His latest lie? He's now saying that I've claimed he's a Microsoft shill. I've never said anything one way or another on that topic. His tin-foil hat is too tight - or he can't keep his lies straight.
He's no friend of the community.
This court ruling was a win. To say this:
It clearly favors an expansive patent system, assuming that new technologies must fall within the scope of patentable subject matter unless there's legislation that sets limits
flies against reality.
So why does Mueller continue to lie and spread fud? It's what he does - he's a lobbyist. Not a programmer.
You forgot us normal programmers, free software guys or not. Who wants to come up with a neat design, get himself or his company into trouble for it, and be forced to go back and tear out that neat design again?
That's because Mueller doesn't give 2 shits about normal programmers, or free software, except when it's convenient for him. Remember, he tried to pull a McBride on Oracle to get them to cave into the crybaby former owner of MySql (the money lost in delaying the Oracle rescue of Sun is that much money that won't be available for supporting programmers)
Major database players, including HP and IBM, have already reportedly taken advantage of the delay to win over customers from Sun.
In the meantime, Sun continues its downward spiral. Late Tuesday, the company confirmed that it would lay off another 3,000 employees, about 10 percent of its total workforce, over the next year. This latest round is in addition to 6,000 jobs cuts announced almost a year ago as part of the company's restructuring plan.
That's 3,000 people who lost jobs in part because of assholes like Nueller/Muller.
3,000 jobs. This is not someone who cares about programmers. This is someone who cares about being a lobbyist - and you can be sure he's looking out for #1.
Get rid of those affiliate marketing schemes and the financial incentive for click-jacking, etc., goes way down.
Malware author: "If I can get credit for sending traffic to your site, then what's to stop me from infecting as many sites as I can and making money off it?"
Want malware to drop? Boycott anyone who uses affiliate marketing.
History shows, once again, that you're wrong. If the comments were truly insightful, how come they're STILL ranked as flamebait and trolling? There's been 4 days for people to mod them back up, and nobody does - for the simple reason that people can read, and they see that he's a liar.
Here, I'll say it again. Florian Mueller is a liar. He got caught. People moderated him accordingly.
The best part? the more I look, the more I find to debunk. I'm not letting this go, because this guy is toxic to F/LOSS.
Just because a feature is there doesn't mean it's necessarily wise to use it. Most well-run communities and websites avoid this kind of highly disruptive account removal for everything short of one-shot accounts created purely for entirely unrelated commercial spam. In fact, many avoid it even then. What's more, there's plausible suggestions those running Groklaw are aware that other options are available and have used them to quietly disable well-known accounts whose total removal would draw too much community attention.
To the contrary, its so effective that all sites should adopt it. Since it's so effective that I'm going to write up generic code so that anyone who wants to incorporate that sort of feature in their site can. Screw the spammers.
when he tried to troll slashdot this weekend and got called on it
Two slight issues. Firstly, he made actual, reasonable claims and a consistent argument based on these claims. (You may not agree with them, but they're not exactly spectacularly unusual.) Secondly, none of the comments by you have actually taken on any of these claims.
Florian Mueller lied. He got caught lying. He tried to weasel-word his way out. Nobody was buying it. Unlike politicians or "industry analysts", there are plenty of us on slashdot who know he's lost it. What a n00b.
He couldn't accept that people are just fed up with his attempts to insert himself into issues for all the wrong reasons.
Someone upset that you're spreading bogus FUD about him being part of a Secret Microsoft Conspiracy? How shocking. I've seen Secret Microsoft Conspiracies, and this supposed conspiracy has the small issue that it's not actually in their interests at all. Indeed, Florian appears to be in support of a whole bunch of stuff that's subtly but indirectly harmful to their strategic goals, like stronger anti-trust enforcement and undermining software patents.
Where have I said that? You're such a liar.
The "conspiracy" that I see is two-fold:
Mueller spreads FUD and lies as part of his agenda of self-promotion
Mueller spreads FUD and lies to try to get an advantage for those he works with/for
As far as I'm concerned, and I know I'm not alone, Mueller's actions wrt Oracle/Sun could best be characterized as a "buy us out" attempt, same as SCO tried with IBM, same as Turbo Hercules with IBM.
