Cheaper available software means more profits for other companies which means more employees which means more spending which again, means more employees, etc.
We dont stop installing robotics in factories when it means cheaper products because a few workers need to be retrained. A capitalistic system adjusts, and frankly, Microsoft could be gone in a day and apart from idiots buying a lot of stock nobody would hurt.
Is a BS artist company. The products do not work as advertised. The problem isnt in the products tho, it is in the advertising.
Facial recognition works fine for security checks, where your face gets compared against a small database and the recognition software can be trimmed to rejecting people. The physical settings like lighting can provide the best possible conditions for the software to provide an accurate match, and people can try again if they get rejected.
It also works fine in finding possible matches for a photo in a database. Now you can trim the software to a high acceptance rate, and get a bunch of likely matches which you can sort manually.
But it does not work if you need to compare a large database like wanted libraries against a massive number of people because you cannot have it both be certain to trigger on the people it's interested in but not the people it doesnt want. You get a minimum of false positives and negatives which will become most of the triggers when you have a large dataset. A device which will be wrong almost all the time isnt useful.
Of course, the actual article is rather fuzzy about the use. If it's used for scanning suspects at the site to speed up police work, it will actually be useful. If it's used for scanning everyone the police passes it wont be. And with Visionics being involved in various of the spectacular post 9/11 'facial recognition' projects, I wouldnt be surprised if they attempt to pull another bullshit job.
Re:The most important thing developers must note:
on
The Future of MMORPGs
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· Score: 2
The problem is that if the world changes because of what you do, it will also change because of what the other 500K players do. What you do wont matter, in the end, because we all want to be heroes, Gandalf, Aragorn, Frodo, but if we all were there would be no difference and we'd be back to not making a difference.
Or should the games cater to the 10% players who have no job or life? That's what the feeble attempts at PVP MMORPG's do. 90% of the players get to be 0wN3D by the 10% who have no life.
Successful games will be the ones where you can do little to become special. People dont want to play the part of the victims or cheering public to other people playing heroes.
You ask the near impossible, but perhaps some day someone will implement it. But probably not as a commercial venture, because it is unlikely to be profitable or popular.
Not quite. Bud is not a monopoly and thus they can enter exclusive relationships. Of course, Bud is easily replaced and a pub being offered a cheap Bud-Only contract versus an expensive Bud or others contract would probably either sell expensive Bud or no Bud, mostly to the loss of Bud, because most of his buisness wont be Bud anyway.
However, if Beer, Inc had dominated the beer market and sold 95% of all beer, the choice for a pub owner to either sell cheap Beer-Only, or expensive Beer plus a microbrew, then the pub owner would have little choice but to dump the microbrew.
Monopolies are a problem, and get into trouble with the law, only when they use their dominant market power to prevent entry for others into the market. Bud would not have enough market power to violate antitrust law, while Beer, Inc, would.
It has already been shown that MS broke some actual laws. The evidence currently hashed out in court is mostly to show the judge that Microsoft still causes consumer harm, and that the remedies imposed by the court should deal with an uncooperative corporate entity that does not recognize they've broken the law and has no intention of stopping.
Capitalism? What Microsoft engages in isnt capitalism. If you look at the constituent elements in their strategies like total control of their market and 5 year plans you'll note their idea of 'capitalism' has more in common with an entirely different kind of economy. Which, of course, is why they're in court in the first place.
TCP/IP isnt based on the OSI model, it was developed separately, apart from the OSI model, and the mapping between the OSI model and TCP/IP doesnt match up. IPX and the novell protocols are OSI compliant, IIRC, tho.
Novell lans are mostly run over TCP/IP today. Strategically they're dead.
As far as samba goes, when new releases of Windows are the ones that 'break', the fault lies squarely on Microsoft. It's kinda hard to verify that something interoperates with something unreleased.
If a legal license to use technology isnt obtainable there are no alternatives to reverse engineering.
