There's user inteface design, documentation, and consistent professional support to be considered in any enterprise implementation.
and
Home users can get away with using half-baked stuff, but enterprises are far pickier.
To generalize in the opposite direction, enterprises seem to think that everyone is an enterprise. Guess what? Most businesses are small businesses. Most employees work for small businesses, and many of those that don't work for smaller public sector agencies (e.g., municipal governments), small non-profits, etc. Having deployed a fair bit of FOSS at outfits of that size, today's FOSS works out quite nicely, given somebody like me who can smooth out the rough edges.
Enterprises seem to think that the whole software world is supposed to revolve around the enterprise. To a large extent, they've succeeded in getting the software world to buy into that vision — it feels like everyone's trying to pitch to the Fortune 500 and, as a side-effect, making their products too expensive and too complicated for smaller customers. Given a choice between spending a ton of dough on tech they need somebody's help to use, or spending next to nothing on tech they need somebody's help to use, what do you think a smaller firm is going to do?
So, I'll agree with your assessment that lots of FOSS is unsuitable for the enterprise. But, as the adage goes, "the barbarians always win".
...but the feature you mention took literally about 2 minutes just to convert just 3 of my Word files into.sxw (not OpenDocument.odt) with NeoOffice/J...
On a Pentium III 1.0GHz, 512MB RAM PC, running Fedora Core 4, and a beta of OpenOffice.org 2.0, I converted 18 documents in about one minute. Those documents ranged from 1 to 10 pages in length, and probably totalled ~30 pages.
Mr. Orlowski's arguments are the same ones as get trotted out time and again against open source. Regardless of whether you think open source is awesome or overrated, it's tough to argue that open source is irrelevant, which is how Mr. Orlowski paints the Creative Commons.
For example, you could easily convert:
The use of an irrevocable Commons license, which effectively ends any hope of the artist being compensated by the creative industries, doesn't seem fair or sensible...
into
The use of an irrevocable [open source] license, which effectively ends any hope of the [programmer] being compensated by the [venture capitalists], doesn't seem fair or sensible...
Similarly:
Issuing the material under [an open source] license may earn them a pat on the back from an expensive American law school, but it pretty much guarantees they won't be compensated.
From two reccie missions we conducted - purely for research purposes, of course - into [CompUSA] last night revealed thousands of people willingly handing over their earnings to enjoy [software]. Their only demand being that it be "Good [Software]".
Is the Creative Commons going to become huge? Perhaps not. But Mr. Orlowski's gotta come up with better arguments than these tired ones.
Make up your mind - either making personal information available on the web is bad, in that case you should not hypocritically do it yourself. Or else it isn't, but then there wouldn't be much point to raising the question in the first place.
The poster I was replying to tried to set a threshold at which it is OK to post "private" information. It's his mind that needs to be "made up", not mine. Personally, I wouldn't post that sort of stuff, nor condone it of people who reported to me. However, if you agree with his notion that there's a threshold of acceptability, then the C|Net article is probably acceptable.
Generally, I agree with your assessment. However...
If CNet had a story about how Google's founder was fighting an attempt to build a mall near his home, it might have been reasonable to include the name of the street he lives upon, because that's relevent too. But this?
The original article was on Google's potential use as a tool for ferreting out "private" information. Hence, Mr. Schmidt's "private" information would seem to be relevant as a compelling example of the problem.
Moreover, the original article did not provide a street address in the text (though it linked to it). Most of the other facts it listed were stuff you might find in any Forbes or Fortune article. Really, only that one link to his address would seem beyond the pale.
There are lots of businesses that "sell something they don't own" by your criterion that a service requires end-to-end ownership. In fact, very few businesses have end-to-end ownership of the means for their service. For example:
Long-distance carriers who aren't your local telco don't own the local phone lines. Instead, they contract for access to your home via the telco.
Internet service providers can only provide direct access within their own pool of customers. To reach anyone else, they have to contract with other ISPs, via direct links or peering points.
Cellular carriers do not necessarily own the land on which their cells are located — the land or building where the cell is mounted is leased.
FedEx Home does not own their own trucks; instead, they use independent contractors for that service. Similarly, many long-haul trucking companies don't own their own trucks, but rather use "owner-operators".