As for his claims to be FOSS-friendly, I'll be debunking them. Hang around - you might decide to change sides.
Maynard f*ed it up. People (including me) were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because we knew that Hercules != Turbo Hercules.
But Maynard kept insisting, despite IBM not ever sending any sort of notice to you, that they were attacking Hercules. Reminds me of the words from the song "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfeield:
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
If you don't know the recent history and you don't know the players, don't assume you're one of them when someone makes a comment. You're not, and you just end up looking stupid.
Even if you assume a 50-50 distribution in the general population, it won't be in this specific problem because of identical twins (1 in 250 births). That means that since you have one boy, there is a 1 in 250 chance that he's part of a pair of identical twins.
In other words, there will be a 0.2% bias towards a second boy, as opposed to what you would expect without the "twin effect".
Now compare him with everyone else - they've all got face hair: http://www.codethinked.com/post/2007/12/06/The-Programmer-Dress-Code.aspx
Edsger Dijkstra (come on...),
Alan Kay (oop),
Bjarne Stroustrup (c++),
Brian Kernighan (unix, c), Dennis Ritchie (c),
Ken Thompson (unix),
John McCarthy (lisp),
Richard Stallman (gnu),
Steve Wozniak (apple),
Larry Wall (perl),
Alan Cox (linux kernel),
James Gosling (java),
Grady Booch (uml),
"Maddog" Jon Hall (linux intl),
Manuel Blum (cryptography),
Robin Milner (ml),
Philip Wadler (haskell, xquery),
Jaron Lanier (virtual reality),
Niklaus Wirth (Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon),
C.A.R. Hoare (quicksort),
Robert Tarjan (splay trees),
Dan Bricklin (visicalc),
Phil Katz (pkzip),
Jon Postel (rfc),
Larry Ellson (oracle).
Local police station used that, a guy spent months messing around with informants, cops girlfriends (awkward when you can hear both the girlfriend and the wife leaving messages for the same cop), etc.
Arrested, charged, convicted, probation... does it again!
Not so hard to do with web platforms, where "pushing it out" means changing a file or two on a server.
Of course, we've seen (here on slashdot) what happens when you try to do that too often... but most of us have probably been in a situation where we're told to shell into the box and manually edit a file "right now!!!" with a best-guess way to stop something from being a problem, even if it's only to disable certain functionality temporarily while you work out a real fix.
Repeat until
a. V is dead.
b. V gives credible information
Either V dies (most likely) or V makes a lucky guess (it can happen - during questioning, an innocent person may pick up enough clues, along with what they have seen but didn't recognize as suspicious before, to figure things out.)
So if V lives, he or she "MUST have been guilty" even though they weren't.
But like I said, do your "expose". I'm sure it will be as insightful as your claim that IBM is attacking Hercules, which was proven to be a lie. People here get that Turbo Hercules is not Hercules. Too bad that you and your pals have gotten Jay so worked up that he's now finished in the IT field, but you don't care.
Go for it. But first, I would suggest you download a copy of geeklog (which is the open-source CMS that groklaw and thousands of other sites run on) and play around with it a bit, and try out the various plug-ins available, before shooting your mouth off yet again.
After all, you were buying into the whole bullshit of "when a user is deleted their comments are assigned to the anonymous user it must be a plot", which indicates someone who is incredibly naive when it comes to managing linked lists (which is what comments are).
I have complained to/. management over this organized misuse of mod points and hijacking of a neutral, opinion-forming platform (which is what/. has been for a long time) by another community that certainly has a lot of overlap (hence they have mod points here).
You really are new here. Only a couple of hundred posts, and you expect that people won't don-mod you when you spout FUD. BTW - where does it say that slashdot is a "neutral, opinion-forming platform"? Your misuse of words like neutral and non-discriminatory will be the subject of a future story - just letting you know:-) There is no such thing as neutral, and the slashdot crowd certainly makes no claim to being neutral.
