes you likely to buy more of it! Woo hoo!
First, if you want to be insulting, don't post as an AC. Second, we're back to apples and oranges. There is an absolute loss if you steal a magazine, because you're walking away with something physical. If you sneak into a movie, presuming you're not taking up a paying customer's seat, you cost the theatre *absolutely nothing*. Is there a potential benefit to you being there? Absolutely. Does that benefit outweight the theoretical cost of you not paying? Maybe... And that's my point. Maybe. Not absolutely not.
. Yes, I know banks loan out money, which is why they pay interest. Does that have anywhere near the same economic benefit as if people were out there using the money? Not at all. We have recessions when people are hoarding their money in the bank, not when they're out there consuming. You're not looking at the whole picture here.
I read your article on microsoft's failed attempt to crack down on piracy, and was a bit disturbed about your figures... Time and time again, there are figures released about the staggering amounts of jobs/money software/music/whatever piracy costs the state, and they're all nonsense. The vast majority of these "statistics" are released/publicized by software companies themselves. Even worse, none of the statistics truely address the ramifications of software piracy. All they do is go "we think there are roughly X number of pirated copies out there." (which is *always* a wild guess) "each copy of software costs $Y." "Thus, we've lost $X * Y, which is a huge amount of money, and just think about how many jobs that could have funded."
First, the reality is, 90%, if not more, of the people who are "pirating" software wouldn't be using the software in the first place. The gentleman who was listed in your article as giving his copy of chessmaster 3000 out to his friends had every right to do that if each person was using the software consecutively. And how many of those friends would have actually paid $49.95 for their own copy of chessmaster if they didn't have access to it for free? Very, very few. Yet, all of those people are counted as posessing pirated software for the statistics.
Second, even if there is a large theoretical cost from software piracy, why is it an issue? Our economy is a closed system. If all of a sudden all of the supposed pirates went out and bought copies of the software, the money they used to pay for the software had to come from somewhere. The statistics the public sees imply it magically appears, to then be used for the benefit of all concerned. Not true... it comes from private individual's pockets, one way or another. Would there be more benefit if it remained in those pockets? Maybe. Maybe not. It could be positive or negative, but it certainly isn't as clear as we're supposed to believe.
Third, even if all of those pirates went out and bought software, and it wouldn't be more useful in their hands, why would it be beneficial to give it to the software companies? They have zero obligation or interest to use it for anything resembling the public good, and the directors of those companies would and should be fired if they used it for anything but the benefit of their company. Microsoft, the biggest crier of wolf, has over (if I remember correctly) 10 BILLION dollars sitting in banks earning interest. How does this provide jobs? Does an extra 500 million mean an extra 10 thousand jobs? Or does it mean a big bonus for the directors and a 2 cents per share dividend? How, then, is software piracy a *problem* for the public?
Finally, none of the statistics or articles I read deal at all with the *positive* aspects of piracy. Software piracy increases awareness of the software. Period. Going back to the chessmaster 3000 example above, is it likely that the ten other individuals who "pirated" chessmaster 3000 will go out and buy a full version? Not really. However, is it *more* likely than if they had never used it? Depends on the quality of the software, doesn't it? If someone "pirates" a piece of software, and then finds it to be the best, most highly-crafted, most stable, etc. etc., piece of software they've ever used, odds are they'll go out and buy a copy of the software, for the documentation, or for the next upgrade, or even out of a sense of thanks for the great value they got. Who will software piracy absolutely not benefit? Companys who make critical (people have to have it), but crappy (people have a low, if not negative perception of it's value) software. Ring a bell? Microsoft's operating system, perhaps? And surprise, microsoft is one of the biggest fighters of software piracy.
Software piracy is not an issue if the software's percieved value matches or exceeds the value the customer is forced to fork over. The negative aspects of software piracy are overinflated, and the fight is entirely one-sided. It really makes you wonder what the "cost" of all that copy-protecting and lawsuits is...
And it's proven to be a great technology. If you're working on something that won't be publically released for a month or two, wait for PHP4 - the features and speedups are incredible. My recommendation is start using PHP4 beta2 for your business logic app, and as that becomes stable, start switching over your CF stuff to PHP. CF has some benefits, and it's certainly better than ASP (shudder), but fundamentally, you don't have the source code, so if something goes wrong, you're screwed. Period. I've been doing web development for over a year and a half, most of which was ASP, with some CF, and now recently pretty much all PHP3. My clients don't want to hear why the site isn't working... they just want it to work. And time and time again, I've had bizzare problems with ASP where I have *no idea* what went wrong. And there's nothing I can do to fix it.
Also, if you're switching over to PHP, buy a cheap box, throw linux on it, and use it for testing and getting familiar with linux and PHP... and try using mySQL or mSQL, rather than msSQL... MS's SQL server proved to be a whole new kettle of crap while I was using it.
I worked on a project at UCLA that was microsoft sponsored, so I have a unique view into microsoft's world of academic sponsorship.
I'm a CS student at UCLA, now on leave to work fulltime, but during the last year and a half or so, I was working with one of the professors in the CS department and some other CS students to build a departmental infrastructure using ASP and SQL Server... We ended up getting sponsored by microsoft (they donated a few machines and more software than we could shake a stick at.)
While trying to get sponsored by microsoft, I got to talk a few times with their VP in charge of academic development (he works for microsoft research, the quasi-independant research side of MS). All of their academic programs are run through there, presumably to give them the stamp of independance. According to him, Microsoft's starting to get big in the university sponsorship area. Their plan is to have five "premiere" university partnerships (UCLA being one of them). I have no idea what the others are, but it sounds like indiana university is another one. Once they've created the premiere partner relationship, they start funding university projects, bringing down MS speakers to give talks (the talks usually revolve around presenting the latest microsoft products, surprisingly), and working their way into the system. I'm not sure what pressures UCLA faces to convert over to NT, but I know a *lot* of their systems use it. Microsoft also has a campus representative, a student who gets paid to run around promoting microsoft, coordinating presentations on site, and being the student side of the public face for microsoft.
On the plus side, the LUG at ucla is pretty darn active, www.linux.ucla.edu although they can always use more help. Aspiring college students, if you want a challenge, head on over to UCLA...
Congratulations! :) Maybe next year they'll give you the big cash award...
I'm writing an open source PHP cart that works with mysql and cybercash... If people are interested in being involved, or have already done this, I'd love to hear from you....