Actually, I think selling gold (money in MMOGs in general) should be encouraged... in fact, you should be able to buy gold from the people who sell the game.
The economic problem here is that in-game resources equate to time, and time has a real-world value. Because of this, you will create an economy, no matter how hard you try not to.
The best solution is to create that economy under your own control. For example, you could sell gold which, but create two classes of gold: that which came directly from in-game activities and that which came from other players. The player gold should be useful for buying routine items, basic gear, giving to other players for goods, etc. However, gold acquired through game activities such as combat, selling goods that you made yourself, etc. should yield gold which has more uses. Items of superior quality can be purchased, ingredients for advanced trade skills can be purchased, etc.
In this way, you create two economies. One is entirely in-game and one is both in and out of game. By dividing the problem, you conquer both halves, retaining the benefit of long play times, while allowing those who can't play 7 days a week a chance to experience all levels of game play.
A good game tries to reward good playing over more playing, but what about more good playing? That's where it gets hard. I have 20 hours to spend and you have 10. You and I both do a "good job" as it were. So what are the rewards that make my extra time worth-while, and what are the rewards that make your 10 hours not seem like a waste (given that others spent 20)?
It's a very hard problem, though I'll agree that the first wave (and realistically, we're still in the first wave) of MMORPGs tackled poorly.
Look again, and you will see that that first article, Pamela Franklin is 3 paragraphs long (has been for a month) and contains a fairlyy extensive list of this person's work. Now go flip open ANY encyclopedia and thumb over to Pamela Franklin. No really, go ahead, I'll wait. At the very most, if you are consulting a special-purpose film encyclopedia, you're going to get an entry that's about the same size, and won't have links to articles on her place of birth (Yokohama, Japan), and her fellow English film actors. Even her IMDB bio is only slightly longer and contains far more subjective statements such as, "Attractive, hauntingly pretty child actress".
Also, I will point out that some of the entries that you hit are actually infrastructural. Lists, tables, disambiguation pages, etc., are actually an interesting aspect of Wikipedia, and I think well deserve to be counted toward the million article count. These are essentially an extended appendix that links topics and concepts, easing searching and overall making Wikipedia easier to use.
Actually, you're thinking of The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). This is The SCO Group. Different company. This one happens to have bought the intellectual property rights of the first one, but as I understand it, that's where the comparison ends.
"No. The GPL only covers distribution, not personal use. If you can get the software installed, then you can use it all you want"
Ah, but there's the rub! If I go to the hardware vendor, get myself a key and port gcc (if there is eventually a gcc with GPLv3 licensing terms) to it, then I CANNOT give my version to anyone else! That's just silly, and yet unless I am allowed to release that key (which I probably am not allowed to do under my agreement with the hardware company), I can't give you a working compiler binary.
No, I'm sorry. I'll just stick with free software, thanks.
No, I'm not sure that I agree with that at all. It's like the old welded hood argument for Open Source, but turned around. We're saying that we won't let you run our software on a system with the hood welded shut instead of telling people that they can run it there, and letting them make the call.
It's not as if people won't write software for these platforms, but now software written for other platforms under the GPLv3 won't be used by such people. That means that there is a strong market pressure to select non-GPLv3 software because it leaves your options open later and lets you interoperate across all platforms (regardless of how you manage your keys). This is a huge win for the BSDs which try to avoid GPLed software in the first place, but it probably means that any remaining GNU software that the BSDs use and which is re-licensed under the GPLv3 will have to be forked or re-implemented by the BSDs. This kind of colateral damage is unacceptable to me, and I will likely start running the forked/re-implemented software on my Linux systems as well, so that I can contribute to an effort which values the "open" part of "open source".
The fundamental flaw in his statements comes early on, and the flaw in the GPL and the rest of his thoughts on it follow. Here it is:
"DRM is an example of a malicious feature"
DRM is not a malicious feature any more than CD writers are a malicious feature (though the RIAA might claim they are in much the same way Stallman wants to claim that DRM is). The reality is that DRM is a tool, and it's not the tool that's malicious, but some of its potential uses. We should be pushing hard, as a community that commands the attention of some of the most important IT groups in the world, to make sure that DRM can be used wisely as well as foolishly. I honestly don't care if Windows won't let you play a song without putting a quarter in your floppy drive. What I care about is that there are valid alternatives; that shipping a general purpose box that only allows one OS to be run on it is seen as anti-competitive, no matter what boogeyman we use to scare Congress (or whatever your local law-making body is called).