Providing legacy access for Microsoft isnt a problem. They're only interested in strategic developments; witness the problem with connectivity tools for Novell when it was a threat to their server buisness. A few years of breakage, until they've mostly taken over.
There is no paranoia. You should study Microsoft a bit more. Emperor Gates and sidekick Ballmer take the prize in paranoia and siege mentality.
No they dont. The musicians rights are already pretty much legistlated away or contractually taken away, they have very close to no rights at all... unless you mean the MPAA corporations have every right to get paid?
And where are the laws preventing MS from extending this with proprietary engineering?
The internet protocols are irrelevant; nobody buys a server 'because it has TCP/IP'. Sure it has TCP/IP, but what does it serve over it?
And... NetBEUI and IPX/SPX/ODI are dead. SMB _is_ NetBIOS. TCP/IP _isnt_ OSI (much to the annoyance of the OSI designers, I believe). Get your protocols in order.
SMB is a perfect example, Samba has been broken on pretty much every Windows release I've seen this far. Funny little errors like W2K suddenly getting 15k/sec transferrates against the samba servers. The Win '98 refusal to connect via cleartext password anymore. Etc.
Kerberos. Exchange. As long as MS has a monopoly on the desktop they will keep throwing roadblocks into the way of other servers, eventually escalating to patenting their extensions and guaranteeing no reverse engineering, until they can kill off any other product in the server space too. And that is only the technical part of it. Ever been threatened with a desktop license price hitch if you dont use Exchange? Such fun little surprises lie in store for you if you believe MS wont be able to use the desktop to decide what servers you are going to run.
Indeed, CO2 can affect the environment, but your analogy is a bit flawed. It's more like if lumberjacks were injured all through history by axes, and then someone tried to claim that issuing knives to lumberjacks causes them injuries.
In theory, CO2 can affect the environment, but the number of alternative, and more compelling theories, are astounding. Other theories that also explain earlier variations.
Resources should be concentrated on finding out _why_ the climate changes, not spent on creating simulation models based on fictional data run through fictional algorithms giving fictional answers, merely to support a popular political agenda in the guise of quasi-science.
If CO2 causes 1% of the temperature increase and solar activity 80%, vegetation change 19%, particle emissions cause temperature drops, etc, we're spending time and resources dealing with the wrong things.
Of course, source criticism is good. It is sorely lacking in every part of the CO2 problemspace.
The agendas exist everywhere, and while this data may be published on sites who have an agenda, or are hired for a public image, the facts presented there dont change. The link contains references to where the data is from. Can you find any links debunking the actual data?
What is interesting is the facts. If we want opinions we can go to greenpeace for one, or the oilcorps for the other. But what is the truth, because the truth is what we need to deal with the climate change problem. Opinions wont do it.
No it isnt. It's not even close. The current temperature is far lower than it has been historically. We have no reliable data for the rate, but analysis of available historical data shows that the earth used to have a much higher temperature.
It's smart to bet on finding out what is actually causing the temperature fluctuations, and it's smart to find out if we can do something about it. Using the environmentalist populistic theory-of-the-year as a policy is neither smart nor productive, since it diverts resources from finding out what are actually the reasons, and dealing with that.
Yep, 2001 is warmer than 1653, however, 1500-1600 was the coldest period in the last 2000 years, and it's still far colder than it used to be between 0 and 1000 AD. Take a look at this link for a graph of the last 10K years of temperature history.Another interesting link would be this one.
There is no doubt the climate is getting warmer, but if CO2 is the reason, why was the earth far warmer than today when we had no CO2 emissions at all?
Personally I doubt the CO2 theory. It doesnt explain earlier climate changes. And if the CO2 theory is invalid, it takes resources away from dealing with the actual problems a climate change we can do nothing about will cause.
(Of course, there are many reasons why we should decrease CO2 emissions anyway, but I dont think global warming is one of them.)
