Beck is a buffoon who uses every logical fallacy in the book.
You can attack Beck all you want, but he plays video and audio that nobody else finds, so he doesn't need credibility. Generally, it shows some pretty troubling stuff said by people in the federal government, many of whom are close to the president.
And before you say "out of context," this stuff is pretty bad, and often played with plenty of context, and often that context is the same person saying similar things throughout their career.
He doesn't like the current administration. But we need people like that who have incentive to find problems and report them to the public. Do we want the president hiring a bunch of leftist radicals like Van Jones? Maybe you do and maybe you don't, but don't you think that people should know when it happens, if they do care?
If you refuse to dignify him with a response, he can go ahead and claim that because you refused to deny it, there must be something to the accusation.
You forgot one thing: when he accuses people, he usually has some evidence. Often, it's video evidence of the person making some very troubling speech involving praise for Mao, Chavez, etc. For instance, what about Van Jones, who ultimately resigned in the middle of the night? There was plenty of evidence that he was a leftist radical.
He also tends to accuse people on the public payroll, who have somewhat of a duty to the public to explain themselves when there is some basis for suspicion.
The post to which I replied said "Shut down broadcast TV completely". His arguments were mostly jealousy about the profits broadcast companies are making.
He didn't make any attempt to weigh the benefits of using that broadcast space for unlicensed low-power use versus the benefits of TV. That means he probably doesn't really care whether people use the spectrum or not, all he cares about is that TV cannot.
There are many examples of deliberate propaganda in corporate media.
I would prefer to have a choice. If some people, with all of the choices available, choose to get all of their news from one source, I am not surprised if they are misinformed.
I'm also suspicious of the study itself, because it depends on the selection of facts chosen. If you collect all of the test questions from PBS, and then quiz FNC viewers on those facts, it doesn't surprise me that FNC viewers might score lower.
You'd get similar results if you quizzed PBS viewers versus Glenn Beck viewers on Van Jones or Mark Lloyd.
it's not against the law to lie intentionally in a new broadcast
Are you disputing the above legal opinion? Would you rather that it was illegal to lie, and let the courts/juries be the arbiter of all facts (not just the facts relevant to a particular case)?
We could have a completely independnat source of news and information that was funded not by congress but directly from tax revenue,
"Independent" in this case means nothing more than unaccountable. They can run favorable coverage of their favorite candidates, and ridiculous taxpayer-funded smears of politicians that they don't like.
and whose directors are elected by the people.
And the people are sure to be well-informed by the people who are running for the positions of power.
No thanks.
media that has sympathies with large corporate interests
And plenty of media that doesn't.
Right now, there is more information, and it is available more cheaply than at any other time in history. Individual investigators can single-handedly drive a story if it matters to people (c.f. Rathergate bloggers). But you are arguing that people are too stupid to find that information, so we need some government employees to spoon feed us "information". By using their power to tax, they would crowd out the investigators that are independent of government, and we'd be left with nobody critical of this new unaccountable organization you propose.
but because [FNC] doesn't really care about actual truth
News outlets should also be judged by the stories they run that other news outlets ignore, like corruption in Acorn, Van Jones, etc.
If your news outlets aren't reporting these things, maybe you should include FNC so that you get all of the relevant information? I'm sure if FNC gets anything wrong, it will be debunked by various FNC critics, so you won't be misinformed.
The BBC is a good example
Everyone uses the BBC as a good example. But we're afraid of the bad examples.
But that's not good enough for you, you want to stifle information and entertainment across the nation just because you don't like it when other people make money. How does them making money hurt you any more than your neighbor getting a cow?
People like you are why the founders of this country felt the need for a written Bill of Rights.
I see you chose the BBC as your example, but what about the CBC? The CBC is notoriously biased and uncritical of government. You may trust it, but (a) I don't trust the CBC, and I don't want something similar here; and (b) I don't trust you to tell me who to trust.
I want independent organizations with their own revenue sources reporting critically on the government. Everyone complains about FNC, but they sometimes break stories that matter, and they are the only ones that even investigate this stuff because the rest of the media is too fond of Obama to criticize him.