On the other hand, I don't see why we should begrudge someone shipping a GPLed game on the XBox/360 or a GPLed version of an open format document reader on a phone. Personally, I'll take the software and modify it to run on platforms that I want to use, but the folks who want to run the DRM-platform versions shouldn't be left in the cold.
You're saying that the idea that copyright would extend to ideas wouldn't be of interest to the overwhelmingly anti-intellectual-property audience on Slashdot?!
I'm confused. Where did you put the "give me my De-CSS T-shirts and bit torrent" Slashdot?
I think the key issue is that the number is an indicator. The statement was:
"country's capacity for scientific and commercial innovation does not correlate directly with its number of scientists"
If you think about it, it really does. The per capita number of scientists will be directly correlated to the satus of scientists in that society and the rewards for being in that field, and that status and those rewards increase the overall chances that someone who would have done excellent work in a field is going to go into that field (rather than becoming a lawyer so that they can make a lot of money, for example).
Why on earth would it be wrong to charge (any amount) for Firefox?! The benefits are vast:
Everyone who buys it is reducing load on the download servers and mirrors
Those who actually offer some added value will sell better. This encourages Firefox development (in the same way that Red Hat, Mantiva, Novell, IBM and many others have contributed to Linux).
In many places, offering a product for sale implies a certain amount of warantee which cannot be disclaimed, on the part of the seller (lemon laws, etc). This gives consumers leverage by which to demand things like security updates, which further incents distributors to participate in Firefox development.
Many people in the world with very slow, noisy connections to the Internet cannot reasonably download something as large as Firefox.
For every dollar (or Euro or Pound) spent on Firefox CDs, there is more measurable sale of open source software.
Overseas sales will encourage better regionalization enhancements.
Since you can download it for free, those purchasing it are likely people who would NOT have used Firefox otherwise (perhaps they just don't trust free software, or perhaps they would not have come acorss it other than on a shelf).
You can stay clear of any reference work you like. In the end, I'm sure that those who take advantage of Wikipedia will either see the benefits that I suggest or they will suffer from the failures taht you suggest... or both (probably more likely). We'll know better in 50 years.
Good find (frustrating that the GP didn't just give a link to or name of the article he was referencing).
Yeah, it looks like there was a bad edit in there, and it was fixed. Not much of a story to that.... Most of the problems that people have with Wikipedia end up being, "some article said something braindead when I looked at it," rather than, "some article says something braindead and continues to."
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia in flux. The good part of that is that you get to partake in the process, and can research both the accepted "common knowledge" and the controversies that arise. The bad part is that there's more leg work involved in reading edit history and talk pages to distinguish the two.
Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive single resource available, but taking correct advantage of it requires more work than most sources. It's a trade-off that I find workable.
"Here on Slashdot, it's popular to tout the wonder that is Wikipedia"
Not at all. Here on Slashdot, no article about Wikipedia goes by without a bunch of people whining about how it'll never be useful.
"From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia..."
There is no such article. Try again. The closest that WP comes is the highly contested Poverty in Africa which carefully warns its readers at the top that it is under dispute, and even that article makes no such claim.
Of course, Horn of Africa does say, "However the Horn of Africa suffers largely from overgrazing and only 5% of its original habitat still remains." But, that's nothing like your claim.
Wikipedia works just fine, thank you, but it's young, and it can be said that articles which generate controversy will never be "perfect" in any given snapshot. For those stuck in the pre-edit-history mode of research, this is a showstopper. The rest of us will continue to get work done using Wikipedia.
"Wake me up when one gnome-terminal crashing doesn't automatically kill every other terminal running in my session."
You have that ability, but gnome-terminal defaults to running a single instance to reduce footprint. It's one of the reasons I love it so (even little old xterm starts to get expensive with the number of terminals I run).
There are a lot of good things about Gnome, but some bad. Circa the FC4 desktop that I use, here are some things (I'll assume all is improved in the latest version) that I either love or hate:
Music and CD playing are primative, but work. XMMS doesn't play well with Gnome because it wants everything to be skinnable, so your window manager binding customizations don't affect it, it doesn't obey focus rules, etc. The default CD player is just kind of primative, but nicely behaved.
Evolution is bloated. I love evolution, don't get me wrong, but it takes up a huge amount of RAM and it uses SpamAssassin for filtering spam, which is a terrible idea (I also love SA, but it's designed as a server-side tool, not as a background spam filter for client-side).