They dont have to gamble much. Take, for example, mail. 'Use Exchange. If you dont, we'll raise the price for your desktop support contracts'. Want to use Samba to reduce fileserver costs? Ooops, every time a new version of Windows is released things start inexplicably breaking. Authentication is another prime target for incompatibility... kerberos being a good example.
Protocols can be corrupted, embraced and extended, or simply blackmailed around. Not to mention if the SSSCA gets passed and we get some form of DRM integrated, in which case they can have the clients simply refuse to talk to non-DRM capable servers, and have law on their side.
Because even if it's getting more stable, people wont pay that much extra for it. As long as they can collect money off the preload buisness they get a revenue stream where they dont have to get the money out of the customer, but can rely on someone else to do it for them. If they lose the ability to control the distribution channels and people can get a cheaper PC as easy with Linux preloaded, preconfigured, and supported, Microsoft will start losing sales, and when they start slipping they wont stop, because Microsoft is the only who wants Microsoft around in the entire computer industry.
Everyone, their partners, their vendors, the content providers, the competition, everyone, fears and hates them, because they know that Microsoft will 'cut off their air supply' and give it to their competitors (or take it themselves) the moment they like someone else better. Microsoft has made clear that there is only room for one company in the PC consumer market, and that is Microsoft.
Look at the former east block to see how that works out. When you start losing control, things fall apart.
This was about stopping Dell from shipping Linux for desktop machines, not rack mountable servers.
Microsoft knows that as long as they control the desktop they can eventually take the server market. After all, what good is a server if the clients wont talk to it? They know that the only thing that can ever imperil them is if they lose control over the desktop, because if they do lose control they're dead in a year or two.
Yes and no. Code linked against a GPL binary or library, must be released, not necessarily under GPL, but under GPL or freer license (BSD, X11, public domain), or you cannot distribute the GPL code.
There is an OS exception like you say (for GPL binaries using proprietary OS libraries), altho that does not work the other way around (proprietary apps linking against GPL libraries that are part of the OS). Fortunately most libraries are LGPL, which does allow linking.
Your code doesnt have to be under the GPL at all. You could release it under the revised BSD license for example (you like the BSD license, right?). Or any other license that imposes no additional restrictions beyond the GPL. You have the right to do whatever you want with your creations, the GPL only affects the GPL code, and it's just the GPL code you cannot distribute together with proprietary code.
Or, what, you only like BSD licensed code when you can 'embrace and extend' it? Sorry, but in that case you'll find little sympathy from me. People like that are exactly why it's necessary to slap the GPL on code. If the world hadnt been full of them, the GPL wouldnt be necessary.
It's not viral at all. You dont have to apply the GPL to your own code, and you can distribute your own code any way you want, under any license you want. You just cant distribute the GPL licensed code with it, unless it doesnt impose any further restrictions on the bundle. Your own code is not, in any way, affected by the GPL.
Of course, your own code may be useless if you cant distribute the GPL code, but that isnt the GPLd codes authors problem now, is it. You'd do better to write code that actually works without depending on code you dont have the right to distribute.
Preventing leeches from distributing my code in proprietary format falls entirely under protecting my original work. Go do it yourself if you cant abide by the terms.
Well, IIRC, Microsoft stole the Citrix code to make Terminal Server (well, not exactly stole, they just said 'give it to us or you wont get a license for the next version of windows', which resulted in Citrix stock collapsing, and Microsoft getting the code).
For computing, almost all major evolutions have happened without patents. The word processor, spreadsheet, GUI's, the web, pretty much everything has been developed without patents. Copyright has been enough for several decades, with no apparent harm to invention. I cant think of a single software idea where the ability to patent would have been a driving factor in its development.