Also, if I were them, I'd block lying pieces of crap and astro-turfers too. This is not "censorship" any more than it would be if the Jewish Defense League refuses to print the KKK's manifesto. In the end, the site editor is the final authority. Don't like it, start your own. That's what freedom of speech is about - the right for you to start your own, not the obligation for anyone else to help you or even listen to you.
If you actually get around to setting up a copy of geeklog, you'll find that there's a cookie variable just for the user IP. Don't take my word for it - try it.
Now scroll down a bit further on the document page - Miscellaneous: IP Lookup. There's a lot more that can be done with that.
For example, to keep trolls and spammers from realizing that their posts are now hidden from regular users, a pseudo-select statement would be "SELECT comments FROM comment_table WHERE story_id=$story_id AND deleted = 0 OR client_ip=$client_ip",
It's the same "mark records for deletion but don't really delete them until the table is packed" as used by dBASE way back in the 80s.
Anyone can implement this with with any cms with a bit of work. It doesn't suddenly make it nefarious - it lowers the amount of repeat spamming and astroturfing, because when astroturfers realize that nobody is getting their message, they go elsewhere.
So, like I said at the beginning, go for it. I'll be watching.
You don't need to use the mysql client libraries to access the underlying file data correctly, or to write your own server and client that also access the underlying file data.
The only issue is file locking, and that can be dealt with easily enough:-)
You don't have to take the database engine offline to use the data with a different database engine. The actual data is just files or raw partitions, and as long as you make it rw to both processes, there's no problem.
But again, if you're talking about proprietary databases or a proprietary version of mysql put out by oracle at some point, it doesn't change anything.
There is nothing to stop anyone from writing a closed-source program that can read and write mysql data formats, and they'd be free to distribute that program in binary form only. There's also nothing to stop someone from writing a database driver for any existing database product, closed or open, to use the same data. Or they could do an open one... their call. As long as I have the file format (and even if I don't - I've had to do data recovery on stuff that was completely undocumented and the vendor was no longer in business) I can figure out how to access it. And if I can do it, so can others.
So when it comes to the closed-source marketplace, the same economic pressures that were there before (keep the price low enough that you don't give your customers an incentive to switch) are still at work. It's not just MySQL or Oracle, it's MySQL or Oracle or PostgreSQL or NoSQL or DB2 or any other product.
Oracle has an incentive to switch them to a more expensive product - but only to the extent that there are no other competing products in terms of price/features - and there are almost always competing products. The whole MySQL anti-trust thing was seen by many of us as extortion, plain and simple, and we have looong memories.
This is not going away this week, this month, or this year.
This effectively meant that, like with proprietary software, one company had control over it and free power to dictate pricing and terms to many of its users. Given that Oracle had a competing, more profitable product and the two together made up a large chunk of their market, the complaints about the takeover were justified for the exact same reason that they would be if MySQL wasn't open source at all.)
Everyone is free to fork it, or to use a different product, either free or proprietary.
Everyone is also free to use it. The ONLY restriction on it is redistribution - if you make changes, you have to distribute your changes.
Now if you don't want to redistribute your changes but you want to redistribute the database product, that's another story entirely - but then, since that's outside the GPL, it has nothing to do with open source whatsoever. So you then have to look at the proprietary database market.
There are plenty of proprietary database products out there, so there was never an anti-trust concern over MySQL - Mueller was just shoveling FUD.
Firstly, due to the way they've set up the site, when a user's account is terminated for disagreeing they effectively become an unperson: all their past comments are retroactively attributed to Anonymous.
Secondly, they have been known to block people for disagreement in such a way that they can't tell they've been blocked - as far as they can see, their comments are still there and visible.
Again, nothing nefarious. This is an anti-spam provision. Spammer posts some spam, you delete it, but because it's tied to an IP, when they go to check up on their spam, it's "still there" so they don't re-post over and over and over. Then, because their spam apparently is bringing 0 results, they go elsewhere.
Thirdly, any comment asking about or commenting on a ban is removed, so if you just read Groklaw you never hear about any of this.
Having to explain it would clue in the more clueless spammers... but since it's not unique, it's no big deal to mention it here.
The real story is Florian Mueller's latest FUD campaign hits a brick wall, when he tried to troll slashdot this weekend and got called on it, then started whining. He couldn't accept that people are just fed up with his attempts to insert himself into issues for all the wrong reasons.