Integration of P2P lacking. Most P2P clients these days have hooks for magnet, the URI sceme for P2P-shared entities. Gnome lacks any integration of this, sadly.
gnome-terminal: best terminal since xterm. I love this thing, and it's the first terminal emulator that was able to do what xterm did without insisting that I put up with any extras (they're all there if I want them). Most of all, I love the fact that it handles arbitrary character sets.
Firefox - Firefox is not a part of the gnome project, but it has hooks for gnome's desktop tools and does an excellent job. It's hard, these days, to think of firefox as the "lightweight mozilla", but it's still a damned good browser.
CD writing - Not terrible, but KDE's K3B blows the doors off of gnome's CD writing capabilities. I use K3B all the time, now, and I'm very happy (before I used command-line tools because the GUI under gnome was so painful, now it's better).
Movies - totem, gmplayer and all of the rest of the video tools are in a relatively sad state, usability-wise. They suffer from the XMMS problem of often not playing well with gnome (gmplayer), crash OFTEN (and aren't those SEGVs a bad thing?), and don't support many formats. I'm not sure that this is unique to Gnome, but it's a black eye on the Linux desktop.
Overall,I love gnome. It's well designed, and glib + Gtk+ is a very powerful use of C that makes relatively high-level code easy to make fairly lightweight... when the developers try.
Thank you for the info. I had thought that was still in their hands. Still, it's not really the point of my post, so I think that what I said about a Windows Apple still stands.
Very well. Good luck with that approach. I have more reading to do;)
PS: If you want a good intro to advanced concepts, Haskell is, as you pointed out, a great source. I've been reading over the pugs code, and I'm still reeling from some of what I saw there. It's just not the way you've always forced yourself to program, and once you tear down those preconceptions that you've spent a career building, it's a fascinating point of view (though I'm actually not terribly fond of the language).
Has it occurred to you that neither approach is terribly efficient, and that simply exposing yourself to more of the state of the art would result in your learning more on your way to such insight?
Incidentally, this is pretty much the summary of the Perl approach and has been for over a decade. Rather than argue, just learn, appreciate and apply. Perl is rarely the best at anything, but because it embraces so much, it is one of the best places to learn to use any technique. Dynamic scoping? Sure. Lexical scoping? Sure. Closures? Got that. Continuations? Took a bit more re-working, but it's there in Perl 6.
I'm not advocating Perl, per se, here. I'm advocating the Perl approach no matter what language you choose to work with today.
You're ignoring the point here. I'm not saying that Apple would do this, but if Apple were going to switch to Windows, they would switch to Windows in the same way that they switched to BSD. Notice, if you will, the vast difference between MacOS/X and FreeBSD. You would be talking about a hybrid OS that used Cocoa (certainly, since that's Apple's branding, not to mention a develpment platform that all of their best add-on software retailers are writing to) on top of the NT "micro"kernel in the same way that Win32 was slapped on top of NT back in the beginning.
Side note: I went to an NT internals talk at USENIX back just before NT came out, and the guy from MS actually made it sound cool. It was the kind of OS that we'd all wanted to see someone do: a true successor to Unix and VMS. Sadly, it seems that they ran out of time, and instead of the elegant integration of Windows as a multi-subsystem, pluggable userspace suite, they slapped Win32 on top of the increasingly innaccurately named "microkernel" and hosed the whole thing. It was barely possible to tell, when released, that below the layers of caked-on mud was the heart of an interesting OS. I almost cried for as long as it took me ot go back to my little Slackware system.
But, I always remember that, and I always remember that SOMEONE COULD do that work still, and NT could become the heart of a truly interesting OS. Would Apple do it? Almost certainly not, but they COULD, and they are partly owned by MS (am I the only one who remembers that deal?)
Sigh. We still have to have a language hate-fest every time a language-specific article shows up?
"When last I looked, Perl didn't treat scalars, hashes and arrays as objects. Perl's incomplete object model is, in my view, a far bigger problem than Python's read-only closures. And on the subject of things Perl doesn't have, as far as I know, it has no metaclass support, either."
All true (except for the opinion about severity which is simply an opinion and neither true nor false).
While Perl 6 endevours to address much of this (I direct your attention to the pugs interpreter), Perl 6 is hardly production-ready at this stage, and Perl 5 as it stands has many drawbacks.