Banks can only cash checks drawn on their own banking system directly. For everything else, they need to use various inter-bank networks or private exchanges.
Most retailers don't own the land or building they use, but rather rent from a real estate owner.
In all those cases, a critical portion of the service delivery requires a relationship with other firms. In theory, the FCC ruling does not prevent this from DSL; what it does is no longer force the telco's to make these sorts of arrangements when requested. The difference is that in all my cited examples save long-distance service, there is competition for the equivalent of the DSL "last mile". And with long-distance service, the telcos are happy to cut deals because their foot is in the door already with the consumer.
I recently got a curious message on my iMac. The desktop was masked by a grey translucent layer, and on top of that, in white text on a black background, was a message in three languages telling me I needed to reboot my Mac.
It took a few appearances of this for me to realize it was a kernel panic, the OS X equivalent to the BSOD.
I mean, c'mon. It can't be a serious problem. Look how pretty the error message is!
and if they were to relicense it, they likely would face an XFree86-like split
Extremely unlikely. Last I knew, they were still trying to get all the individual contributors to allow GPL and LGPL licensing to go along with the MPL. Unlike projects like OpenOffice.org, Mozilla traditionally did not require any form of joint copyright assignment, so Mozilla itself can't relicense the code, only the individual developers can.
The Register's headline was sensationalistic and misleading. But, that's their style for headlines (and, sometimes, for articles).
Re:Why do you need a switch for Render Engine?
on
Netscape 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Right now, too many people think Internet Explorer is the Web. Because of browser incompatibilities, many people have to use IE for some sites, even if they use something else most of the time. I would rather them be using Netscape 8 (or, better yet, Firefox, if they adopt the feature) and view the occasional site in "IE Compatibility Mode" than think that Netscape/Firefox is somehow "broken", causing them to stick with IE and perpetuating the compatibility problem.
Of course, everybody could go buy a Mac, like the one I'm using...:-)
Have you installed Windows on that Sony laptop? Or did you just get it with Windows pre-installed? I ask, because Sony laptops are a pain to get any operating system on, because they have a tendency toward leading-edge components, for which drivers don't ship with the operating system. Now, it might well take less time to install Windows from scratch, because there's greater chance Sony has collected the various Windows drivers for you on a Sony support site.
Let's imagine a world where Sony shipped Linux pre-installed and that's what their support pages discussed. It might well take well over "12 hours of fiddling" to get Windows on a Sony laptop, as you might not even be able to readily get drivers for various bits of Sony hardware (e.g., Memory Stick PRO slots).
If the Linux community wants to see Linux become mainstream, they need to focus on usability, instead of security.
The vast majority of computer users will never install an operating system. So, if the Linux community takes your advice to heart, it won't help in your particular situation. Instead, you should be writing to Sony (and any other hardware manufacturer whose equipment you use) and ask them to provide a page of Linux drivers for their hardware.
Yes, patents are a rich man's game. That's part of the cost of doing business in the US. I agree with every comment regarding the cost of going to court, and while that's a problem involving the patent system, this isn't something that the USPTO has authority to change.
Sure it does.
You indicated in your earlier post that the reason USPTO grants a lot of patents is because of the checks and balances, including courts. If courts forcing USPTO to grant patents is indeed what's going on here, then USPTO can start going to court more, to put the burden of "proof" on the shoulders of those requesting the patent.
The "burden" in this case is cash. Yes, patent cases are civil cases (today) and the legal "burden of proof" lies with the patent-holding prosecution. But, as Bruce and others have pointed out, the defense would get bankrupted first in many cases.
Lets suppose instead that the USPTO granted a narrower set of patents, plus those they're forced to by a court (plaintiff in this case being the rejected patent-seeker). Yes, it cost the patent seeker money to bring the suit. They get the benefit of having their newly-minted patent be declared valid by a court before they go trying to use it to squash competition.
The net effect would be fewer patents granted in general (many rejected firms wouldn't bother with the court case). Small business will likely get fewer patents in the aggregate, as they won't want to fund the court case to force USPTO to grant the patent. But, I argue that there are far fewer small businesses seeking patents than there are small businesses who could get sued for patent infringement, so small business gains on the whole.