Well-reasoned? Not when they've been shown to be lies.
Example: the claim that IBM has attacked Hercules (the open source project).
IBM has not had ANY communication wit the project maintainer whatsoever. If Mayrand has his panties in a knot, it's because he bought into the FUD, because IBM has not said a word to him.
And IBM has not violated their pledge in any way. They have not sued anyone. They have not sent a cease and desist letter to anyone. They have not even mentioned the existence of the patents to any member of the Hercules OSS project.
What would IBM possibly have to gain from suing anyone involved in the Hercules project? They have already taken all the action they need - they refused to license z/OS to run on it.
Neither IBM, nor Google, nor any other company who has made a similar statement has said they would actively SUPPORT a project that they felt infringed on their IP. All they have said is that they would take a passive approach and not sue. And that is exactly what they have done.
In the 10+ years of it's existence, has IBM ever sent any member of the Hercules project a cease and desist letter? Have they ever actually (not in someone's imagination) threatened a lawsuit? No. But you and a few others are trying to paint IBM's refusal to actively support a direct competitor as some sort of 'attack' on open source, and it is just plain dishonest.
Mueller has continually confabulated Hercules (the open-source emulator) and Turbo Hercules (the attempt to extract a license from IBM to sell boxes running zOS on unsupported hardware).
That first letter only talks about licensing z/OS to TurboHercules customers, which has absolutely nothing to do with patents. They were asking for permission to let non-IBM customers run z/OS. They were NOT asking IBM to grant licenses to emulate z/Architecture.
In the second letter to IBM, in the paragraph starting at the bottom of the first page, they make the quote I posted above
'In the unlikely event that IBM believes that the Hercules open source project infringes any IBM intellectual property, we kindly ask you too add any such property to the portfolio of patents that IBM has already pledged for the free use of the open source community'.
So far you have denied both that the statement says they find it 'unlikely' that IBM would think it has IP in that area, and that they ask to be able to use said IP for free. We must be speaking different languages.
There is never a mention of any offer to license said IP on FRAND or any other terms.
And where, exactly, is the 'threat' to an OSS project that you and Maynard keep going on about? All any reasonable person sees in that exchange of letters is IBM declining to SUPPORT a direct competitor (not an OSS project), and, when pressed, give a detailed account of WHY they won't support them.
As far as I can tell, Mueller trolled the EC to try to get a buy-out out of Oracle for Widenius, and he's now doing the same thing to try to get a buy-out out of IBM for Turbo Hercules. The parallels are uncanny. Those who disagree with him are "people who if they're not IBM employees are at least very close to IBM and very much informed."
What did he expect when he posts to a tech site? It's not MySpace. If he wants to make baseless conspiracy accusations, he deserves public ridicule.
IBM supports some open source projects, yes, but only where they improve its profits.
... and we wouldn't have it any other way. If you believe, like I do, that open source will win out in the end, then you know that as time goes on, more of the "animal kingdom" of software will be open source, and businesses will still find ways to profit from it.
His agenda is simple - disrupt until he gets his (or his client's) way. We saw that with the Oracle rescue of Sun. We're seeing it with the current campaign of lies over Turbo Hercules/Hercules. His goal is always the same - to insert himself into issues, to be "a player."
Too bad for him that he melted down so badly over the weekend. The man has zero credibility at this point. Just another net-kook, like Maureen O'Gara.
Slashdot Mirror
Make no mistake about it folks - Muller/Mueller is a shill.
This is the same lobbyist who helped delay the Oracle rescue of Sun. The delay cost 3,000 additional jobs over and above the 6,000 that were originally slated.
This is the same lobbyist who is trying to pull a Darl McBride on IBM for Turbo Hercules - and who "complained to the establishment" when slashdotters down-modded his bullsh*t.
This is the same lobbyist who is now threatening to "expose" groklaw because astroturfers got the boot.
His latest lie? He's now saying that I've claimed he's a Microsoft shill. I've never said anything one way or another on that topic. His tin-foil hat is too tight - or he can't keep his lies straight.
He's no friend of the community.