It was one thing to beat up on FNC during Republican control, when they weren't the only critics around. But now they are the only critics around, so be careful what you wish for.
If you "just" fork, then you "just" have source code.
Bug fixes, support, organization, new releases, infrastructure, or anything else will cost extra. Communities that do this aren't ethereal entities that magically accomplish work; they are people, and it takes a long time to put a real team together. It takes even longer if you start with a budget of $0. Respected leaders like Monty can do it more quickly, but even then, it's a serious challenge.
Do you another specific reason or is it principle of it that bothers you?
Let's say I want to implement the same or a very similar patch for a different project. If I've seen the previous patch (because I wrote it) but I signed all of my rights away, maybe they can make a copyright claim over any similarities between the two implementations.
I should say that I don't really understand copyright well enough to know whether the above makes any sense legally.
It's mostly principle, but there are practical differences. I feel much more comfortable just licensing code as BSD or GPL than actively signing my own rights away. Of course, if I'm well paid, that is a different story.
You make some interesting points, but I think we'll have to agree to disagree, mostly on matters of scale and importance.
One clarification:
not so much because people are philosophically opposed to making contributions that might get used in a closed-source project
That's not what I was trying to say. Any BSD software could potentially be used in a closed-source project, and lots of people contribute to BSD projects.
But I would not contribute to a project where I had to sign over my copyright unless I had a very clear reason for doing so.
Granted, there are some exceptions, but that's just what they are: EXCEPTIONS.
They aren't just "exceptions", you have hand-waved away a majority of the free software people use.
I don't know of any free software compiler that uses that approach (not gcc, ghc, python, ruby, perl, etc.); nor any OS (GNU+linux, freebsd, opensolaris); nor any desktop environment or GUI tools; nor any browsers or email clients; nor text editors/IDEs. For database systems, MySQL and BerkeleyDB do, but postgresql, firebirdsql, and sqlite do not. Let's say that OO.o does, as well.
When I think about the volume of quality software that I use, the part that uses a dual licensing model is there, but it's not the predominant portion. For one thing, any dual licensed software project requires that you sign over the rights if you are an outside contributor. Not many open source projects do that, because it generally eliminates outside development except from some special cases.
the mere possibility of support or no-business development model means there is no cause for concern
There's plenty of cause for concern, as with any project using any model. Ultimately, a lot of things need to line up for a project to really take off and sustain itself. The "hybrid licensing model", however, is not the only way to do it.
or have been subsidized heavily by some other business for other reasons
That is very common, and it's a very different model than the "single company plus dual licensing" model. I would also add that it's often many businesses. It's probably a lot better in many cases -- PostgreSQL and Linux are both backed by various companies. I don't think you should marginalize this as a model for a successful project.
Google contributes heavily to MySQL, yet they are a second-class citizen in mainline MySQL, because they have to sign over rights to get improvements accepted. I don't think this state of affairs will last very long -- they will throw their weight behind one of the forks, and become a first-class contributor to the project, among others.
I do not think it is an accident that those few open vibrant open source products
Which few? I use a lot of free software from vibrant projects, and a lot of it quite simply does not follow your "hybrid licensing" explanation at all.
Although anyone can fork MySQL and support it in theory, the reality is not this simple.
Exactly right.
The primary problem is that essentially the only business models that actually works for open source companies is the hybrid licensing model
That's just not true. PostgreSQL doesn't use hybrid licensing. Linux doesn't, either. Yet both projects seem to attract valuable people and turn them into great communities that accomplish a lot.
I think your argument is too focused on money being sent to some central authority, which distributes the money to various people to make a database system and provide support. However, that's not the only way that money can move, and money is not the only incentive for people to accomplish things.
There's some truth to that, but that's hyperbole. The use cases are not disjoint.
Additionally, MySQL may represent a general shift away from the traditional SQL architecture towards things like MySQL and non-SQL database systems. In some sense, Oracle is not just fighting to keep its customers on Oracle, it's trying to keep customers using traditional SQL systems.
I happen to think that the traditional SQL architecture is a pretty good one, and much better for general purpose development than the alternatives. But some people disagree, and Oracle doesn't want to lose part of the market, even if that part of the market is misguided.