Oh, and IANAPENDIPOOTV (I Am Not A Patent Examiner, Nor Do I Play One On TV)...
As posted above, from the GPL FAQ. Daimaou and the company he works for are all in the same "organization", so redistribution has not occurred.
Yes and no.
I'm assuming Daimaou and the employer are in the US, so what I'm saying may not hold true if they're someplace else.
Daimaou is both his own legal entity and an agent of the employer, at the present time. As his own legal entity, Daimaou can own property, whether real (land, cars, Pez dispensers) or intellectual (copyright, patent, trademark). In this case, it appears that Daimaou created intellectual property before becoming an agent of the employer. That intellectual property does not naturally become the property of the employer, any more than Daimaou's home becomes the property of the employer. It's conceivable that an employment agreement might somehow grant the employer ownership of all past copyrighted works by the agent, but that'd be a nasty contract and could get tossed out in the courts, who apply a "reasonableness" factor to employment agreements.
Suppose Daimaou had posted his code online, and some other agent of the employer had downloaded it. There's little question a distribution would have occurred there, thereby triggering the GPL distribution clauses. The fact that Daimaou served as the employer's agent and "downloaded" the code does not change this.
Or if distribution did occur, I assume he already GPL'ed that set of modifications.
Yup, I assume that too. And there's a question whether or not Daimaou had the authority to accept the GPL terms on behalf of the employer, though I suspect the courts will say Diamaou does (otherwise, firms would have to have attornies or executives on hand for each one of those EULA license acceptance windows you get when installing software).
Of course, the moral of this story is: avoid IP-entangling employment agreements like the plague...:-)
Daimaou didn't release the code at all, let alone illegally.
IANAL, but by my reading of the OP, he did release the code. Here's the time sequence that I see:
IBM wrote their code and released it under the GPL; ActiveState wrote their code and released it under the GPL.
The legal entity named "Daimaou" wrote code that links to or otherwise reuses the GPLd code (" I brought in some source code that I had worked on prior to working here"), putting the collective work under the terms of the GPL
The legal entity named "Daimaou" distributed said code to the the legal entity that is Daimou's current employer
The legal entity that is the employer may have made modifications to said code that's not completely clear. If so, Daimaou is the employee who made those modifications, but he did so acting as an agent of the employer.
I think the rest of your point is valid, but I'm pretty sure there was a distribution involved, early on. Moreover, it's unclear whether the employer actually owns the ideas behind the patent (i.e., how much of this was Daimaou before he started working there?), let alone the software.
how do you handle complicated tape library management (ie: tape robots, backup aging, onsite/offsite backups) automatically without having to use software more complicated than the basic Unix command line utilities?
By not using tape. rsnapshot going to a sufficiently-large RAID array or drive covers your regular backups, including aging. A separate rsnapshot or rsync can do nicely for offsites, pushing the backups to another server. For enterprises, this approach probably is insufficient, but for smaller firms (e.g., ~70 employees, 5 offices), this works well.
Note that Ad-Aware is only free for personal use, whereas Spybot Search & Destroy is free for basically any use. For home users, there's no practical difference license-wise. To be fair, I haven't checked Ad-Aware's licensing in recent months, so my info may be out of date.
I had programming job offers after undergrad work in 1990 in physics at a state university not known for its CS or physics programs.
The bigger question you need to ask is: how good is the placement program at the university you're attending? If businesses come by the truckload to recruit, it doesn't matter that the place is a tad short of ivy.
If your grades and such are top-notch, then another criteria becomes important: how the businesses and placement office chooses who gets to interview. At my undergrad school, anyone could apply to interview with for any given job, and the businesses doing the interviews chose the interviewees. This helps top students at the expense of the so-so students. Where I went for my MBA, anyone could apply, and the university doled out interview slots, with no apparent input from the firms, benefitting everyone equally and thereby reducing the value of your grades.
After you get your first job, tech jobs tend to be far closer to a meritocracy than a sheepskin-ocracy, so the importance of where you went to school tends to decline. What you do in your jobs, or what sorts of projects you undertake outside your jobs (e.g., open source), will count for far much more than where you went to school, or even how well you did.