This court ruling was a win. To say this:
flies against reality.
So why does Mueller continue to lie and spread fud? It's what he does - he's a lobbyist. Not a programmer.
That's because Mueller doesn't give 2 shits about normal programmers, or free software, except when it's convenient for him. Remember, he tried to pull a McBride on Oracle to get them to cave into the crybaby former owner of MySql (the money lost in delaying the Oracle rescue of Sun is that much money that won't be available for supporting programmers)
That's 3,000 people who lost jobs in part because of assholes like Nueller/Muller.
and he's now trying to pull a McBride on IBM on behalf of his buddies at Turbo Hercules .
And also he wants to "expose" groklaw because they exposed the Turbo Hercules FUD for what it was.
3,000 jobs. This is not someone who cares about programmers. This is someone who cares about being a lobbyist - and you can be sure he's looking out for #1.
Get rid of those affiliate marketing schemes and the financial incentive for click-jacking, etc., goes way down.
Malware author: "If I can get credit for sending traffic to your site, then what's to stop me from infecting as many sites as I can and making money off it?"
Want malware to drop? Boycott anyone who uses affiliate marketing.
It's bad when a 2-paragraph rant is more informative than the 10-paragraph article.
I know - I've got a Motorola v635 that's got 4 years and 4,796 hours of talk time on it.
The things it's been through (including someone else intentionally smashing it on a concrete sidewalk), no other phone would have survived.
I'm coming up for contract renewal time ... I've only owned Motorola all these years - I'm loath to change.
Here, I'll say it again. Florian Mueller is a liar. He got caught. People moderated him accordingly.
The best part? the more I look, the more I find to debunk. I'm not letting this go, because this guy is toxic to F/LOSS.
You're so paranoid it isn't funny. Here's what really happened. Maynard made an ass of himself. He got his account locked. Tough.
To the contrary, its so effective that all sites should adopt it. Since it's so effective that I'm going to write up generic code so that anyone who wants to incorporate that sort of feature in their site can. Screw the spammers.
Florian Mueller lied. He got caught lying. He tried to weasel-word his way out. Nobody was buying it. Unlike politicians or "industry analysts", there are plenty of us on slashdot who know he's lost it. What a n00b.
Where have I said that? You're such a liar.
The "conspiracy" that I see is two-fold:
As far as I'm concerned, and I know I'm not alone, Mueller's actions wrt Oracle/Sun could best be characterized as a "buy us out" attempt, same as SCO tried with IBM, same as Turbo Hercules with IBM.
As for his claims to be FOSS-friendly, I'll be debunking them. Hang around - you might decide to change sides.
I was referring to Jay Maynard, you ID-10-T.
Maynard f*ed it up. People (including me) were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because we knew that Hercules != Turbo Hercules.
But Maynard kept insisting, despite IBM not ever sending any sort of notice to you, that they were attacking Hercules. Reminds me of the words from the song "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfeield:
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
If you don't know the recent history and you don't know the players, don't assume you're one of them when someone makes a comment. You're not, and you just end up looking stupid.
In other words, there will be a 0.2% bias towards a second boy, as opposed to what you would expect without the "twin effect".
http://www.codethinked.com/image.axd?picture=WindowsLiveWriter/TheProgrammerDressCode_10D17/knuth_don_2f874343-5a7b-4b33-823a-b18a84849447.jpg
Now compare him with everyone else - they've all got face hair: ...),
Alan Kay (oop),
Bjarne Stroustrup (c++),
Brian Kernighan (unix, c), Dennis Ritchie (c),
Ken Thompson (unix),
John McCarthy (lisp),
Richard Stallman (gnu),
Steve Wozniak (apple),
Larry Wall (perl),
Alan Cox (linux kernel),
James Gosling (java),
Grady Booch (uml),
"Maddog" Jon Hall (linux intl),
Manuel Blum (cryptography),
Robin Milner (ml),
Philip Wadler (haskell, xquery),
Jaron Lanier (virtual reality),
Niklaus Wirth (Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon),
C.A.R. Hoare (quicksort),
Robert Tarjan (splay trees),
Dan Bricklin (visicalc),
Phil Katz (pkzip),
Jon Postel (rfc),
Larry Ellson (oracle).
http://www.codethinked.com/post/2007/12/06/The-Programmer-Dress-Code.aspx Edsger Dijkstra (come on
The problem with that is that the distribution of sexes is not 50-50 to begin with.