It's not that easy to kill an open source project.
It takes a long time to put together a real community; it doesn't happen overnight. However, dismantling one can happen overnight, and that may be what has taken place already.
There is a promising amount of development, excitement, and support behind some of the forks like Drizzle and MariaDB. But losing a development team and then trying to reassemble it somewhere else is going to be a serious setback, and it will fracture the community.
When the forks start to diverge there will be even more problems. Application developers will pick fork X, and then people will start asking in the mailing lists "I am having a problem and I am using fork Y". Whether or not the difference between X and Y is causing the problem is not important -- what's important is that it will take effort for the application developers to figure it out.
The "open source can't be killed" idea is great in theory, but in practice it takes more than a license. It takes a real community effort, and requires real leadership, full-time people, a consistent message, and they have to be able to deliver a product, not a stream of patches. These challenges are all magnified for a database system, where it's hard to find those critical few developers that you can rely on, and the need for quantized releases is greater (to avoid the pain of data migration).
All that being said: I think MySQL can pull itself together. But it takes a lot of work, and the thinking that "open source can't be killed" is a sure-fire way to make sure the necessary work is not done, and that will lead to the death of the project.
Moving from one database system to another is no trivial matter, even if that other system is a fork.
I agree with Marten Mickos here. There's no benefit to dragging this process out. If Oracle owning MySQL would be a problem, the time to fix it was months ago (I realize that may have been impossible); leaving it in extended purgatory is worse. MySQL has some degree of protection by using the GPL license, anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm a PostgreSQL user, and I haven't used MySQL for a while.
For the US, Russia, and a lot of other countries, that's probably true. But Iran is run by different people who state publicly that they would like to destroy other countries. Perhaps, in Iran, the purpose of nuclear weapons is to destroy, and not to defend? Have you considered that?
Yes, some people are that bad. There are evil people out there, and some of them are, unfortunately, in control of Iran.
Telling Iran we don't want them to have nuclear weaponry is pretty much proof positive of our intent to attack them if we don't get our way at some point.
No, it is not proof. We don't want them to have nuclear weapons because we don't think they would use them responsibly. Is it "fair"? I don't care. We don't trust them to not blow stuff up just for the sake of chaos, destruction, and power.
Consider what would happen if they blew up Isreal, and then said "Hey, we have snuck a few more bombs into various cities around the world. Now do what we say or we start exploding them.". Do we really start shooting nukes at them? Is that really our answer in that case? Are they bluffing?
Or, what happens if Iran is "innocent" in the matter, but the bombs just "fell into the wrong hands". Whether that's true or not, what do we do?
Do you seriously think Iran would launch at us?
I'm not going to bet my life that they won't. I assume here that you don't really mean "launch", because they don't have the range. They would just run them across the Canadian or Mexican border.
I think you are making too much of an attempt to be objective when sometimes the subjective differences matter. Iranian leaders say they want to blow people up. They seem to be preparing to do so. They have not expressed as much interest in the well-being of their own people as is required for things like deterrence and MAD to work. Those things matter.
Slashdot Mirror
That's where McCarthy focused his efforts. At first.
McCarthy (ab)used his powers as a senator; in particular, the power to subpoena anyone for any reason.
Beck doesn't have any official powers.
Glenn Beck takes quotes completely out of context, for one thing.
Example, please? People say outrageous things, and then use "out of context" like a magic wand, without ever explaining what the context is.
Beck is a buffoon who uses every logical fallacy in the book.
You can attack Beck all you want, but he plays video and audio that nobody else finds, so he doesn't need credibility. Generally, it shows some pretty troubling stuff said by people in the federal government, many of whom are close to the president.
And before you say "out of context," this stuff is pretty bad, and often played with plenty of context, and often that context is the same person saying similar things throughout their career.
He doesn't like the current administration. But we need people like that who have incentive to find problems and report them to the public. Do we want the president hiring a bunch of leftist radicals like Van Jones? Maybe you do and maybe you don't, but don't you think that people should know when it happens, if they do care?