Do you think that 1-click shopping would not have been invented had there been no patents for software? GIF's? GIF was developed without knowledge of the unisys compression patent (not to mention the compression algorithms were patented not only by unisys, but two other companies hold conflicting patents as well, IIRC). Since then, better formats have been developed, while having to steer clear of patents, so again things get invented despite, rather than because of, patents. Software gets developed all the time where the creators run afoul of patents post-fact, which means the idea of patents promoting invention isnt correct, at least in the software field. And patents are meant for promoting inventions, not to be ways to leech cash of other developers or to leverage them as control instruments in the industry.
IBM would hardly have licensed a patent for the BIOS. With the stance they had when all they had was copyright, why would they be different with a patent backing them?
The problem with applying the prisoners dilemma to the IP problemspace is that the prisoners dilemma requires that you be able to map some form of values onto the options. If you automatically get a negative result by implementing patents, you dont get the effect specifically because others defect.
External threats are minor compared with the everyday risks of not being able to cover your back.
It's just that Joe Programmer being fired because he couldnt prove the customer asked for what he provided and then the customer changed his mind later doesnt exactly make the news headlines the same way.
Yes. You may be able to install it. Then call Oracle for help with a problem with Oracle on Mandrake... or IBM with Tivoli... or about NetWorker... or about your Fibre Channel adapter drivers... or etc.
It doesnt matter that it sometimes is possible to install RedHat rpm's on Mandrake. As long as it diverges enough from RedHat to not be supported by the necessary software (ie, it isnt RedHat with an improved GUI), it wont really be a choice in corporate space. It's hard enough getting a single Linux distribution accepted, nevermind one that isnt explicitly supported by all your vendors.
All nations have prospered without patent law. Go back to the last century. Inventions were still happening.
Go back just a decade in computing, to before you could patent computer programs. How much invention happened then? Most of the important new concepts in computing were developed without patents.
What if IBM had been able to patent the BIOS of the PC? The evolution of the PC industry would have been slowed down immensely.
The prisoners dilemma doesnt match up against IP problemspace. If everyone defects, they still will not be worse off, in fact it might map the other way around.
This isnt really news tho, look up the criticism of patents on the eurolinux alliance website; a lot of research that has come to the conclusion that patents hamper innovation is available.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheaper available software means more profits for other companies which means more employees which means more spending which again, means more employees, etc.
We dont stop installing robotics in factories when it means cheaper products because a few workers need to be retrained. A capitalistic system adjusts, and frankly, Microsoft could be gone in a day and apart from idiots buying a lot of stock nobody would hurt.
Is a BS artist company. The products do not work as advertised. The problem isnt in the products tho, it is in the advertising.
Facial recognition works fine for security checks, where your face gets compared against a small database and the recognition software can be trimmed to rejecting people. The physical settings like lighting can provide the best possible conditions for the software to provide an accurate match, and people can try again if they get rejected.
It also works fine in finding possible matches for a photo in a database. Now you can trim the software to a high acceptance rate, and get a bunch of likely matches which you can sort manually.
But it does not work if you need to compare a large database like wanted libraries against a massive number of people because you cannot have it both be certain to trigger on the people it's interested in but not the people it doesnt want. You get a minimum of false positives and negatives which will become most of the triggers when you have a large dataset. A device which will be wrong almost all the time isnt useful.
Of course, the actual article is rather fuzzy about the use. If it's used for scanning suspects at the site to speed up police work, it will actually be useful. If it's used for scanning everyone the police passes it wont be. And with Visionics being involved in various of the spectacular post 9/11 'facial recognition' projects, I wouldnt be surprised if they attempt to pull another bullshit job.
The problem is that if the world changes because of what you do, it will also change because of what the other 500K players do. What you do wont matter, in the end, because we all want to be heroes, Gandalf, Aragorn, Frodo, but if we all were there would be no difference and we'd be back to not making a difference.
Or should the games cater to the 10% players who have no job or life? That's what the feeble attempts at PVP MMORPG's do. 90% of the players get to be 0wN3D by the 10% who have no life.
Successful games will be the ones where you can do little to become special. People dont want to play the part of the victims or cheering public to other people playing heroes.