1-2-3-4-5
Local police station used that, a guy spent months messing around with informants, cops girlfriends (awkward when you can hear both the girlfriend and the wife leaving messages for the same cop), etc.
Arrested, charged, convicted, probation ... does it again!
The cops never changed the password.
Not so hard to do with web platforms, where "pushing it out" means changing a file or two on a server.
Of course, we've seen (here on slashdot) what happens when you try to do that too often ... but most of us have probably been in a situation where we're told to shell into the box and manually edit a file "right now!!!" with a best-guess way to stop something from being a problem, even if it's only to disable certain functionality temporarily while you work out a real fix.
It's news when it happens - or when it's imminent.
"Next year" is forever in mobile phone world. People change phones every 2 years - next year is "half a generation away".
'It's hard to ignore the quality issues that the new iPhone has faced.'
Repeat until
a. V is dead.
b. V gives credible information
Either V dies (most likely) or V makes a lucky guess (it can happen - during questioning, an innocent person may pick up enough clues, along with what they have seen but didn't recognize as suspicious before, to figure things out.)
So if V lives, he or she "MUST have been guilty" even though they weren't.
The problem "solution space" overlooked the first thing that I thought of that would skew answers - twins. So the odds in the "solution" are wrong.
Current odds of twins 1/33
Identical twins 1/250.
And if you're OctoMom ...
But like I said, do your "expose". I'm sure it will be as insightful as your claim that IBM is attacking Hercules, which was proven to be a lie. People here get that Turbo Hercules is not Hercules. Too bad that you and your pals have gotten Jay so worked up that he's now finished in the IT field, but you don't care.
After all, you were buying into the whole bullshit of "when a user is deleted their comments are assigned to the anonymous user it must be a plot", which indicates someone who is incredibly naive when it comes to managing linked lists (which is what comments are).
Or like your whining about the way people down-modded you.
You really are new here. Only a couple of hundred posts, and you expect that people won't don-mod you when you spout FUD. BTW - where does it say that slashdot is a "neutral, opinion-forming platform"? Your misuse of words like neutral and non-discriminatory will be the subject of a future story - just letting you know :-) There is no such thing as neutral, and the slashdot crowd certainly makes no claim to being neutral.
Also, if I were them, I'd block lying pieces of crap and astro-turfers too. This is not "censorship" any more than it would be if the Jewish Defense League refuses to print the KKK's manifesto. In the end, the site editor is the final authority. Don't like it, start your own. That's what freedom of speech is about - the right for you to start your own, not the obligation for anyone else to help you or even listen to you.
If you actually get around to setting up a copy of geeklog, you'll find that there's a cookie variable just for the user IP. Don't take my word for it - try it.
You can even read about it in the online documentation
Now scroll down a bit further on the document page - Miscellaneous: IP Lookup. There's a lot more that can be done with that.
For example, to keep trolls and spammers from realizing that their posts are now hidden from regular users, a pseudo-select statement would be "SELECT comments FROM comment_table WHERE story_id=$story_id AND deleted = 0 OR client_ip=$client_ip",
It's the same "mark records for deletion but don't really delete them until the table is packed" as used by dBASE way back in the 80s.
Anyone can implement this with with any cms with a bit of work. It doesn't suddenly make it nefarious - it lowers the amount of repeat spamming and astroturfing, because when astroturfers realize that nobody is getting their message, they go elsewhere.
So, like I said at the beginning, go for it. I'll be watching.
You don't need to use the mysql client libraries to access the underlying file data correctly, or to write your own server and client that also access the underlying file data.
The only issue is file locking, and that can be dealt with easily enough :-)
You don't have to take the database engine offline to use the data with a different database engine. The actual data is just files or raw partitions, and as long as you make it rw to both processes, there's no problem.
But again, if you're talking about proprietary databases or a proprietary version of mysql put out by oracle at some point, it doesn't change anything.