If you refuse to dignify him with a response, he can go ahead and claim that because you refused to deny it, there must be something to the accusation.
You forgot one thing: when he accuses people, he usually has some evidence. Often, it's video evidence of the person making some very troubling speech involving praise for Mao, Chavez, etc. For instance, what about Van Jones, who ultimately resigned in the middle of the night? There was plenty of evidence that he was a leftist radical.
He also tends to accuse people on the public payroll, who have somewhat of a duty to the public to explain themselves when there is some basis for suspicion.
The post to which I replied said "Shut down broadcast TV completely". His arguments were mostly jealousy about the profits broadcast companies are making.
He didn't make any attempt to weigh the benefits of using that broadcast space for unlicensed low-power use versus the benefits of TV. That means he probably doesn't really care whether people use the spectrum or not, all he cares about is that TV cannot.
Acorn corruption? WTF cares?
Apparently, the people of the United States care. But the other media outlets didn't think they should care, so they ignored it.
Do you want your news organization delivering the facts that are important to you, or the facts they want you to know?
The CBC isn't weened from the government purse.
"the CBC employs commercial advertising to supplement its federal funding"
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation
There are many examples of deliberate propaganda in corporate media.
I would prefer to have a choice. If some people, with all of the choices available, choose to get all of their news from one source, I am not surprised if they are misinformed.
I'm also suspicious of the study itself, because it depends on the selection of facts chosen. If you collect all of the test questions from PBS, and then quiz FNC viewers on those facts, it doesn't surprise me that FNC viewers might score lower.
You'd get similar results if you quizzed PBS viewers versus Glenn Beck viewers on Van Jones or Mark Lloyd.
it's not against the law to lie intentionally in a new broadcast
Are you disputing the above legal opinion? Would you rather that it was illegal to lie, and let the courts/juries be the arbiter of all facts (not just the facts relevant to a particular case)?
We could have a completely independnat source of news and information that was funded not by congress but directly from tax revenue,
"Independent" in this case means nothing more than unaccountable. They can run favorable coverage of their favorite candidates, and ridiculous taxpayer-funded smears of politicians that they don't like.
and whose directors are elected by the people.
And the people are sure to be well-informed by the people who are running for the positions of power.
No thanks.
media that has sympathies with large corporate interests
And plenty of media that doesn't.
Right now, there is more information, and it is available more cheaply than at any other time in history. Individual investigators can single-handedly drive a story if it matters to people (c.f. Rathergate bloggers). But you are arguing that people are too stupid to find that information, so we need some government employees to spoon feed us "information". By using their power to tax, they would crowd out the investigators that are independent of government, and we'd be left with nobody critical of this new unaccountable organization you propose.
but because [FNC] doesn't really care about actual truth
News outlets should also be judged by the stories they run that other news outlets ignore, like corruption in Acorn, Van Jones, etc.
If your news outlets aren't reporting these things, maybe you should include FNC so that you get all of the relevant information? I'm sure if FNC gets anything wrong, it will be debunked by various FNC critics, so you won't be misinformed.
The BBC is a good example
Everyone uses the BBC as a good example. But we're afraid of the bad examples.
I'm sure the constant threat of their government funding being cut would NEVER affect their critical coverage of said government.
Nor their coverage of bills to increase or decrease subsidies, of course.
Shut down broadcast TV completely
There's already an "off" button on your TV set.
But that's not good enough for you, you want to stifle information and entertainment across the nation just because you don't like it when other people make money. How does them making money hurt you any more than your neighbor getting a cow?
People like you are why the founders of this country felt the need for a written Bill of Rights.
I see you chose the BBC as your example, but what about the CBC? The CBC is notoriously biased and uncritical of government. You may trust it, but (a) I don't trust the CBC, and I don't want something similar here; and (b) I don't trust you to tell me who to trust.
I want independent organizations with their own revenue sources reporting critically on the government. Everyone complains about FNC, but they sometimes break stories that matter, and they are the only ones that even investigate this stuff because the rest of the media is too fond of Obama to criticize him.
