Several comments here have cited the need to make a profit as the reason that Amazon should expand. The salient point here is that expanding the way they have into markets that are already dominated by others - having IMHO, no real chance to make a serious impact - will drive them further away from profitability than they ever have been. I think this drives them from a questionable position (sacrificing profits for "mindshare") into a positively bad one. If I had the cash to take an 18 month short position on them, I would.
The value (performance/price) of Redhat just went too low for me. No way I could justify it. All my friends with Redhat 6.0 only complain about it. Redhat 5.0 was a similarly buggy, rush-it-out-the-door effort. I've been pretty happy with Caldera - tech support is sketchy - but I don't need it like I would need RedHat's.
I presume the these open source licenses will let me profit from (for example) GPL'd code if I do it without distributing it. As an example, lets say someone writes some intelligent code for predicting stock price movements. Can I start a company using this code with my own closed-source improvments? It seems to me that as long as I am not making money by distributing the code I should be able to do this? Anyone know better than me?
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Several comments here have cited the need to make a profit as the reason that Amazon should expand. The salient point here is that expanding the way they have into markets that are already dominated by others - having IMHO, no real chance to make a serious impact - will drive them further away from profitability than they ever have been. I think this drives them from a questionable position (sacrificing profits for "mindshare") into a positively bad one. If I had the cash to take an 18 month short position on them, I would.
The value (performance/price) of Redhat just went too low for me. No way I could justify it. All my friends with Redhat 6.0 only complain about it. Redhat 5.0 was a similarly buggy, rush-it-out-the-door effort. I've been pretty happy with Caldera - tech support is sketchy - but I don't need it like I would need RedHat's.
I presume the these open source licenses will let me profit from (for example) GPL'd code if I do it without distributing it. As an example, lets say someone writes some intelligent code for predicting stock price movements. Can I start a company using this code with my own closed-source improvments? It seems to me that as long as I am not making money by distributing the code I should be able to do this? Anyone know better than me?