Unfortunately, it appears that no large commercial RDBMS available today is unconditionally stable, and Oracle is representative of the genre. If your application is database-intensive, you should expect to see bugs come out of the woodwork every now and then. With Oracle under Solaris, a bug a month seems to be par for the course, according to some senior DBAs with long experience in bug chasing. I wouldn't expect it to be very different under Linux: on the one hand Linux has far fewer known bugs than Solaris, but on the other hand Oracle under Linux has undergone far less testing in the field, so perhaps they even out.
The thing that really annoys me about Oracle though is that they don't publish their list of known bugs; instead, you have to be bitten by a bug first before they'll admit that they know about it and supply you with a patch. If you ask me, that's an approach that is less than totally customer-friendly.
As for NT, don't even joke about it... Those that don't want a Unix server on the premises but have money to burn should head straight for the Oracle8i Appliance, a turnkey box that runs Oracle native rather than on top of an O/S. Well, we all know that there's an O/S under there somewhere, but hey, anything's better than NT. And turnkey appliances are cool for standard applications, as proved again and again by the lovely NetApp.
In any event, politician's lives are not meant to be cushy. A little pain in their positions of power can have a salutory effect in bringing them back in touch with the real world and distancing them from the idea that they are gods who can do no wrong.
If most of the Internet is used up on sex, it indicates that the majority of people want sex, so who are you to say that it's wrong, FOR THEM? Perhaps it stems from politicians having stigmatized it for so long that the floodgates have now opened.
In any event, none of that matters as long as the Internet is also available for more productive things as well, and it is. Check out those two URLs I gave above to give yourself a birdseye view of the positive side of Internet communities and how they are gearing up for very practical advances for mankind.
You have missed entirely the fundamental point that my morality and other views based on subjective value judgements are right FOR ME and only for me. If I were to seek to apply them to others (such as by the gun-toting methods that you suggest) then I would be guilty of the worst crime in the individualist's book, which is coercion of my worldview onto others. I don't do that.
In contrast, you do seek to do precisely what you argue against, since you believe in universal walls and seek to apply them to me despite the fact that your beliefs are not mine. You are brandishing the gun, not I.
A friend in the computer graphics industry tells me that a lot of their main commercial tools are starting to get ported to Linux now.
It wasn't just the effect of Titanic; the industry is well aware of the worldwide trend towards Linux, and their artists and designers curse the lousiness of W95 and NT as a professional platform every bit as strongly as do software engineers.
Seeing how well it worked out, both technically and financially, their competitors are gearing up now to do likewise. (I couldn't possibly say who I heard that from.:-)
I've just ordered a Spectra 333 from Evergreen as a quick way of upgrading a legacy P100. It's basically a 333MHz K6-2 on a module that fits into the Pentium socket 7 on non-K6-compatible motherboards. Very slick, and a good alternative to swapping in an entirely new motherboard which sometimes just isn't possible, eg. on industrial PICMG or embedded cards.
This kind of backward-compatible technology might solve some of the problems mentioned in this thread. If the K7 takes off, it'll be only a matter of time before somebody does something similar to the Spectra for it, so any investment one makes in computers now isn't necessarily lost when one wants to use the next generation of CPU.
If the Spectra turns out bad, I'll post a problem report followup here. [It seemed worth taking the chance as Evergreen stake their business on compatibility... I hope.:-)]
I sure hope you're right. He needs to be a little more careful about the message he sends to the community and to the commercial world, in my opinion. There is nothing to be gained by playing a confrontational card, and plenty to lose. He shouldn't view it as about himself or RMS as alternatives.
Free software and also OSS are all about building freely upon the work of others in a perpetually cooperative framework, and if he stressed that more then he'd be in hot water a lot less. My work as a contractor in the software industry suggests that companies understand cooperation very well indeed (cooperative agreements are signed by the dozen daily), and they also understand the costs of traditional marketing and distribution and support, so I don't think the OSS task is half as hard as he makes out. Making it look like he is a focus of confrontation just makes his own work harder.