It was one thing to beat up on FNC during Republican control, when they weren't the only critics around. But now they are the only critics around, so be careful what you wish for.
the newspapers are folding because people are reading their news online...for free
The WSJ[1], and the Economist[2] are doing just fine. Why are particular publications immune? There must be another explanation.
[1] http://www.editorsweblog.org/newspaper/2009/10/wsj_rising_circulation_offers_glimmer_of.php
[2] http://www.economistgroup.com/our_news/press_releases/2009/results_for_the_year_ended_march_31st_2009.html
Unfortunately Postgres still scales out very poorly compared to MySQL
...
Sloany cluster degrades very quickly
Where did you get your information?
Just a tip, about 10 years ago when MySQL started, PostGRES had been abandoned for several years with no maintenance.
That is utterly false. Mailing lists, commits, steady releases, and community activity all around the world over the last 10 years prove otherwise.
I've seen a suspiciously similar post in response to another article, so you obviously intend to misinform (I don't know or care why).
just fork
If you "just" fork, then you "just" have source code.
Bug fixes, support, organization, new releases, infrastructure, or anything else will cost extra. Communities that do this aren't ethereal entities that magically accomplish work; they are people, and it takes a long time to put a real team together. It takes even longer if you start with a budget of $0. Respected leaders like Monty can do it more quickly, but even then, it's a serious challenge.
Do you another specific reason or is it principle of it that bothers you?
Let's say I want to implement the same or a very similar patch for a different project. If I've seen the previous patch (because I wrote it) but I signed all of my rights away, maybe they can make a copyright claim over any similarities between the two implementations.
I should say that I don't really understand copyright well enough to know whether the above makes any sense legally.
It's mostly principle, but there are practical differences. I feel much more comfortable just licensing code as BSD or GPL than actively signing my own rights away. Of course, if I'm well paid, that is a different story.
You make some interesting points, but I think we'll have to agree to disagree, mostly on matters of scale and importance.
One clarification:
not so much because people are philosophically opposed to making contributions that might get used in a closed-source project
That's not what I was trying to say. Any BSD software could potentially be used in a closed-source project, and lots of people contribute to BSD projects.
But I would not contribute to a project where I had to sign over my copyright unless I had a very clear reason for doing so.
Granted, there are some exceptions, but that's just what they are: EXCEPTIONS.
They aren't just "exceptions", you have hand-waved away a majority of the free software people use.
I don't know of any free software compiler that uses that approach (not gcc, ghc, python, ruby, perl, etc.); nor any OS (GNU+linux, freebsd, opensolaris); nor any desktop environment or GUI tools; nor any browsers or email clients; nor text editors/IDEs. For database systems, MySQL and BerkeleyDB do, but postgresql, firebirdsql, and sqlite do not. Let's say that OO.o does, as well.
When I think about the volume of quality software that I use, the part that uses a dual licensing model is there, but it's not the predominant portion. For one thing, any dual licensed software project requires that you sign over the rights if you are an outside contributor. Not many open source projects do that, because it generally eliminates outside development except from some special cases.
the mere possibility of support or no-business development model means there is no cause for concern
There's plenty of cause for concern, as with any project using any model. Ultimately, a lot of things need to line up for a project to really take off and sustain itself. The "hybrid licensing model", however, is not the only way to do it.
or have been subsidized heavily by some other business for other reasons
That is very common, and it's a very different model than the "single company plus dual licensing" model. I would also add that it's often many businesses. It's probably a lot better in many cases -- PostgreSQL and Linux are both backed by various companies. I don't think you should marginalize this as a model for a successful project.
Google contributes heavily to MySQL, yet they are a second-class citizen in mainline MySQL, because they have to sign over rights to get improvements accepted. I don't think this state of affairs will last very long -- they will throw their weight behind one of the forks, and become a first-class contributor to the project, among others.
I do not think it is an accident that those few open vibrant open source products
Which few? I use a lot of free software from vibrant projects, and a lot of it quite simply does not follow your "hybrid licensing" explanation at all.
Although anyone can fork MySQL and support it in theory, the reality is not this simple.
Exactly right.