Of course, IANACRNDIPOOTV (I Am Not A Corporate Recruiter, Nor Do I Play One On TV), YMMV, etc.
This is why companies have sales people/help desks/managers. The OSS model does away with it, and so now you see why they are needed.
The grandparent poster asked for the user community to assist the developer community by minimizing noise while still adding useful information. This is akin to asking for quiet at a public meeting -- it's not saying the meeting is useless, or that the meeting should be private, but that excessive noise hampers progress of the meeting. Your argument would then be that public meetings need sales people/help desks/managers. Public meetings have been held for centuries without those acoutrements. Some public meetings collapse due to excessive interruptions (e.g., protests), and such collapses may or may not be in the best interests of those doing the interrupting.
Sort of like putting up your code for everyone to see and reviewing it (isn't this one of the strenghts of OSS?), people will look at your application. And they will critize on it. Don't want to hear what they have to say, don't listen.
All the grandparent poster is trying to do is direct the user community's energies in a more productive manner. That being said, to the extent whining exists, it suggests that the feedback mechanisms are lacking -- there should be some form of voting or something that is visible and powerful enough that most people are satisfied with "whining" that way.
Owning the copyright to GPL code means little other than the fact that you get credit for it.
Consolidating copyrights is highly recommended for large open source projects, so they can adjust to new licenses over time. This is why OpenOffice.org, for example, requires a Joint Copyright Assignment be signed, so the project can release the code under all relevant licenses. This is why Mozilla, when they decided to add GPL/LGPL to their license mix, had such a huge headache, because they didn't consolidate copyrights, and so they had to track down each developer and get them to authorize the relicensing.
Now, to be sure, the GPL means that non-copyright-holders have a whole lot more rights than they do under, say, a Microsoft EULA. But that doesn't mean holding copyright is useless.
This is why jhoger's comments were spot-on. If Furthermore has a contract with the developer, and if the contract called for copyright assignment and, if the code change submitted to Mambo can reasonably be determined to be covered under that contract, and if the contract itself is fundamentally valid (e.g., incldues consideration), then Furthermore would hold copyright to that code change. If Furthermore didn't want it distributed, then the contractor is in violation of Furthemore's copyright to the code change. If Furthermore distributed the code, then the GPL might ruin their case anyway, but if the only distribution was done by the contractor, Furthermore's right to keep the code change internal to their organization was violated, a right they have under the GPL.
In effect, this is a watered-down version of the whole SCO situation: a firm claims a contract grants them rights over code that, according to others, was independently developed. As with SCO, it mostly hinges on the interpretation of the contract (and, in this case, whether said contract exists, since that's under dispute).
Furthermore's handling of this situation is disgusting, but until a court determines the existence, validity, and scope of the contract, we can't just assume Furthermore has no case, any more than we can assume SCO has no case, even though it kinda looks that way (thank heavens).
Although this might improve accountability, this would drive the small investor right out of the stock market.
Directly, perhaps. Mutual funds will still be available, integrating the insurance aspect he alludes to, albeit with correspondingly higher expense ratios. Also, there's the possibility of non-profit investor insurance groups aimed at solo investors.
Adding to the problem is the arbitrariness of law suit damages that are now being awarded. They often have no relation to the actual damage done. There is no way an investor can accurately assess the risk.
Ah, there's the rub. Without serious tort reform, I agree that lawsuits would be a problem. Right now, limited liability is our poor man's tort reform.
This brings up an interesting point -- anybody know of a site that lists laptop models that can run with the lid closed? For example, I have an HP Pavilion zt1125 that I suspect won't run closed.
Also, anybody have suggestions for heat dissipation? I've heard horror stories (some posted here at/.) about laptops overheating with the lid closed.
Slashdot Mirror
and
To generalize in the opposite direction, enterprises seem to think that everyone is an enterprise. Guess what? Most businesses are small businesses. Most employees work for small businesses, and many of those that don't work for smaller public sector agencies (e.g., municipal governments), small non-profits, etc. Having deployed a fair bit of FOSS at outfits of that size, today's FOSS works out quite nicely, given somebody like me who can smooth out the rough edges.