Actually, if the Windows95 GUI is the norm then E does the job very nicely as a symbol for an enlightenment that goes way beyond the current state of play for the majority of computer users.
Of course it's all sex, sex, sex on the net... on the surface. What do you expect?
But the underlying renaissance is far more substantive, and on a par with that earlier renaissance. Spend a few weeks on the extropians and transhumanist mailing lists, and you'll see that important things like getting decent medical attention for one's family are but a tiny part of what lies ahead.
Here are a couple of URLs. Treat them as no more than significant points on a massive search tree:
That does it for me. ESR is now classed together with corporate lawyers and other baddies who care not about freedom but about legal technicalities. He seems to forget entirely that any clause he can overturn on an interpretation can equally be overturned yet again on appeal by roomfuls of suits that get paid for doing nothing else.
Freedom in software is not about clauses. It's concerned with the way you feel about things in the community, the way you contribute while using parts created by others, the way you cooperate with and trust other developers, the way you seek to empower others through the things you create. ESR has the wrong focus entirely, and in seeking to pass that focus on to industry he does us no favours.
Your first paragraph does not carry any justification. Furthermore, judging by the current state of the free software community, it is probably entirely incorrect.
Your second paragraph is largely false because earned wealth is almost entirely drained as profit. It is very rare to find more than a small fraction being reinvested in R&D, especially in *new* products rather than new versions, and in general, new ideas tend to arise at the pre-investment stage in most cases.
Your third paragraph is almost entirely a non sequitur. There isn't any scarcity of new ideas nor products in the free software community. Try monitoring freshmeat.net for a week, *every* week. The rate of arrival of new ideas is scary.
Your fourth paragraph just relies on the premise of your previous three, so I won't bother arguing it.
Quite a few reasonable arguments have been made here on Slashdot in support of commercial for-profit development, despite the in-trend being the opposite. Your "growing up" article hasn't really helped your cause, it seems to me, not necessarily because it's wrong but because it isn't argued soundly.
Don't put artists into some sort of ivory tower of exclusions. There is no universal law that says that artists *have* to get paid, nor software developers, nor anybody else.
The steamroller of electronic freedom isn't going to stop just because musicians want to make money. If they do nothing and just live in the pre-Internet world then they may indeed starve, but I expect that most will adapt to the new ways and possibilities. After all, they adapted easily enough to the new world of CD pressing when it suited them, not protesting about the price hike despite the lower cost of CD fabrication, and now they have a new challange. Nobody said that just because the music industry could bleed their customers dry over the past decades they must now continue doing so as a matter of right.
Of course, some say that poorly paid musicians in their agony write better material. Well, I rather doubt that, but one thing's for sure, and that is that the sooner the Sony, EMI, etc of this world stop earning 95% of the earnings from music the better. I have no sympathy for musicians that support that old system just to earn a few crumbs thrown to them by their masters.
There is no such thing as universal wrong or universal right --- everything takes place in a context, and requires a subjective value judgement by the parties concerned to determine if it is good or bad from their point of view.
How happy are the customers of Scriptics with their commercial and proprietary extensions to Tcl, and how unhappy are they with the lack of open source for those parts of the product? If there is more happiness than unhappiness then it must be OK or at least acceptable, FOR THEM. So be it. If they felt otherwise then they would not remain customers of John's just as we do not remain customers of Microsoft.
Since in the free software community we do not use those proprietary extensions and the rest of Tcl is free software, our requirement is satisfied. Apparently, their requirements are satisfied as well, by the standards of their own community.
People who want to change the values in their own community are progressives; those who want to impose their own local values on other communities are no better than the missionaries that (believing they were in the right) coercively eradicated almost all the tribal cultures worldwide not all that many decades ago.
Personally I think that proprietary software has no future at all outside of niche markets: the charms of free software are just too seductive, and the growth pattern is irrefutable. But let the drain away from proprietariness happen at its own pace (the drain is accelerating rapidly anyway), not by labelling everyone else as bad without exception.
The case of Scriptics is particularly interesting, because John is selling to a tiny niche market such as might be left over after The Big Drain. In this way, Scriptics might represent the future of bespoke development, while the free software community might represent the future of mainstream software.
