2) They don't want the world to not know about the exploits, they just don't want the world to know how to use those exploits
There's at least a couple large-scale problems with this viewpoint.
The most direct one is that knowing about the exploit, and knowing how to use the exploit aren't really as different as you try to make them out. How long do you think for "bad guys" to figure out the full picture if you released enough information for people to protect themselves? i.e. "disable function X of server product Y". Well shit, you just gave a HUGE clue to the "bad guys", but probably didn't really give ENOUGH information to enough of the "good guys". What about the guys relying on "function x of server y" who simply can't disable it?
Exploits are often esoteric sounding enough that companies can just claim (and often have) "that vulnerability is entirely theoretical". It's often the case that the exploit is VERY exploitable, but the developers or companies are just being arrogant, don't understand, or don't care. In a perfect world where companies and developers had perfect knowledge of exactly how exploitable and dangerous a vulnerability was (and addressed the ones that needed to be addressed) your idea would work. The real world has proven otherwise.
The third problem is simply that the companies/developers responsible for fixing the problem often don't suffer the costs (or a much lower cost) or people actually exploiting the vulnerability. i.e. Microsoft doesn't suffer enormous losses when the latest worm ravages the internet. Since they suffer a lot less pain, they'll devote a lot less resources to fixing it. If the exploit eventually will get out then company X will be a lot more likely to fix it rather than just ignoring it and hoping nobody else ever finds out.
3) These exploits would still be in the hands of the security companies so that they could prepare protection against them
Heh. Where does this view that there's always the mysterious people who are just going to fix everything come from? If you think "Security Companies" are going to save you, blah blah blah Bridge to sell.. blah blah blah swamp land in Florida.
No, what needs to happen is if security is important it needs to be built into the product to begin with. Security isn't a product you "buy", it's something you are. This is nothing different than what people have been saying for 20 years.
I think you're right. I've got a co-worker who claims he's "not very green or environmental". I jokingly asked him if he goes on his property and dumps out oil and chemicals all over the place. He said of course not. I also know he's installed compact florescent bulbs to save money, over-insulated his house, and drives a fuel-efficient car. But "he's not very green".
A lot of arguments are really about "side of the room". Some people just don't want to be seen as being on the same side of the room with other people.
There's another side related to this same line of thinking. It's one where a certain way of thinking challenges you whole world view. For certain people global warming simply CAN'T be true because then human beings wouldn't be able to just do as they please with the planet without consequences. There's a lot of crossover between these two ideas.
For the above two groups of people, scientific argument simply doesn't work, as "it just can't be true!". You really have to win them over to the new "team" or "world view". For people who think rationally and scientifically getting people to your side using persuasive techniques is akin to blasphemy since you could convince people of anything this way.
what does the "55% of scientists are Democrats" statistic mean?
From a purely scientific viewpoint, it doesn't really "mean" anything without more information. I could come up with a whole slew of theories to explain this statistic, but they'd all be extremely speculative since it's just one piece of information.
The only thing it might mean (if the sample is accurate) is that the Republican party is extremely unpopular among scientists at the moment. can we really say that humans are responsible for global warming when all we can really show is a strong correlation?
My understanding is we have a mechanism, a model, and a lot of evidence that shows global warming is caused by us. Where did you get the idea that it was ONLY a correlation?
Ahh the salad days when a man feared for his life that a plague might ravage through the countryside and kill all him and his neighbors. It really gave a man a sense of being alive and to value his life when he surived those great smallpox epidemics of yore. These days, with the fancy-dancy "vaccine" kids will never know this great wonder of nature.
Why is it whenever some new form of technology that relieves some burden comes along there's always these dumb articles about how it's going to ruin us, and how some aspect of -old thing- was really just great? Any positive aspects of -new thing- are ignored, any negative aspect is amplified and distorted, and anything else that mitigates the negative aspect are also ignored.
Getting back to reality, there's always going to be people who don't have sat-navigation, don't use it, etc. This isn't like a telephone or the internet where you're eventually forced into the technology because everyone else has it.
The best way to protect against drive failure is to buy server grade SATA drives, which are designed for 24/7/365*5 operation, and not cheap PC drives which are designed for 10 hours per day for 3-4 years. Buy server grade SATA drives
This is just pure marketing baloney. Do you have any real-world tests that actually back this claim up? I've never used "server-grade" drives, and never will. I've seen "server grade" drives fail in large quantities and "desktop" grade drives last for years running 24/7/365.