Enterprises seem to think that the whole software world is supposed to revolve around the enterprise. To a large extent, they've succeeded in getting the software world to buy into that vision — it feels like everyone's trying to pitch to the Fortune 500 and, as a side-effect, making their products too expensive and too complicated for smaller customers. Given a choice between spending a ton of dough on tech they need somebody's help to use, or spending next to nothing on tech they need somebody's help to use, what do you think a smaller firm is going to do?
So, I'll agree with your assessment that lots of FOSS is unsuitable for the enterprise. But, as the adage goes, "the barbarians always win".
On a Pentium III 1.0GHz, 512MB RAM PC, running Fedora Core 4, and a beta of OpenOffice.org 2.0, I converted 18 documents in about one minute. Those documents ranged from 1 to 10 pages in length, and probably totalled ~30 pages.
Mr. Orlowski's arguments are the same ones as get trotted out time and again against open source. Regardless of whether you think open source is awesome or overrated, it's tough to argue that open source is irrelevant, which is how Mr. Orlowski paints the Creative Commons.
For example, you could easily convert:
into
Similarly:
Is the Creative Commons going to become huge? Perhaps not. But Mr. Orlowski's gotta come up with better arguments than these tired ones.
The poster I was replying to tried to set a threshold at which it is OK to post "private" information. It's his mind that needs to be "made up", not mine. Personally, I wouldn't post that sort of stuff, nor condone it of people who reported to me. However, if you agree with his notion that there's a threshold of acceptability, then the C|Net article is probably acceptable.
Generally, I agree with your assessment. However...
The original article was on Google's potential use as a tool for ferreting out "private" information. Hence, Mr. Schmidt's "private" information would seem to be relevant as a compelling example of the problem.
Moreover, the original article did not provide a street address in the text (though it linked to it). Most of the other facts it listed were stuff you might find in any Forbes or Fortune article. Really, only that one link to his address would seem beyond the pale.
How the heck did this get modded "insightful"?
There are lots of businesses that "sell something they don't own" by your criterion that a service requires end-to-end ownership. In fact, very few businesses have end-to-end ownership of the means for their service. For example:
In all those cases, a critical portion of the service delivery requires a relationship with other firms. In theory, the FCC ruling does not prevent this from DSL; what it does is no longer force the telco's to make these sorts of arrangements when requested. The difference is that in all my cited examples save long-distance service, there is competition for the equivalent of the DSL "last mile". And with long-distance service, the telcos are happy to cut deals because their foot is in the door already with the consumer.
And give Disney another shot at requiring everyone to pay licensing fees for the use of their cartoon character trademark, Pluto(R)? I think not!
;-) (I think...)
Don't laugh.
I recently got a curious message on my iMac. The desktop was masked by a grey translucent layer, and on top of that, in white text on a black background, was a message in three languages telling me I needed to reboot my Mac.
It took a few appearances of this for me to realize it was a kernel panic, the OS X equivalent to the BSOD.
I mean, c'mon. It can't be a serious problem. Look how pretty the error message is!
<snip>
Ah, but since a bicycle *is* an "instrument of conveyance"...
*ducks*Extremely unlikely. Last I knew, they were still trying to get all the individual contributors to allow GPL and LGPL licensing to go along with the MPL. Unlike projects like OpenOffice.org, Mozilla traditionally did not require any form of joint copyright assignment, so Mozilla itself can't relicense the code, only the individual developers can.
The Register's headline was sensationalistic and misleading. But, that's their style for headlines (and, sometimes, for articles).
Right now, too many people think Internet Explorer is the Web. Because of browser incompatibilities, many people have to use IE for some sites, even if they use something else most of the time. I would rather them be using Netscape 8 (or, better yet, Firefox, if they adopt the feature) and view the occasional site in "IE Compatibility Mode" than think that Netscape/Firefox is somehow "broken", causing them to stick with IE and perpetuating the compatibility problem.
Of course, everybody could go buy a Mac, like the one I'm using... :-)
Have you installed Windows on that Sony laptop? Or did you just get it with Windows pre-installed? I ask, because Sony laptops are a pain to get any operating system on, because they have a tendency toward leading-edge components, for which drivers don't ship with the operating system. Now, it might well take less time to install Windows from scratch, because there's greater chance Sony has collected the various Windows drivers for you on a Sony support site.