Perhaps what the poster really demonstrated was that Rob should include in his terms and conditions a statement to the effect that all submitted material is placed in the public domain by the poster, and that consequently the poster loses any rights which he may have held over the material prior to the act of posting.
Without that, Rob could have a nightmare on his hands.
Why is everyone perpetuating the myth that free software *needs* the support and interest of the corporate world?
I would argue that it doesn't need any at all, because even without such support it will bloom into all the software niches and be completely unstoppable. There is no other way for it to go but up, because once software is freed it is always free and available, whereas commercial products die as soon as their developers and marketing staff lose interest. You just can't stop the body of free software growing by accretion, whatever you do.
No, it's not free software that needs the support of commerce, but merely the people of the free software community who like to see their camp being given a vote of confidence by well-respected corporates. Yes, that is nice to see, but it's not *needed*. GNU, BSD and Linux were heading into the stratosphere long before the Netscapes and Oracles of this world decided that free software was a good thing.
The big names did not make Linux good by signing up to it; Linux already was excellent, as were countless other products of the community. At best it has accelerated the already very rapid takeup, but it's far from being fundamental in any way. The credit has to go to the community of free software developers and users. Corporates are merely sensible enough to recognize a pearl beyond price when they seen one, and to understand that there is little point in arguing with a tidal wave.
Your morality, reality and purpose are not necessarily identical to mine or anyone else's, as all three of these are subjective. If you insist that these are walls and hence universals, then they most definitely need to be knocked down, otherwise we are not free but slaves to those whose morality, reality and purpose those walls happen to define and serve.
MP4 misses one of the key points of the MP3 revolution: that the music industry has repeatedly ignored the call for massive reductions in the price of music over the past 10 years despite the dramatic drop in the cost of electronic replication, so now music listeners are taking matters into their own hands and reducing the communal cost of buying CDs at the current extortionate prices. It's not happening as an organized protest or revolution, but the effect is the same. MP4 is a controlled format and so cannot fill the same niche as an instrument of "people-power".
If the industry wants to stop the "unauthorized" MP3 scene (as opposed to the mp3.com-style one) they could do so at a stroke by reducing the price of CDs to a dollar apiece. They would still make a fortune because people would buy massively more CDs than they do now, but no, there's no chance of that happening because they're basically dinosaurs with a peanut for a brain.
This is a free market in action, with new technology constantly changing the rules. If the industry doesn't want to compete with the new lost-cost possibilities brought about by technology then it deserves to die, and with it those musicians who insist on playing the old game at the old prices instead of adapting to the new environment.
That's not the only driving force of course, but it's a strong one.
I think the original query wasn't questioning the use of efficient access procedures so much as use of an RDBMS, because of all the other baggage that comes with the territory.
Whether it is a good idea or not depends on whether the disadvantages of complexity and lack of transparency outweigh the advantages of clean access API and high flexibility. The answer does not always favour RDBMSs because high flexibility can be irrelevant in many cases, especially in an informal web environment. A combination of DBM files and directory-based structuring can often provide both rapid access and a lot of flexibility while keeping complexity very low and transparency very high. Furthermore, this can interface trivially with standard file distribution mechanisms to scale the whole thing up to thousands of servers if you feel the urge, and without introducing single points of failure that are almost inevitable with commit-based solutions.
It is a mistake to head blindly down the RDBMS route without seriously considering that there are strings attached. Use them where it is *necessary*, not where the tempting illusion of a simple SQL API makes it appear merely convenient.
"Safeguarding" that information by hiding the interface specs is pointless, because it's only a matter of time before the binaries are disassembled or even decompiled. There hasn't been much happening on that front in the past because we've had sources for everything, but if binary drivers become commonplace then you can bet your last dollar that we'll have top-notch tools to do the required work for us soon.