The only thing I've seen vary greatly in quality are power supplies. Cheap ones are designed to last a couple years and fail. The more expensive ones higher grade ones tend to be better.
The trouble with my argument is that it isn't an argument. You've taken it out of context, which was a refutation of the environment imposed on this guy.
Everyone seems to think they understand exactly what happened here from one crappy ass article written by some journalist. Presumably nobody here was at the trial, hasn't read anything else about what was disclosed, or any real specifics. This kind of case is far from simple, and making assumptions with almost nothing to go on about what compromised what, what the law states, etc is extremely misleading. I simply argue for ignorance here, not knowledge.
He's claiming ignorance, but there's no way that's true. It specifically states in the article that he took that laptop to China "despite warnings from his University's Export Control Officer"....
Wow. You'd kind of a scary person to have on a trial. You've already decided he's guilty reading a poorly written article? I really have no idea if he's guilty or not. It sounds like he was at least careless, but the article is extraordinarily light on details. Determining anything about guilt or innocence from this crappy article is beyond wrong.
Those of us who work in defense are trained until we're blue in the face about how to handle sensitive information, what is and is not releasable
He doesn't work in "defense", he's a retired University professor who works for a company doing work with plasma. Comparing him to yourself is disingenuous at best.
Universities (especially physics) works very differently than a company with regard to "classified" information. Here's how it works. You want research money. You apply for a grant from the DOE for said research money where you check "yes this has potential weapons applications" (because hey, what doesn't?). The DOE grants your request. In reality your research only meets the barest minimum for a qualification of "weapons potential". Yah, there's some kind of nonsense restriction on what you can do with it, but remember it never really had defense implications in the first place.
So, if we're talking about environments here, that's quite a different environment than the one you're describing.
Yes, I've read the wikipedia article on "cloud computing" too. I've also seen buzzwords come an go throughout the years, and have a decent understanding behind what they really mean.
Buzzwords like "cloud computing" are MEANT to be amorphously defined, so then you can just say "Yup, we've got -buzzword-. Buzzwords are defined to mean "whatever the customer thinks it means". A wikipedia article that defined is interesting, but not not definitive by definition.
If you COULD generalize, "cloud computing" is a service, not software. That's why talking about OSS with regard to "cloud computing" makes about as much sense as talking about selling cheeseburgers. I'm sure OSS could help both, but the relationship is indirect, not an overlapping one.
He knew he wasn't supposed to do it, he was warned not to do it, he did it anyway. He pled guilty.
Wrong, maybe, and wrong. In his trial (he didn't plead guilty, that was a different party) he said he didn't think it was illegal (see below). (from the article and the summary, which apparently you either didn't read or comprehend)
During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract, otherwise he would not have participated since his plasma research also has non-military applications.
If he didn't read his contract that's his problem.
Have you ever read a real contract? Even lawyers have difficulty interpreting many of them.
Maybe I'm missing something big here, but isn't "cloud computing" largely just a data delivery service, and not really "software"? It's kind of hard to get a handle on "cloud computing" since it's such an amorphous buzzword. Can someone give me a real example of an application that's "cloud computing" based. I thought my little weather app telling me the temperature might be defined as "cloud computing".
If the above is true, I don't see how OSS can really make some big impact on "cloud computing" any more than it can make it on websites. If it's not true, how could OSS big a big player in "cloud computing"?
But error detection built in would have, removing the operator's need to manually check logs.
It sounds like the system could have been improved. I guess what I'm responding to is the perceived need to take people out of the process, because people create errors or because people are expensive. Computers are only as smart as you make them, and properly trained people can catch problems you never thought of.
Having two redundant independent systems to prevent errors isn't necessarily a bad thing, and can lead to improved reliability and reduced risks. Normally you automate things to reduce costs. But there's always going to be unforeseen consequences of something else happening upstream. At a certain level of risk it makes more sense to have a person on the scene to be part of the error catching process. That doesn't mean the system was "good", but it sounds like it ultimately worked.
Even the over night batch processing was horrible. Scripts and programs had to be manually started by an operator, then a checkoff sheet had to be signed by the operator. If something happened during execution (fairly common), it had to be restarted by hand, after backing out the failed step. No scheduling package whatsoever. Incredibly manual and error prone.
Hmm.. I guess I'd be more interested in the actual failures that happened than what sounds like knocking the system because it's "manual". Manual processes can actually be better than an automated process because there's some actual person looking at what's happening and can call the right person and fix the damn thing if need be. Automated processes fail ALL THE TIME as well, and without a person looking at what's going on, you'll never know about it until it's too late.