There is nothing to stop anyone from writing a closed-source program that can read and write mysql data formats, and they'd be free to distribute that program in binary form only. There's also nothing to stop someone from writing a database driver for any existing database product, closed or open, to use the same data. Or they could do an open one ... their call. As long as I have the file format (and even if I don't - I've had to do data recovery on stuff that was completely undocumented and the vendor was no longer in business) I can figure out how to access it. And if I can do it, so can others.
So when it comes to the closed-source marketplace, the same economic pressures that were there before (keep the price low enough that you don't give your customers an incentive to switch) are still at work. It's not just MySQL or Oracle, it's MySQL or Oracle or PostgreSQL or NoSQL or DB2 or any other product.
Oracle has an incentive to switch them to a more expensive product - but only to the extent that there are no other competing products in terms of price/features - and there are almost always competing products. The whole MySQL anti-trust thing was seen by many of us as extortion, plain and simple, and we have looong memories.
This is not going away this week, this month, or this year.
Everyone is free to fork it, or to use a different product, either free or proprietary.
Everyone is also free to use it. The ONLY restriction on it is redistribution - if you make changes, you have to distribute your changes.
Now if you don't want to redistribute your changes but you want to redistribute the database product, that's another story entirely - but then, since that's outside the GPL, it has nothing to do with open source whatsoever. So you then have to look at the proprietary database market.
There are plenty of proprietary database products out there, so there was never an anti-trust concern over MySQL - Mueller was just shoveling FUD.
Please get your facts at least a little straight.
There's nothing nefarious about that - every geeklog installation works that way. So do many other content management systems. Download a copy and try it.
Again, nothing nefarious. This is an anti-spam provision. Spammer posts some spam, you delete it, but because it's tied to an IP, when they go to check up on their spam, it's "still there" so they don't re-post over and over and over. Then, because their spam apparently is bringing 0 results, they go elsewhere.
Having to explain it would clue in the more clueless spammers ... but since it's not unique, it's no big deal to mention it here.
The real story is Florian Mueller's latest FUD campaign hits a brick wall, when he tried to troll slashdot this weekend and got called on it, then started whining. He couldn't accept that people are just fed up with his attempts to insert himself into issues for all the wrong reasons.
Example: the claim that IBM has attacked Hercules (the open source project).
IBM has not had ANY communication wit the project maintainer whatsoever. If Mayrand has his panties in a knot, it's because he bought into the FUD, because IBM has not said a word to him.
Refuted by bws111
Mueller has continually confabulated Hercules (the open-source emulator) and Turbo Hercules (the attempt to extract a license from IBM to sell boxes running zOS on unsupported hardware).
bws11 further notes
As far as I can tell, Mueller trolled the EC to try to get a buy-out out of Oracle for Widenius, and he's now doing the same thing to try to get a buy-out out of IBM for Turbo Hercules. The parallels are uncanny. Those who disagree with him are "people who if they're not IBM employees are at least very close to IBM and very much informed."
What did he expect when he posts to a tech site? It's not MySpace. If he wants to make baseless conspiracy accusations, he deserves public ridicule.
To put it another way (and into the current perspective), Florian Mueller is not a friend of open source. He's your typical troll 4 hire. And he's surprisingly inept when it comes to technical issues - even simple things like how user moderation works here on slashdot.
His agenda is simple - disrupt until he gets his (or his client's) way. We saw that with the Oracle rescue of Sun. We're seeing it with the current campaign of lies over Turbo Hercules/Hercules. His goal is always the same - to insert himself into issues, to be "a player."
Too bad for him that he melted down so badly over the weekend. The man has zero credibility at this point. Just another net-kook, like Maureen O'Gara.
Florian Mueller fails at trolling slashdot yesterday:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/25/149228/Open-Source-Complaint-Against-IBM-Gets-Support
Read about how Florian Mueller is a whiny crybaby who can't believe that everyone is against him and that it must be a plot by IBM and groklaw.
Or read this more detailed list of some of the critiques of his current FUD campaign.
Florian Mueller - the "other" Darl McBride. Even the two Steves are more credible when it comes to Open Source.