There are at least three very solid reasons why this will (and must) happen:
1. The kernel is not a protected space and this makes it extremely sensitive to programming faults (driver experts are not necessarily total kernel experts, and most are human too). Faults need to be fixed rapidly, and corporate teams cannot always do that because the resource may be committed to another project. Furthermore, if the fault is actually a design fault then corporates may not be keen to acknowledge that they've made a large balls'up, and sometimes don't even acknowledge that there *is* a fault if it's not a showstopper. That is not adequate.
2. The lack of access protection in the kernel makes it a security risk to have unreviewed code there. It is really easy to pop a cracker-infected module into the kernel and unwittingly compromise the operating system's security in just about any way the cracker likes. This is so scary that this reason alone is enough to make binary drivers complete anathema for many.
3. You buy powerful I/O hardware to offload some of the CPU's work onto it, not for the manufacturer to offload some of his hardware processing onto your CPU. If your CPU seems to be spending too many cycles in the driver, the first port of call is to see what the driver is doing.
These are powerful reasons. Manufacturers like Creative don't seem to understand these driving forces at all at present, but in time they will. They will have no option, because fighting the way that the community does things will be commercial suicide in a market that they are trying to attract, not disaffect.
This is how OSS is meant to work
on
Linux 2.2.1
·
· Score: 1
I think you've missed the point of OSS completely. Let me fill you in.
1) The main developer or team put together a release. They hammer the crap out of it as best they can, but they are relatively few, and catch only some of the bugs.
2) The rest of the community downloads it and uses it. We rarely do testing as such, but there are bazillions of us, so a lot more bugs get flushed out.
3) The bugs get reported, fixed, and 'round again we go.
It's very simple and very effective, and we're damn lucky to have primary developers that respond so quickly to bug reports and issue fixed releases with an efficiency unparalleled in industry.
And you're complaining that the process works so well. Sigh...
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it appears that no large commercial RDBMS available today is unconditionally stable, and Oracle is representative of the genre. If your application is database-intensive, you should expect to see bugs come out of the woodwork every now and then. With Oracle under Solaris, a bug a month seems to be par for the course, according to some senior DBAs with long experience in bug chasing. I wouldn't expect it to be very different under Linux: on the one hand Linux has far fewer known bugs than Solaris, but on the other hand Oracle under Linux has undergone far less testing in the field, so perhaps they even out.
... Those that don't want a Unix server on the premises but have money to burn should head straight for the Oracle8i Appliance, a turnkey box that runs Oracle native rather than on top of an O/S. Well, we all know that there's an O/S under there somewhere, but hey, anything's better than NT. And turnkey appliances are cool for standard applications, as proved again and again by the lovely NetApp.
The thing that really annoys me about Oracle though is that they don't publish their list of known bugs; instead, you have to be bitten by a bug first before they'll admit that they know about it and supply you with a patch. If you ask me, that's an approach that is less than totally customer-friendly.
As for NT, don't even joke about it
In any event, politician's lives are not meant to be cushy. A little pain in their positions of power can have a salutory effect in bringing them back in touch with the real world and distancing them from the idea that they are gods who can do no wrong.
If most of the Internet is used up on sex, it indicates that the majority of people want sex, so who are you to say that it's wrong, FOR THEM? Perhaps it stems from politicians having stigmatized it for so long that the floodgates have now opened.
In any event, none of that matters as long as the Internet is also available for more productive things as well, and it is. Check out those two URLs I gave above to give yourself a birdseye view of the positive side of Internet communities and how they are gearing up for very practical advances for mankind.
You have missed entirely the fundamental point that my morality and other views based on subjective value judgements are right FOR ME and only for me. If I were to seek to apply them to others (such as by the gun-toting methods that you suggest) then I would be guilty of the worst crime in the individualist's book, which is coercion of my worldview onto others. I don't do that.
In contrast, you do seek to do precisely what you argue against, since you believe in universal walls and seek to apply them to me despite the fact that your beliefs are not mine. You are brandishing the gun, not I.
A friend in the computer graphics industry tells me that a lot of their main commercial tools are starting to get ported to Linux now.
It wasn't just the effect of Titanic; the industry is well aware of the worldwide trend towards Linux, and their artists and designers curse the lousiness of W95 and NT as a professional platform every bit as strongly as do software engineers.