Praising a system simply because it's automatic, and knocking another because it's "manual" (or hell, the other way around too) misses the point. What matters is what you get out of each of them, not the methodology used to achieve that.
You're right, the OS has a certain amount of importance. But you're really getting way to granular here. This isn't about micro-second delays in transactions, it's about the whole fucking system being down for 6 hours and 45 minutes. If you think that's an OS problem, I guess I can't help you.
Here's a reference and a quote for you to understand the issue we're talking about:
"We have the biggest takeover in the history of the known world... and then we can't trade. It's terrible," one trader said.
I have to side with the "accenture is worse than incompetent" crowd.
I know of one project they worked on for the University of Minnesota redoing their financial system that they fucked up completely. I've a friend who was in the periphery of the project (he knew some of the key developers) and saw it all coming. They hire monkeys to produce documentation, and produce complete garbage code. They actually had to fire some people because they discovered they were never at their desk, but produced code. It was discovered they contracted their own jobs out to someone in India to do.
I also know someone who had to work with the "finished" product when it was first roled out, and it was a complete train wreck. (Think magic formulas and tea leaves to get what you need done). It's still largely a train wreck a year later, people have just gotten used to the train wreck.
I really have no idea how many rows/day the likes of Walmart throws into a database. 100 million a day wouldn't surprise me. I just have a hard time believing that Google/Amazon/ is the biggest DB users in the world.
(btw. throwing around the word "vast" like it has some specialized meaning outside of some small group of people is just incredibly wrong)
And so you're saying this is all the fault of the relational database, and would all be solved by using some sort of object based database? That's the topic at hand here, not developers dealing with legacy systems patched together.
I'm inclined to listen to engineers from these companies if they say that an SQL database does not scale well for vast amounts of data.
This statement, taken as a whole is pure nonsense. "Databases" scale quite well for "vast" amounts of data. There's retailers that store millions of transactions a day on relational databases that would be out of business if they didn't.
If I had to guess, I'd say that relational databases might not be a great solution for a quickly evolving web company with possibly constantly changing data structures and new requirements being added. Doing all that glue code sucks, and patchwork solutions like Hibernate aren't much better (and IMO worse).
It shouldn't be surprising that a tool developed for one purpose isn't well suited to all purposes. Creating some kind of "movement" out of it is about as stupid as being against hammers in favor of screwdrivers. Down with hammers! Yeah screwdrivers!!
Heh.. Your post reminds me of all the people nostalgic about Vinyl. They said/say the exact same thing about tapes. It's interesting how some members of each generation seems to fall in love with the FORMAT of the music.
It could very well be a totally unrealistic expectation. Less money could mean simply NO results rather than a lower lifetime. Shit, these missions were ALREADY supposed to be inexpensive ones. Remember, failure IS an option, and does happen especially with mars missions a large amount of the time.
I don't know, I really hope not. But my guess is that this douche-bag NBIS company could hire enough lawyers to make it not worth anyones money to find out. Their only interest is protecting their own application.
Also remember this is a small subsidiary of the real company that produces the prediction software and system. Someone thought it'd be a good idea to try to sell mobile applications to consumers, so they split off what looks like a dinky subsidiary. The really stupid thing is this works at cross-purposes of the REAL company (the one who likely makes all the money) who just wants to sell these systems to cities to improve their transit systems. Having a strong developer community developing software that interacts with YOUR system is a hell of a lot smarter that trying to protect the tiny amount of revenue this kind of application can provide.
ROE is a much better way of calculating economics than "payback time," by the way
I think you're right, as you can compare against other investments.
The other factor that needs to be considered is simply that this is somewhat of a sunk cost. Getting back the equity is questionable when you sell your house. How much does it REALLY increase your home value for instance? With solar panel prices decreasing, I'd say any increased home equity would tend to decrease with time.
In other words it's not likely something you'd want to do unless you have a high likelihood that you'll stay in your house for many years.
Despite your attempt at sarcasm, I DO see the difference. Generally people not in upper management making decisions that affect the whole company is frowned upon. Do you also get equally upset when upper management decides to develop some new product, and they don't let you make that decision?
I thought that's why we wrote open source software - not to receive credit, but because we want to share our work with the world.
I think there's a lot of different reasons people write open source software. That's the core reason there's so many different versions of open source licenses. Some people DO write it for credit and feel cheated when it's not given.
The rest of your post I agree with. The original author calling this "stealing" adds nothing to the argument, and only serves to inflame.