Then again, so does Java, Python, Ruby and just about any other language out there. Why not just relax and accept that any turing complete language that gets the job done does just that. Perl is a very rapid development tool that has historically proven itself to generate fairly heavyweight code (usually as a result of coding conventions rather than language features). That's pretty much as far as you have to go into advantages and disadvantages beyond determining if the particular tools that you need for a particular project are present and well supported in the language that you are evaluationg.
I think it's safe to say that, once you get to the stage of worrying about how core types are treated by the object system, you've gotten to a level of detail at which it is difficult to objectively balance all of the various tradeoffs in language selection.
Personally, I'm starting to agree with a friend of mine: the ideal language is C++ because it is so horridly barroque that only programmers capable of understanding that level of complexity will program in it beyond simple wrappers to GUI libraries.
No, you almost certainly want to avoid that game. I'd be quite concerned about running code from someone who took programming quite that seriously. Some examples:
If you only run a sucking proprietary OS like Windows, or if you use a lousy Gnu/Linux distribution for which there is no binary package available here
Free software is a very interesting (and important) concept. It was brought to mankind by Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation. (no, actually, free software was a rather common case pre-Stallman, but he created the copyleft and coined the term)
If you're interested in the reason why you should not port Frozen-Bubble to proprietary OS'es [...]
Again, I do not see this. The closed source version could easily make use of open source libraries (closed source Linux apps do this all the time).
No, I think Oracle would be best served in using this as leverage to offer to buy out MySQL, and turn them into the first-tier Oracle offering.
MySQL is eating Oracle's lunch in the low-end database market, and that has to be pushing Oracle to think in terms of either killing MySQL (not possible) or absorbing them.
I mis-spoke. Let me clarify: there is no provision in the law for asserting that you have forgotten a key (read the text that someone else pasted, it says "know or have known" not "have known and still do know"). However, I did over-state the case./dev/random would be easily defended as a source for which you never knew the key.
Anyone who has learned both languages does not agree, in my particular case. They're both powerful, highly flexible languages that have powerful constructs for managing high-level structures. Perl tends to have more varied facilities while Python tends to have fewer, but often more robust facilities (twisted comes to mind).
They are both excellent languages, and if you're of the ill-informed opinion that one or the other does not serve well for large, highly strucutred projects, then I suppose our experiences simply differ.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think selling gold (money in MMOGs in general) should be encouraged... in fact, you should be able to buy gold from the people who sell the game.
The economic problem here is that in-game resources equate to time, and time has a real-world value. Because of this, you will create an economy, no matter how hard you try not to.
The best solution is to create that economy under your own control. For example, you could sell gold which, but create two classes of gold: that which came directly from in-game activities and that which came from other players. The player gold should be useful for buying routine items, basic gear, giving to other players for goods, etc. However, gold acquired through game activities such as combat, selling goods that you made yourself, etc. should yield gold which has more uses. Items of superior quality can be purchased, ingredients for advanced trade skills can be purchased, etc.
In this way, you create two economies. One is entirely in-game and one is both in and out of game. By dividing the problem, you conquer both halves, retaining the benefit of long play times, while allowing those who can't play 7 days a week a chance to experience all levels of game play.
A good game tries to reward good playing over more playing, but what about more good playing? That's where it gets hard. I have 20 hours to spend and you have 10. You and I both do a "good job" as it were. So what are the rewards that make my extra time worth-while, and what are the rewards that make your 10 hours not seem like a waste (given that others spent 20)?
It's a very hard problem, though I'll agree that the first wave (and realistically, we're still in the first wave) of MMORPGs tackled poorly.
Actually, your result is highly encouraging!
Look again, and you will see that that first article, Pamela Franklin is 3 paragraphs long (has been for a month) and contains a fairlyy extensive list of this person's work. Now go flip open ANY encyclopedia and thumb over to Pamela Franklin. No really, go ahead, I'll wait. At the very most, if you are consulting a special-purpose film encyclopedia, you're going to get an entry that's about the same size, and won't have links to articles on her place of birth (Yokohama, Japan), and her fellow English film actors. Even her IMDB bio is only slightly longer and contains far more subjective statements such as, "Attractive, hauntingly pretty child actress".
Also, I will point out that some of the entries that you hit are actually infrastructural. Lists, tables, disambiguation pages, etc., are actually an interesting aspect of Wikipedia, and I think well deserve to be counted toward the million article count. These are essentially an extended appendix that links topics and concepts, easing searching and overall making Wikipedia easier to use.