Seeing how well it worked out, both technically and financially, their competitors are gearing up now to do likewise. (I couldn't possibly say who I heard that from. :-)
Thanks Dastardly, that had me worried for a few minutes. False alarm then.
Hmmm, it could be on topic if the alleged problem is not acknowledged by AMD and makes it into the K7.
Please give URLs + Usenet references where those problems have been discussed, to avoid starting a rumour without foundation.
I've just ordered a Spectra 333 from Evergreen as a quick way of upgrading a legacy P100. It's basically a 333MHz K6-2 on a module that fits into the Pentium socket 7 on non-K6-compatible motherboards. Very slick, and a good alternative to swapping in an entirely new motherboard which sometimes just isn't possible, eg. on industrial PICMG or embedded cards.
... I hope. :-)]
This kind of backward-compatible technology might solve some of the problems mentioned in this thread. If the K7 takes off, it'll be only a matter of time before somebody does something similar to the Spectra for it, so any investment one makes in computers now isn't necessarily lost when one wants to use the next generation of CPU.
If the Spectra turns out bad, I'll post a problem report followup here. [It seemed worth taking the chance as Evergreen stake their business on compatibility
I sure hope you're right. He needs to be a little more careful about the message he sends to the community and to the commercial world, in my opinion. There is nothing to be gained by playing a confrontational card, and plenty to lose. He shouldn't view it as about himself or RMS as alternatives.
Free software and also OSS are all about building freely upon the work of others in a perpetually cooperative framework, and if he stressed that more then he'd be in hot water a lot less. My work as a contractor in the software industry suggests that companies understand cooperation very well indeed (cooperative agreements are signed by the dozen daily), and they also understand the costs of traditional marketing and distribution and support, so I don't think the OSS task is half as hard as he makes out. Making it look like he is a focus of confrontation just makes his own work harder.
Oops, I seem to have missed out the while() around the "classic C phrase". It should of course have been
:-)
while (*dest++ = *src++);
Maybe it's so classic that I've forgotten it.
Actually, if the Windows95 GUI is the norm then E does the job very nicely as a symbol for an enlightenment that goes way beyond the current state of play for the majority of computer users.
Of course it's all sex, sex, sex on the net ... on the surface. What do you expect?
But the underlying renaissance is far more substantive, and on a par with that earlier renaissance. Spend a few weeks on the extropians and transhumanist mailing lists, and you'll see that important things like getting decent medical attention for one's family are but a tiny part of what lies ahead.
Here are a couple of URLs. Treat them as no more than significant points on a massive search tree:
http://www.extropy.org/
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/
That does it for me. ESR is now classed together with corporate lawyers and other baddies who care not about freedom but about legal technicalities. He seems to forget entirely that any clause he can overturn on an interpretation can equally be overturned yet again on appeal by roomfuls of suits that get paid for doing nothing else.
Freedom in software is not about clauses. It's concerned with the way you feel about things in the community, the way you contribute while using parts created by others, the way you cooperate with and trust other developers, the way you seek to empower others through the things you create. ESR has the wrong focus entirely, and in seeking to pass that focus on to industry he does us no favours.
Your first paragraph does not carry any justification. Furthermore, judging by the current state of the free software community, it is probably entirely incorrect.
Your second paragraph is largely false because earned wealth is almost entirely drained as profit. It is very rare to find more than a small fraction being reinvested in R&D, especially in *new* products rather than new versions, and in general, new ideas tend to arise at the pre-investment stage in most cases.
Your third paragraph is almost entirely a non sequitur. There isn't any scarcity of new ideas nor products in the free software community. Try monitoring freshmeat.net for a week, *every* week. The rate of arrival of new ideas is scary.
Your fourth paragraph just relies on the premise of your previous three, so I won't bother arguing it.
Quite a few reasonable arguments have been made here on Slashdot in support of commercial for-profit development, despite the in-trend being the opposite. Your "growing up" article hasn't really helped your cause, it seems to me, not necessarily because it's wrong but because it isn't argued soundly.