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2) They don't want the world to not know about the exploits, they just don't want the world to know how to use those exploits
There's at least a couple large-scale problems with this viewpoint.
The most direct one is that knowing about the exploit, and knowing how to use the exploit aren't really as different as you try to make them out. How long do you think for "bad guys" to figure out the full picture if you released enough information for people to protect themselves? i.e. "disable function X of server product Y". Well shit, you just gave a HUGE clue to the "bad guys", but probably didn't really give ENOUGH information to enough of the "good guys". What about the guys relying on "function x of server y" who simply can't disable it?
Exploits are often esoteric sounding enough that companies can just claim (and often have) "that vulnerability is entirely theoretical". It's often the case that the exploit is VERY exploitable, but the developers or companies are just being arrogant, don't understand, or don't care. In a perfect world where companies and developers had perfect knowledge of exactly how exploitable and dangerous a vulnerability was (and addressed the ones that needed to be addressed) your idea would work. The real world has proven otherwise.
The third problem is simply that the companies/developers responsible for fixing the problem often don't suffer the costs (or a much lower cost) or people actually exploiting the vulnerability. i.e. Microsoft doesn't suffer enormous losses when the latest worm ravages the internet. Since they suffer a lot less pain, they'll devote a lot less resources to fixing it. If the exploit eventually will get out then company X will be a lot more likely to fix it rather than just ignoring it and hoping nobody else ever finds out.
3) These exploits would still be in the hands of the security companies so that they could prepare protection against them
Heh. Where does this view that there's always the mysterious people who are just going to fix everything come from? If you think "Security Companies" are going to save you, blah blah blah Bridge to sell.. blah blah blah swamp land in Florida.
No, what needs to happen is if security is important it needs to be built into the product to begin with. Security isn't a product you "buy", it's something you are. This is nothing different than what people have been saying for 20 years.
I think you're right. I've got a co-worker who claims he's "not very green or environmental". I jokingly asked him if he goes on his property and dumps out oil and chemicals all over the place. He said of course not. I also know he's installed compact florescent bulbs to save money, over-insulated his house, and drives a fuel-efficient car. But "he's not very green".
A lot of arguments are really about "side of the room". Some people just don't want to be seen as being on the same side of the room with other people.
There's another side related to this same line of thinking. It's one where a certain way of thinking challenges you whole world view. For certain people global warming simply CAN'T be true because then human beings wouldn't be able to just do as they please with the planet without consequences. There's a lot of crossover between these two ideas.
For the above two groups of people, scientific argument simply doesn't work, as "it just can't be true!". You really have to win them over to the new "team" or "world view". For people who think rationally and scientifically getting people to your side using persuasive techniques is akin to blasphemy since you could convince people of anything this way.
what does the "55% of scientists are Democrats" statistic mean?
From a purely scientific viewpoint, it doesn't really "mean" anything without more information. I could come up with a whole slew of theories to explain this statistic, but they'd all be extremely speculative since it's just one piece of information.
The only thing it might mean (if the sample is accurate) is that the Republican party is extremely unpopular among scientists at the moment.
can we really say that humans are responsible for global warming when all we can really show is a strong correlation?
My understanding is we have a mechanism, a model, and a lot of evidence that shows global warming is caused by us. Where did you get the idea that it was ONLY a correlation?
Ahh the salad days when a man feared for his life that a plague might ravage through the countryside and kill all him and his neighbors. It really gave a man a sense of being alive and to value his life when he surived those great smallpox epidemics of yore. These days, with the fancy-dancy "vaccine" kids will never know this great wonder of nature.
Why is it whenever some new form of technology that relieves some burden comes along there's always these dumb articles about how it's going to ruin us, and how some aspect of -old thing- was really just great? Any positive aspects of -new thing- are ignored, any negative aspect is amplified and distorted, and anything else that mitigates the negative aspect are also ignored.
Getting back to reality, there's always going to be people who don't have sat-navigation, don't use it, etc. This isn't like a telephone or the internet where you're eventually forced into the technology because everyone else has it.
The best way to protect against drive failure is to buy server grade SATA drives, which are designed for 24/7/365*5 operation, and not cheap PC drives which are designed for 10 hours per day for 3-4 years. Buy server grade SATA drives
This is just pure marketing baloney. Do you have any real-world tests that actually back this claim up? I've never used "server-grade" drives, and never will. I've seen "server grade" drives fail in large quantities and "desktop" grade drives last for years running 24/7/365.
The only thing I've seen vary greatly in quality are power supplies. Cheap ones are designed to last a couple years and fail. The more expensive ones higher grade ones tend to be better.