The primary problem is that essentially the only business models that actually works for open source companies is the hybrid licensing model
That's just not true. PostgreSQL doesn't use hybrid licensing. Linux doesn't, either. Yet both projects seem to attract valuable people and turn them into great communities that accomplish a lot.
I think your argument is too focused on money being sent to some central authority, which distributes the money to various people to make a database system and provide support. However, that's not the only way that money can move, and money is not the only incentive for people to accomplish things.
Completely different use-cases.
There's some truth to that, but that's hyperbole. The use cases are not disjoint.
Additionally, MySQL may represent a general shift away from the traditional SQL architecture towards things like MySQL and non-SQL database systems. In some sense, Oracle is not just fighting to keep its customers on Oracle, it's trying to keep customers using traditional SQL systems.
I happen to think that the traditional SQL architecture is a pretty good one, and much better for general purpose development than the alternatives. But some people disagree, and Oracle doesn't want to lose part of the market, even if that part of the market is misguided.
It's not that easy to kill an open source project.
It takes a long time to put together a real community; it doesn't happen overnight. However, dismantling one can happen overnight, and that may be what has taken place already.
There is a promising amount of development, excitement, and support behind some of the forks like Drizzle and MariaDB. But losing a development team and then trying to reassemble it somewhere else is going to be a serious setback, and it will fracture the community.
When the forks start to diverge there will be even more problems. Application developers will pick fork X, and then people will start asking in the mailing lists "I am having a problem and I am using fork Y". Whether or not the difference between X and Y is causing the problem is not important -- what's important is that it will take effort for the application developers to figure it out.
The "open source can't be killed" idea is great in theory, but in practice it takes more than a license. It takes a real community effort, and requires real leadership, full-time people, a consistent message, and they have to be able to deliver a product, not a stream of patches. These challenges are all magnified for a database system, where it's hard to find those critical few developers that you can rely on, and the need for quantized releases is greater (to avoid the pain of data migration).
All that being said: I think MySQL can pull itself together. But it takes a lot of work, and the thinking that "open source can't be killed" is a sure-fire way to make sure the necessary work is not done, and that will lead to the death of the project.
Moving from one database system to another is no trivial matter, even if that other system is a fork.
I agree with Marten Mickos here. There's no benefit to dragging this process out. If Oracle owning MySQL would be a problem, the time to fix it was months ago (I realize that may have been impossible); leaving it in extended purgatory is worse. MySQL has some degree of protection by using the GPL license, anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm a PostgreSQL user, and I haven't used MySQL for a while.
I wonder how many of the prisoners are there entirely because of pot? I would think that most of them have committed other crimes, as well.
The *point* of nuclear weaponry *is* MAD.
For the US, Russia, and a lot of other countries, that's probably true. But Iran is run by different people who state publicly that they would like to destroy other countries. Perhaps, in Iran, the purpose of nuclear weapons is to destroy, and not to defend? Have you considered that?
Yes, some people are that bad. There are evil people out there, and some of them are, unfortunately, in control of Iran.
Telling Iran we don't want them to have nuclear weaponry is pretty much proof positive of our intent to attack them if we don't get our way at some point.
No, it is not proof. We don't want them to have nuclear weapons because we don't think they would use them responsibly. Is it "fair"? I don't care. We don't trust them to not blow stuff up just for the sake of chaos, destruction, and power.
Consider what would happen if they blew up Isreal, and then said "Hey, we have snuck a few more bombs into various cities around the world. Now do what we say or we start exploding them.". Do we really start shooting nukes at them? Is that really our answer in that case? Are they bluffing?
Or, what happens if Iran is "innocent" in the matter, but the bombs just "fell into the wrong hands". Whether that's true or not, what do we do?
Do you seriously think Iran would launch at us?
I'm not going to bet my life that they won't. I assume here that you don't really mean "launch", because they don't have the range. They would just run them across the Canadian or Mexican border.
I think you are making too much of an attempt to be objective when sometimes the subjective differences matter. Iranian leaders say they want to blow people up. They seem to be preparing to do so. They have not expressed as much interest in the well-being of their own people as is required for things like deterrence and MAD to work. Those things matter.