Don't put artists into some sort of ivory tower of exclusions. There is no universal law that says that artists *have* to get paid, nor software developers, nor anybody else.
The steamroller of electronic freedom isn't going to stop just because musicians want to make money. If they do nothing and just live in the pre-Internet world then they may indeed starve, but I expect that most will adapt to the new ways and possibilities. After all, they adapted easily enough to the new world of CD pressing when it suited them, not protesting about the price hike despite the lower cost of CD fabrication, and now they have a new challange. Nobody said that just because the music industry could bleed their customers dry over the past decades they must now continue doing so as a matter of right.
Of course, some say that poorly paid musicians in their agony write better material. Well, I rather doubt that, but one thing's for sure, and that is that the sooner the Sony, EMI, etc of this world stop earning 95% of the earnings from music the better. I have no sympathy for musicians that support that old system just to earn a few crumbs thrown to them by their masters.
There is no such thing as universal wrong or universal right --- everything takes place in a context, and requires a subjective value judgement by the parties concerned to determine if it is good or bad from their point of view.
How happy are the customers of Scriptics with their commercial and proprietary extensions to Tcl, and how unhappy are they with the lack of open source for those parts of the product? If there is more happiness than unhappiness then it must be OK or at least acceptable, FOR THEM. So be it. If they felt otherwise then they would not remain customers of John's just as we do not remain customers of Microsoft.
Since in the free software community we do not use those proprietary extensions and the rest of Tcl is free software, our requirement is satisfied. Apparently, their requirements are satisfied as well, by the standards of their own community.
People who want to change the values in their own community are progressives; those who want to impose their own local values on other communities are no better than the missionaries that (believing they were in the right) coercively eradicated almost all the tribal cultures worldwide not all that many decades ago.
Personally I think that proprietary software has no future at all outside of niche markets: the charms of free software are just too seductive, and the growth pattern is irrefutable. But let the drain away from proprietariness happen at its own pace (the drain is accelerating rapidly anyway), not by labelling everyone else as bad without exception.
The case of Scriptics is particularly interesting, because John is selling to a tiny niche market such as might be left over after The Big Drain. In this way, Scriptics might represent the future of bespoke development, while the free software community might represent the future of mainstream software.
This is worth observing without bias.
Perhaps what the poster really demonstrated was that Rob should include in his terms and conditions a statement to the effect that all submitted material is placed in the public domain by the poster, and that consequently the poster loses any rights which he may have held over the material prior to the act of posting.
Without that, Rob could have a nightmare on his hands.
Your point is quite good but your example isn't phrased in programming terms. It might be better if you gave the example of the classic C phrase
*dest++ = *src++;
which is the most easily comprehended form for C-literate people, being turned into
do
{
ch = *src;
src++;
*dest = ch;
dest++;
}
while (ch != '\0');
just to pad out the program statistics, but unfortunately also making it less maintainable and often slower.
I hope it never comes to that.
Why is everyone perpetuating the myth that free software *needs* the support and interest of the corporate world?
I would argue that it doesn't need any at all, because even without such support it will bloom into all the software niches and be completely unstoppable. There is no other way for it to go but up, because once software is freed it is always free and available, whereas commercial products die as soon as their developers and marketing staff lose interest. You just can't stop the body of free software growing by accretion, whatever you do.
No, it's not free software that needs the support of commerce, but merely the people of the free software community who like to see their camp being given a vote of confidence by well-respected corporates. Yes, that is nice to see, but it's not *needed*. GNU, BSD and Linux were heading into the stratosphere long before the Netscapes and Oracles of this world decided that free software was a good thing.
The big names did not make Linux good by signing up to it; Linux already was excellent, as were countless other products of the community. At best it has accelerated the already very rapid takeup, but it's far from being fundamental in any way. The credit has to go to the community of free software developers and users. Corporates are merely sensible enough to recognize a pearl beyond price when they seen one, and to understand that there is little point in arguing with a tidal wave.
Your morality, reality and purpose are not necessarily identical to mine or anyone else's, as all three of these are subjective. If you insist that these are walls and hence universals, then they most definitely need to be knocked down, otherwise we are not free but slaves to those whose morality, reality and purpose those walls happen to define and serve.