You ask the near impossible, but perhaps some day someone will implement it. But probably not as a commercial venture, because it is unlikely to be profitable or popular.
Not quite. Bud is not a monopoly and thus they can enter exclusive relationships. Of course, Bud is easily replaced and a pub being offered a cheap Bud-Only contract versus an expensive Bud or others contract would probably either sell expensive Bud or no Bud, mostly to the loss of Bud, because most of his buisness wont be Bud anyway.
However, if Beer, Inc had dominated the beer market and sold 95% of all beer, the choice for a pub owner to either sell cheap Beer-Only, or expensive Beer plus a microbrew, then the pub owner would have little choice but to dump the microbrew.
Monopolies are a problem, and get into trouble with the law, only when they use their dominant market power to prevent entry for others into the market. Bud would not have enough market power to violate antitrust law, while Beer, Inc, would.
It has already been shown that MS broke some actual laws. The evidence currently hashed out in court is mostly to show the judge that Microsoft still causes consumer harm, and that the remedies imposed by the court should deal with an uncooperative corporate entity that does not recognize they've broken the law and has no intention of stopping.
Capitalism? What Microsoft engages in isnt capitalism. If you look at the constituent elements in their strategies like total control of their market and 5 year plans you'll note their idea of 'capitalism' has more in common with an entirely different kind of economy. Which, of course, is why they're in court in the first place.
TCP/IP isnt based on the OSI model, it was developed separately, apart from the OSI model, and the mapping between the OSI model and TCP/IP doesnt match up. IPX and the novell protocols are OSI compliant, IIRC, tho.
Novell lans are mostly run over TCP/IP today. Strategically they're dead.
As far as samba goes, when new releases of Windows are the ones that 'break', the fault lies squarely on Microsoft. It's kinda hard to verify that something interoperates with something unreleased.
If a legal license to use technology isnt obtainable there are no alternatives to reverse engineering.
Providing legacy access for Microsoft isnt a problem. They're only interested in strategic developments; witness the problem with connectivity tools for Novell when it was a threat to their server buisness. A few years of breakage, until they've mostly taken over.
There is no paranoia. You should study Microsoft a bit more. Emperor Gates and sidekick Ballmer take the prize in paranoia and siege mentality.
No they dont. The musicians rights are already pretty much legistlated away or contractually taken away, they have very close to no rights at all... unless you mean the MPAA corporations have every right to get paid?
And where are the laws preventing MS from extending this with proprietary engineering?
The internet protocols are irrelevant; nobody buys a server 'because it has TCP/IP'. Sure it has TCP/IP, but what does it serve over it?
And... NetBEUI and IPX/SPX/ODI are dead. SMB _is_ NetBIOS. TCP/IP _isnt_ OSI (much to the annoyance of the OSI designers, I believe). Get your protocols in order.
SMB is a perfect example, Samba has been broken on pretty much every Windows release I've seen this far. Funny little errors like W2K suddenly getting 15k/sec transferrates against the samba servers. The Win '98 refusal to connect via cleartext password anymore. Etc.
Kerberos. Exchange. As long as MS has a monopoly on the desktop they will keep throwing roadblocks into the way of other servers, eventually escalating to patenting their extensions and guaranteeing no reverse engineering, until they can kill off any other product in the server space too. And that is only the technical part of it. Ever been threatened with a desktop license price hitch if you dont use Exchange? Such fun little surprises lie in store for you if you believe MS wont be able to use the desktop to decide what servers you are going to run.
Indeed, CO2 can affect the environment, but your analogy is a bit flawed. It's more like if lumberjacks were injured all through history by axes, and then someone tried to claim that issuing knives to lumberjacks causes them injuries.
In theory, CO2 can affect the environment, but the number of alternative, and more compelling theories, are astounding. Other theories that also explain earlier variations.