Let's imagine a world where Sony shipped Linux pre-installed and that's what their support pages discussed. It might well take well over "12 hours of fiddling" to get Windows on a Sony laptop, as you might not even be able to readily get drivers for various bits of Sony hardware (e.g., Memory Stick PRO slots).
The vast majority of computer users will never install an operating system. So, if the Linux community takes your advice to heart, it won't help in your particular situation. Instead, you should be writing to Sony (and any other hardware manufacturer whose equipment you use) and ask them to provide a page of Linux drivers for their hardware.
Sure it does.
You indicated in your earlier post that the reason USPTO grants a lot of patents is because of the checks and balances, including courts. If courts forcing USPTO to grant patents is indeed what's going on here, then USPTO can start going to court more, to put the burden of "proof" on the shoulders of those requesting the patent.
The "burden" in this case is cash. Yes, patent cases are civil cases (today) and the legal "burden of proof" lies with the patent-holding prosecution. But, as Bruce and others have pointed out, the defense would get bankrupted first in many cases.
Lets suppose instead that the USPTO granted a narrower set of patents, plus those they're forced to by a court (plaintiff in this case being the rejected patent-seeker). Yes, it cost the patent seeker money to bring the suit. They get the benefit of having their newly-minted patent be declared valid by a court before they go trying to use it to squash competition.
The net effect would be fewer patents granted in general (many rejected firms wouldn't bother with the court case). Small business will likely get fewer patents in the aggregate, as they won't want to fund the court case to force USPTO to grant the patent. But, I argue that there are far fewer small businesses seeking patents than there are small businesses who could get sued for patent infringement, so small business gains on the whole.
Oh, and IANAPENDIPOOTV (I Am Not A Patent Examiner, Nor Do I Play One On TV)...
Yes and no.
I'm assuming Daimaou and the employer are in the US, so what I'm saying may not hold true if they're someplace else.
Daimaou is both his own legal entity and an agent of the employer, at the present time. As his own legal entity, Daimaou can own property, whether real (land, cars, Pez dispensers) or intellectual (copyright, patent, trademark). In this case, it appears that Daimaou created intellectual property before becoming an agent of the employer. That intellectual property does not naturally become the property of the employer, any more than Daimaou's home becomes the property of the employer. It's conceivable that an employment agreement might somehow grant the employer ownership of all past copyrighted works by the agent, but that'd be a nasty contract and could get tossed out in the courts, who apply a "reasonableness" factor to employment agreements.
Suppose Daimaou had posted his code online, and some other agent of the employer had downloaded it. There's little question a distribution would have occurred there, thereby triggering the GPL distribution clauses. The fact that Daimaou served as the employer's agent and "downloaded" the code does not change this.
Yup, I assume that too. And there's a question whether or not Daimaou had the authority to accept the GPL terms on behalf of the employer, though I suspect the courts will say Diamaou does (otherwise, firms would have to have attornies or executives on hand for each one of those EULA license acceptance windows you get when installing software).
Of course, the moral of this story is: avoid IP-entangling employment agreements like the plague... :-)
IANAL, but by my reading of the OP, he did release the code. Here's the time sequence that I see:
I think the rest of your point is valid, but I'm pretty sure there was a distribution involved, early on. Moreover, it's unclear whether the employer actually owns the ideas behind the patent (i.e., how much of this was Daimaou before he started working there?), let alone the software.
By not using tape. rsnapshot going to a sufficiently-large RAID array or drive covers your regular backups, including aging. A separate rsnapshot or rsync can do nicely for offsites, pushing the backups to another server. For enterprises, this approach probably is insufficient, but for smaller firms (e.g., ~70 employees, 5 offices), this works well.
FWIW, the lock/unlock model (a.k.a., "reserved checkouts") is on tap for Subversion 1.2, according to the roadmap.
Sounds like a lovely use for an Orion drive.
Note that Ad-Aware is only free for personal use, whereas Spybot Search & Destroy is free for basically any use. For home users, there's no practical difference license-wise. To be fair, I haven't checked Ad-Aware's licensing in recent months, so my info may be out of date.