MP4 misses one of the key points of the MP3 revolution: that the music industry has repeatedly ignored the call for massive reductions in the price of music over the past 10 years despite the dramatic drop in the cost of electronic replication, so now music listeners are taking matters into their own hands and reducing the communal cost of buying CDs at the current extortionate prices. It's not happening as an organized protest or revolution, but the effect is the same. MP4 is a controlled format and so cannot fill the same niche as an instrument of "people-power".
If the industry wants to stop the "unauthorized" MP3 scene (as opposed to the mp3.com-style one) they could do so at a stroke by reducing the price of CDs to a dollar apiece. They would still make a fortune because people would buy massively more CDs than they do now, but no, there's no chance of that happening because they're basically dinosaurs with a peanut for a brain.
This is a free market in action, with new technology constantly changing the rules. If the industry doesn't want to compete with the new lost-cost possibilities brought about by technology then it deserves to die, and with it those musicians who insist on playing the old game at the old prices instead of adapting to the new environment.
That's not the only driving force of course, but it's a strong one.
I think the original query wasn't questioning the use of efficient access procedures so much as use of an RDBMS, because of all the other baggage that comes with the territory.
Whether it is a good idea or not depends on whether the disadvantages of complexity and lack of transparency outweigh the advantages of clean access API and high flexibility. The answer does not always favour RDBMSs because high flexibility can be irrelevant in many cases, especially in an informal web environment. A combination of DBM files and directory-based structuring can often provide both rapid access and a lot of flexibility while keeping complexity very low and transparency very high. Furthermore, this can interface trivially with standard file distribution mechanisms to scale the whole thing up to thousands of servers if you feel the urge, and without introducing single points of failure that are almost inevitable with commit-based solutions.
It is a mistake to head blindly down the RDBMS route without seriously considering that there are strings attached. Use them where it is *necessary*, not where the tempting illusion of a simple SQL API makes it appear merely convenient.
"Safeguarding" that information by hiding the interface specs is pointless, because it's only a matter of time before the binaries are disassembled or even decompiled. There hasn't been much happening on that front in the past because we've had sources for everything, but if binary drivers become commonplace then you can bet your last dollar that we'll have top-notch tools to do the required work for us soon.
There are at least three very solid reasons why this will (and must) happen:
1. The kernel is not a protected space and this makes it extremely sensitive to programming faults (driver experts are not necessarily total kernel experts, and most are human too). Faults need to be fixed rapidly, and corporate teams cannot always do that because the resource may be committed to another project. Furthermore, if the fault is actually a design fault then corporates may not be keen to acknowledge that they've made a large balls'up, and sometimes don't even acknowledge that there *is* a fault if it's not a showstopper. That is not adequate.
2. The lack of access protection in the kernel makes it a security risk to have unreviewed code there. It is really easy to pop a cracker-infected module into the kernel and unwittingly compromise the operating system's security in just about any way the cracker likes. This is so scary that this reason alone is enough to make binary drivers complete anathema for many.
3. You buy powerful I/O hardware to offload some of the CPU's work onto it, not for the manufacturer to offload some of his hardware processing onto your CPU. If your CPU seems to be spending too many cycles in the driver, the first port of call is to see what the driver is doing.
These are powerful reasons. Manufacturers like Creative don't seem to understand these driving forces at all at present, but in time they will. They will have no option, because fighting the way that the community does things will be commercial suicide in a market that they are trying to attract, not disaffect.
I think you've missed the point of OSS completely. Let me fill you in.
...
1) The main developer or team put together a release. They hammer the crap out of it as best they can, but they are relatively few, and catch only some of the bugs.
2) The rest of the community downloads it and uses it. We rarely do testing as such, but there are bazillions of us, so a lot more bugs get flushed out.
3) The bugs get reported, fixed, and 'round again we go.
It's very simple and very effective, and we're damn lucky to have primary developers that respond so quickly to bug reports and issue fixed releases with an efficiency unparalleled in industry.
And you're complaining that the process works so well. Sigh