Resources should be concentrated on finding out _why_ the climate changes, not spent on creating simulation models based on fictional data run through fictional algorithms giving fictional answers, merely to support a popular political agenda in the guise of quasi-science.
If CO2 causes 1% of the temperature increase and solar activity 80%, vegetation change 19%, particle emissions cause temperature drops, etc, we're spending time and resources dealing with the wrong things.
Of course, source criticism is good. It is sorely lacking in every part of the CO2 problemspace.
The agendas exist everywhere, and while this data may be published on sites who have an agenda, or are hired for a public image, the facts presented there dont change. The link contains references to where the data is from. Can you find any links debunking the actual data?
What is interesting is the facts. If we want opinions we can go to greenpeace for one, or the oilcorps for the other. But what is the truth, because the truth is what we need to deal with the climate change problem. Opinions wont do it.
No it isnt. It's not even close. The current temperature is far lower than it has been historically. We have no reliable data for the rate, but analysis of available historical data shows that the earth used to have a much higher temperature.
It's smart to bet on finding out what is actually causing the temperature fluctuations, and it's smart to find out if we can do something about it. Using the environmentalist populistic theory-of-the-year as a policy is neither smart nor productive, since it diverts resources from finding out what are actually the reasons, and dealing with that.
There is no doubt the climate is getting warmer, but if CO2 is the reason, why was the earth far warmer than today when we had no CO2 emissions at all?
Personally I doubt the CO2 theory. It doesnt explain earlier climate changes. And if the CO2 theory is invalid, it takes resources away from dealing with the actual problems a climate change we can do nothing about will cause.
(Of course, there are many reasons why we should decrease CO2 emissions anyway, but I dont think global warming is one of them.)
They dont have to gamble much. Take, for example, mail. 'Use Exchange. If you dont, we'll raise the price for your desktop support contracts'. Want to use Samba to reduce fileserver costs? Ooops, every time a new version of Windows is released things start inexplicably breaking. Authentication is another prime target for incompatibility... kerberos being a good example.
Protocols can be corrupted, embraced and extended, or simply blackmailed around. Not to mention if the SSSCA gets passed and we get some form of DRM integrated, in which case they can have the clients simply refuse to talk to non-DRM capable servers, and have law on their side.
Because even if it's getting more stable, people wont pay that much extra for it. As long as they can collect money off the preload buisness they get a revenue stream where they dont have to get the money out of the customer, but can rely on someone else to do it for them. If they lose the ability to control the distribution channels and people can get a cheaper PC as easy with Linux preloaded, preconfigured, and supported, Microsoft will start losing sales, and when they start slipping they wont stop, because Microsoft is the only who wants Microsoft around in the entire computer industry.
Everyone, their partners, their vendors, the content providers, the competition, everyone, fears and hates them, because they know that Microsoft will 'cut off their air supply' and give it to their competitors (or take it themselves) the moment they like someone else better. Microsoft has made clear that there is only room for one company in the PC consumer market, and that is Microsoft.
Look at the former east block to see how that works out. When you start losing control, things fall apart.
This was about stopping Dell from shipping Linux for desktop machines, not rack mountable servers.
Microsoft knows that as long as they control the desktop they can eventually take the server market. After all, what good is a server if the clients wont talk to it? They know that the only thing that can ever imperil them is if they lose control over the desktop, because if they do lose control they're dead in a year or two.
Yes and no. Code linked against a GPL binary or library, must be released, not necessarily under GPL, but under GPL or freer license (BSD, X11, public domain), or you cannot distribute the GPL code.
There is an OS exception like you say (for GPL binaries using proprietary OS libraries), altho that does not work the other way around (proprietary apps linking against GPL libraries that are part of the OS). Fortunately most libraries are LGPL, which does allow linking.
Your code doesnt have to be under the GPL at all. You could release it under the revised BSD license for example (you like the BSD license, right?). Or any other license that imposes no additional restrictions beyond the GPL. You have the right to do whatever you want with your creations, the GPL only affects the GPL code, and it's just the GPL code you cannot distribute together with proprietary code.