I had programming job offers after undergrad work in 1990 in physics at a state university not known for its CS or physics programs.
The bigger question you need to ask is: how good is the placement program at the university you're attending? If businesses come by the truckload to recruit, it doesn't matter that the place is a tad short of ivy.
If your grades and such are top-notch, then another criteria becomes important: how the businesses and placement office chooses who gets to interview. At my undergrad school, anyone could apply to interview with for any given job, and the businesses doing the interviews chose the interviewees. This helps top students at the expense of the so-so students. Where I went for my MBA, anyone could apply, and the university doled out interview slots, with no apparent input from the firms, benefitting everyone equally and thereby reducing the value of your grades.
After you get your first job, tech jobs tend to be far closer to a meritocracy than a sheepskin-ocracy, so the importance of where you went to school tends to decline. What you do in your jobs, or what sorts of projects you undertake outside your jobs (e.g., open source), will count for far much more than where you went to school, or even how well you did.
Of course, IANACRNDIPOOTV (I Am Not A Corporate Recruiter, Nor Do I Play One On TV), YMMV, etc.
The grandparent poster asked for the user community to assist the developer community by minimizing noise while still adding useful information. This is akin to asking for quiet at a public meeting -- it's not saying the meeting is useless, or that the meeting should be private, but that excessive noise hampers progress of the meeting. Your argument would then be that public meetings need sales people/help desks/managers. Public meetings have been held for centuries without those acoutrements. Some public meetings collapse due to excessive interruptions (e.g., protests), and such collapses may or may not be in the best interests of those doing the interrupting.
All the grandparent poster is trying to do is direct the user community's energies in a more productive manner. That being said, to the extent whining exists, it suggests that the feedback mechanisms are lacking -- there should be some form of voting or something that is visible and powerful enough that most people are satisfied with "whining" that way.
Consolidating copyrights is highly recommended for large open source projects, so they can adjust to new licenses over time. This is why OpenOffice.org, for example, requires a Joint Copyright Assignment be signed, so the project can release the code under all relevant licenses. This is why Mozilla, when they decided to add GPL/LGPL to their license mix, had such a huge headache, because they didn't consolidate copyrights, and so they had to track down each developer and get them to authorize the relicensing.
Now, to be sure, the GPL means that non-copyright-holders have a whole lot more rights than they do under, say, a Microsoft EULA. But that doesn't mean holding copyright is useless.
This is why jhoger's comments were spot-on. If Furthermore has a contract with the developer, and if the contract called for copyright assignment and, if the code change submitted to Mambo can reasonably be determined to be covered under that contract, and if the contract itself is fundamentally valid (e.g., incldues consideration), then Furthermore would hold copyright to that code change. If Furthermore didn't want it distributed, then the contractor is in violation of Furthemore's copyright to the code change. If Furthermore distributed the code, then the GPL might ruin their case anyway, but if the only distribution was done by the contractor, Furthermore's right to keep the code change internal to their organization was violated, a right they have under the GPL.
In effect, this is a watered-down version of the whole SCO situation: a firm claims a contract grants them rights over code that, according to others, was independently developed. As with SCO, it mostly hinges on the interpretation of the contract (and, in this case, whether said contract exists, since that's under dispute).
Furthermore's handling of this situation is disgusting, but until a court determines the existence, validity, and scope of the contract, we can't just assume Furthermore has no case, any more than we can assume SCO has no case, even though it kinda looks that way (thank heavens).
Directly, perhaps. Mutual funds will still be available, integrating the insurance aspect he alludes to, albeit with correspondingly higher expense ratios. Also, there's the possibility of non-profit investor insurance groups aimed at solo investors.
Ah, there's the rub. Without serious tort reform, I agree that lawsuits would be a problem. Right now, limited liability is our poor man's tort reform.
This brings up an interesting point -- anybody know of a site that lists laptop models that can run with the lid closed? For example, I have an HP Pavilion zt1125 that I suspect won't run closed.
Also, anybody have suggestions for heat dissipation? I've heard horror stories (some posted here at /.) about laptops overheating with the lid closed.
Another variation on the rsync script is rsnapshot, which works quite nicely.