The trouble with your argument
The trouble with my argument is that it isn't an argument. You've taken it out of context, which was a refutation of the environment imposed on this guy.
Everyone seems to think they understand exactly what happened here from one crappy ass article written by some journalist. Presumably nobody here was at the trial, hasn't read anything else about what was disclosed, or any real specifics. This kind of case is far from simple, and making assumptions with almost nothing to go on about what compromised what, what the law states, etc is extremely misleading. I simply argue for ignorance here, not knowledge.
He's claiming ignorance, but there's no way that's true. It specifically states in the article that he took that laptop to China "despite warnings from his University's Export Control Officer".
Wow. You'd kind of a scary person to have on a trial. You've already decided he's guilty reading a poorly written article? I really have no idea if he's guilty or not. It sounds like he was at least careless, but the article is extraordinarily light on details. Determining anything about guilt or innocence from this crappy article is beyond wrong.
Those of us who work in defense are trained until we're blue in the face about how to handle sensitive information, what is and is not releasable
He doesn't work in "defense", he's a retired University professor who works for a company doing work with plasma. Comparing him to yourself is disingenuous at best.
Universities (especially physics) works very differently than a company with regard to "classified" information. Here's how it works. You want research money. You apply for a grant from the DOE for said research money where you check "yes this has potential weapons applications" (because hey, what doesn't?). The DOE grants your request. In reality your research only meets the barest minimum for a qualification of "weapons potential". Yah, there's some kind of nonsense restriction on what you can do with it, but remember it never really had defense implications in the first place.
So, if we're talking about environments here, that's quite a different environment than the one you're describing.
Yes, I've read the wikipedia article on "cloud computing" too. I've also seen buzzwords come an go throughout the years, and have a decent understanding behind what they really mean.
Buzzwords like "cloud computing" are MEANT to be amorphously defined, so then you can just say "Yup, we've got -buzzword-. Buzzwords are defined to mean "whatever the customer thinks it means". A wikipedia article that defined is interesting, but not not definitive by definition.
If you COULD generalize, "cloud computing" is a service, not software. That's why talking about OSS with regard to "cloud computing" makes about as much sense as talking about selling cheeseburgers. I'm sure OSS could help both, but the relationship is indirect, not an overlapping one.
He knew he wasn't supposed to do it, he was warned not to do it, he did it anyway. He pled guilty.
Wrong, maybe, and wrong. In his trial (he didn't plead guilty, that was a different party) he said he didn't think it was illegal (see below).
(from the article and the summary, which apparently you either didn't read or comprehend)
If he didn't read his contract that's his problem.
Have you ever read a real contract? Even lawyers have difficulty interpreting many of them.
Maybe I'm missing something big here, but isn't "cloud computing" largely just a data delivery service, and not really "software"? It's kind of hard to get a handle on "cloud computing" since it's such an amorphous buzzword. Can someone give me a real example of an application that's "cloud computing" based. I thought my little weather app telling me the temperature might be defined as "cloud computing".
If the above is true, I don't see how OSS can really make some big impact on "cloud computing" any more than it can make it on websites. If it's not true, how could OSS big a big player in "cloud computing"?
But error detection built in would have, removing the operator's need to manually check logs.
It sounds like the system could have been improved. I guess what I'm responding to is the perceived need to take people out of the process, because people create errors or because people are expensive. Computers are only as smart as you make them, and properly trained people can catch problems you never thought of.
Having two redundant independent systems to prevent errors isn't necessarily a bad thing, and can lead to improved reliability and reduced risks. Normally you automate things to reduce costs. But there's always going to be unforeseen consequences of something else happening upstream. At a certain level of risk it makes more sense to have a person on the scene to be part of the error catching process. That doesn't mean the system was "good", but it sounds like it ultimately worked.
Even the over night batch processing was horrible. Scripts and programs had to be manually started by an operator, then a checkoff sheet had to be signed by the operator. If something happened during execution (fairly common), it had to be restarted by hand, after backing out the failed step. No scheduling package whatsoever. Incredibly manual and error prone.
Hmm.. I guess I'd be more interested in the actual failures that happened than what sounds like knocking the system because it's "manual". Manual processes can actually be better than an automated process because there's some actual person looking at what's happening and can call the right person and fix the damn thing if need be. Automated processes fail ALL THE TIME as well, and without a person looking at what's going on, you'll never know about it until it's too late.