Or, what, you only like BSD licensed code when you can 'embrace and extend' it? Sorry, but in that case you'll find little sympathy from me. People like that are exactly why it's necessary to slap the GPL on code. If the world hadnt been full of them, the GPL wouldnt be necessary.
It's not viral at all. You dont have to apply the GPL to your own code, and you can distribute your own code any way you want, under any license you want. You just cant distribute the GPL licensed code with it, unless it doesnt impose any further restrictions on the bundle. Your own code is not, in any way, affected by the GPL.
Of course, your own code may be useless if you cant distribute the GPL code, but that isnt the GPLd codes authors problem now, is it. You'd do better to write code that actually works without depending on code you dont have the right to distribute.
Preventing leeches from distributing my code in proprietary format falls entirely under protecting my original work. Go do it yourself if you cant abide by the terms.
Well, IIRC, Microsoft stole the Citrix code to make Terminal Server (well, not exactly stole, they just said 'give it to us or you wont get a license for the next version of windows', which resulted in Citrix stock collapsing, and Microsoft getting the code).
Yes, ehm, of course I mean the 1800-hundreds.
For computing, almost all major evolutions have happened without patents. The word processor, spreadsheet, GUI's, the web, pretty much everything has been developed without patents. Copyright has been enough for several decades, with no apparent harm to invention. I cant think of a single software idea where the ability to patent would have been a driving factor in its development.
Do you think that 1-click shopping would not have been invented had there been no patents for software? GIF's? GIF was developed without knowledge of the unisys compression patent (not to mention the compression algorithms were patented not only by unisys, but two other companies hold conflicting patents as well, IIRC). Since then, better formats have been developed, while having to steer clear of patents, so again things get invented despite, rather than because of, patents. Software gets developed all the time where the creators run afoul of patents post-fact, which means the idea of patents promoting invention isnt correct, at least in the software field. And patents are meant for promoting inventions, not to be ways to leech cash of other developers or to leverage them as control instruments in the industry.
IBM would hardly have licensed a patent for the BIOS. With the stance they had when all they had was copyright, why would they be different with a patent backing them?
The problem with applying the prisoners dilemma to the IP problemspace is that the prisoners dilemma requires that you be able to map some form of values onto the options. If you automatically get a negative result by implementing patents, you dont get the effect specifically because others defect.
External threats are minor compared with the everyday risks of not being able to cover your back.
It's just that Joe Programmer being fired because he couldnt prove the customer asked for what he provided and then the customer changed his mind later doesnt exactly make the news headlines the same way.
$12 USD? No, that's what storage costs on your PC at home. $300/month would be more in line for 6 GB storage, internal corporate no-profit charges.
Yes. You may be able to install it. Then call Oracle for help with a problem with Oracle on Mandrake... or IBM with Tivoli... or about NetWorker... or about your Fibre Channel adapter drivers... or etc.
It doesnt matter that it sometimes is possible to install RedHat rpm's on Mandrake. As long as it diverges enough from RedHat to not be supported by the necessary software (ie, it isnt RedHat with an improved GUI), it wont really be a choice in corporate space. It's hard enough getting a single Linux distribution accepted, nevermind one that isnt explicitly supported by all your vendors.
All nations have prospered without patent law. Go back to the last century. Inventions were still happening.
Go back just a decade in computing, to before you could patent computer programs. How much invention happened then? Most of the important new concepts in computing were developed without patents.
What if IBM had been able to patent the BIOS of the PC? The evolution of the PC industry would have been slowed down immensely.
The prisoners dilemma doesnt match up against IP problemspace. If everyone defects, they still will not be worse off, in fact it might map the other way around.
This isnt really news tho, look up the criticism of patents on the eurolinux alliance website; a lot of research that has come to the conclusion that patents hamper innovation is available.