Actually, you're thinking of The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). This is The SCO Group. Different company. This one happens to have bought the intellectual property rights of the first one, but as I understand it, that's where the comparison ends.
"No. The GPL only covers distribution, not personal use. If you can get the software installed, then you can use it all you want"
Ah, but there's the rub! If I go to the hardware vendor, get myself a key and port gcc (if there is eventually a gcc with GPLv3 licensing terms) to it, then I CANNOT give my version to anyone else! That's just silly, and yet unless I am allowed to release that key (which I probably am not allowed to do under my agreement with the hardware company), I can't give you a working compiler binary.
No, I'm sorry. I'll just stick with free software, thanks.
No, I'm not sure that I agree with that at all. It's like the old welded hood argument for Open Source, but turned around. We're saying that we won't let you run our software on a system with the hood welded shut instead of telling people that they can run it there, and letting them make the call.
It's not as if people won't write software for these platforms, but now software written for other platforms under the GPLv3 won't be used by such people. That means that there is a strong market pressure to select non-GPLv3 software because it leaves your options open later and lets you interoperate across all platforms (regardless of how you manage your keys). This is a huge win for the BSDs which try to avoid GPLed software in the first place, but it probably means that any remaining GNU software that the BSDs use and which is re-licensed under the GPLv3 will have to be forked or re-implemented by the BSDs. This kind of colateral damage is unacceptable to me, and I will likely start running the forked/re-implemented software on my Linux systems as well, so that I can contribute to an effort which values the "open" part of "open source".
On the other hand, I don't see why we should begrudge someone shipping a GPLed game on the XBox/360 or a GPLed version of an open format document reader on a phone. Personally, I'll take the software and modify it to run on platforms that I want to use, but the folks who want to run the DRM-platform versions shouldn't be left in the cold.
You're saying that the idea that copyright would extend to ideas wouldn't be of interest to the overwhelmingly anti-intellectual-property audience on Slashdot?!
I'm confused. Where did you put the "give me my De-CSS T-shirts and bit torrent" Slashdot?
You can stay clear of any reference work you like. In the end, I'm sure that those who take advantage of Wikipedia will either see the benefits that I suggest or they will suffer from the failures taht you suggest... or both (probably more likely). We'll know better in 50 years.
Good find (frustrating that the GP didn't just give a link to or name of the article he was referencing).
Yeah, it looks like there was a bad edit in there, and it was fixed. Not much of a story to that.... Most of the problems that people have with Wikipedia end up being, "some article said something braindead when I looked at it," rather than, "some article says something braindead and continues to."
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia in flux. The good part of that is that you get to partake in the process, and can research both the accepted "common knowledge" and the controversies that arise. The bad part is that there's more leg work involved in reading edit history and talk pages to distinguish the two.
Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive single resource available, but taking correct advantage of it requires more work than most sources. It's a trade-off that I find workable.
"Here on Slashdot, it's popular to tout the wonder that is Wikipedia"
Not at all. Here on Slashdot, no article about Wikipedia goes by without a bunch of people whining about how it'll never be useful.
"From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia..."
There is no such article. Try again. The closest that WP comes is the highly contested Poverty in Africa which carefully warns its readers at the top that it is under dispute, and even that article makes no such claim.
Of course, Horn of Africa does say, "However the Horn of Africa suffers largely from overgrazing and only 5% of its original habitat still remains." But, that's nothing like your claim.
Wikipedia works just fine, thank you, but it's young, and it can be said that articles which generate controversy will never be "perfect" in any given snapshot. For those stuck in the pre-edit-history mode of research, this is a showstopper. The rest of us will continue to get work done using Wikipedia.
You have that ability, but gnome-terminal defaults to running a single instance to reduce footprint. It's one of the reasons I love it so (even little old xterm starts to get expensive with the number of terminals I run).only one window dies.
Overall,I love gnome. It's well designed, and glib + Gtk+ is a very powerful use of C that makes relatively high-level code easy to make fairly lightweight... when the developers try.
Thank you for the info. I had thought that was still in their hands. Still, it's not really the point of my post, so I think that what I said about a Windows Apple still stands.
Very well. Good luck with that approach. I have more reading to do ;)
PS: If you want a good intro to advanced concepts, Haskell is, as you pointed out, a great source. I've been reading over the pugs code, and I'm still reeling from some of what I saw there. It's just not the way you've always forced yourself to program, and once you tear down those preconceptions that you've spent a career building, it's a fascinating point of view (though I'm actually not terribly fond of the language).
Has it occurred to you that neither approach is terribly efficient, and that simply exposing yourself to more of the state of the art would result in your learning more on your way to such insight?
Incidentally, this is pretty much the summary of the Perl approach and has been for over a decade. Rather than argue, just learn, appreciate and apply. Perl is rarely the best at anything, but because it embraces so much, it is one of the best places to learn to use any technique. Dynamic scoping? Sure. Lexical scoping? Sure. Closures? Got that. Continuations? Took a bit more re-working, but it's there in Perl 6.
I'm not advocating Perl, per se, here. I'm advocating the Perl approach no matter what language you choose to work with today.
Arguments are for time wasting.
You're ignoring the point here. I'm not saying that Apple would do this, but if Apple were going to switch to Windows, they would switch to Windows in the same way that they switched to BSD. Notice, if you will, the vast difference between MacOS/X and FreeBSD. You would be talking about a hybrid OS that used Cocoa (certainly, since that's Apple's branding, not to mention a develpment platform that all of their best add-on software retailers are writing to) on top of the NT "micro"kernel in the same way that Win32 was slapped on top of NT back in the beginning.
Side note: I went to an NT internals talk at USENIX back just before NT came out, and the guy from MS actually made it sound cool. It was the kind of OS that we'd all wanted to see someone do: a true successor to Unix and VMS. Sadly, it seems that they ran out of time, and instead of the elegant integration of Windows as a multi-subsystem, pluggable userspace suite, they slapped Win32 on top of the increasingly innaccurately named "microkernel" and hosed the whole thing. It was barely possible to tell, when released, that below the layers of caked-on mud was the heart of an interesting OS. I almost cried for as long as it took me ot go back to my little Slackware system.
But, I always remember that, and I always remember that SOMEONE COULD do that work still, and NT could become the heart of a truly interesting OS. Would Apple do it? Almost certainly not, but they COULD, and they are partly owned by MS (am I the only one who remembers that deal?)
Sigh. We still have to have a language hate-fest every time a language-specific article shows up?
"When last I looked, Perl didn't treat scalars, hashes and arrays as objects. Perl's incomplete object model is, in my view, a far bigger problem than Python's read-only closures. And on the subject of things Perl doesn't have, as far as I know, it has no metaclass support, either."
All true (except for the opinion about severity which is simply an opinion and neither true nor false).
While Perl 6 endevours to address much of this (I direct your attention to the pugs interpreter), Perl 6 is hardly production-ready at this stage, and Perl 5 as it stands has many drawbacks.
Then again, so does Java, Python, Ruby and just about any other language out there. Why not just relax and accept that any turing complete language that gets the job done does just that. Perl is a very rapid development tool that has historically proven itself to generate fairly heavyweight code (usually as a result of coding conventions rather than language features). That's pretty much as far as you have to go into advantages and disadvantages beyond determining if the particular tools that you need for a particular project are present and well supported in the language that you are evaluationg.
I think it's safe to say that, once you get to the stage of worrying about how core types are treated by the object system, you've gotten to a level of detail at which it is difficult to objectively balance all of the various tradeoffs in language selection.
Personally, I'm starting to agree with a friend of mine: the ideal language is C++ because it is so horridly barroque that only programmers capable of understanding that level of complexity will program in it beyond simple wrappers to GUI libraries.
Again, I do not see this. The closed source version could easily make use of open source libraries (closed source Linux apps do this all the time).
No, I think Oracle would be best served in using this as leverage to offer to buy out MySQL, and turn them into the first-tier Oracle offering.
MySQL is eating Oracle's lunch in the low-end database market, and that has to be pushing Oracle to think in terms of either killing MySQL (not possible) or absorbing them.
I mis-spoke. Let me clarify: there is no provision in the law for asserting that you have forgotten a key (read the text that someone else pasted, it says "know or have known" not "have known and still do know"). However, I did over-state the case. /dev/random would be easily defended as a source for which you never knew the key.
Anyone who has learned both languages does not agree, in my particular case. They're both powerful, highly flexible languages that have powerful constructs for managing high-level structures. Perl tends to have more varied facilities while Python tends to have fewer, but often more robust facilities (twisted comes to mind).
They are both excellent languages, and if you're of the ill-informed opinion that one or the other does not serve well for large, highly strucutred projects, then I suppose our experiences simply differ.