Praising a system simply because it's automatic, and knocking another because it's "manual" (or hell, the other way around too) misses the point. What matters is what you get out of each of them, not the methodology used to achieve that.
This isn't a platform failure. It's a people failure.
That could be said of any failure. While I agree with you (how could I not), I have to wonder what you expect anyone to learn from your statement.
You're right, the OS has a certain amount of importance. But you're really getting way to granular here. This isn't about micro-second delays in transactions, it's about the whole fucking system being down for 6 hours and 45 minutes. If you think that's an OS problem, I guess I can't help you.
Here's a reference and a quote for you to understand the issue we're talking about:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_suffers_net_crash
I have to side with the "accenture is worse than incompetent" crowd.
I know of one project they worked on for the University of Minnesota redoing their financial system that they fucked up completely. I've a friend who was in the periphery of the project (he knew some of the key developers) and saw it all coming. They hire monkeys to produce documentation, and produce complete garbage code. They actually had to fire some people because they discovered they were never at their desk, but produced code. It was discovered they contracted their own jobs out to someone in India to do.
I also know someone who had to work with the "finished" product when it was first roled out, and it was a complete train wreck. (Think magic formulas and tea leaves to get what you need done). It's still largely a train wreck a year later, people have just gotten used to the train wreck.
I really have no idea how many rows/day the likes of Walmart throws into a database. 100 million a day wouldn't surprise me. I just have a hard time believing that Google/Amazon/ is the biggest DB users in the world.
(btw. throwing around the word "vast" like it has some specialized meaning outside of some small group of people is just incredibly wrong)
And so you're saying this is all the fault of the relational database, and would all be solved by using some sort of object based database? That's the topic at hand here, not developers dealing with legacy systems patched together.
I'm inclined to listen to engineers from these companies if they say that an SQL database does not scale well for vast amounts of data.
This statement, taken as a whole is pure nonsense. "Databases" scale quite well for "vast" amounts of data. There's retailers that store millions of transactions a day on relational databases that would be out of business if they didn't.
If I had to guess, I'd say that relational databases might not be a great solution for a quickly evolving web company with possibly constantly changing data structures and new requirements being added. Doing all that glue code sucks, and patchwork solutions like Hibernate aren't much better (and IMO worse).
It shouldn't be surprising that a tool developed for one purpose isn't well suited to all purposes. Creating some kind of "movement" out of it is about as stupid as being against hammers in favor of screwdrivers. Down with hammers! Yeah screwdrivers!!
Heh.. Your post reminds me of all the people nostalgic about Vinyl. They said/say the exact same thing about tapes. It's interesting how some members of each generation seems to fall in love with the FORMAT of the music.
How is this a bad thing?
It could very well be a totally unrealistic expectation. Less money could mean simply NO results rather than a lower lifetime. Shit, these missions were ALREADY supposed to be inexpensive ones. Remember, failure IS an option, and does happen especially with mars missions a large amount of the time.
I don't know, I really hope not. But my guess is that this douche-bag NBIS company could hire enough lawyers to make it not worth anyones money to find out. Their only interest is protecting their own application.
Also remember this is a small subsidiary of the real company that produces the prediction software and system. Someone thought it'd be a good idea to try to sell mobile applications to consumers, so they split off what looks like a dinky subsidiary. The really stupid thing is this works at cross-purposes of the REAL company (the one who likely makes all the money) who just wants to sell these systems to cities to improve their transit systems. Having a strong developer community developing software that interacts with YOUR system is a hell of a lot smarter that trying to protect the tiny amount of revenue this kind of application can provide.
ROE is a much better way of calculating economics than "payback time," by the way
I think you're right, as you can compare against other investments.
The other factor that needs to be considered is simply that this is somewhat of a sunk cost. Getting back the equity is questionable when you sell your house. How much does it REALLY increase your home value for instance? With solar panel prices decreasing, I'd say any increased home equity would tend to decrease with time.
In other words it's not likely something you'd want to do unless you have a high likelihood that you'll stay in your house for many years.
See the difference?
Despite your attempt at sarcasm, I DO see the difference. Generally people not in upper management making decisions that affect the whole company is frowned upon. Do you also get equally upset when upper management decides to develop some new product, and they don't let you make that decision?
I thought that's why we wrote open source software - not to receive credit, but because we want to share our work with the world.
I think there's a lot of different reasons people write open source software. That's the core reason there's so many different versions of open source licenses. Some people DO write it for credit and feel cheated when it's not given.
The rest of your post I agree with. The original author calling this "stealing" adds nothing to the argument, and only serves to inflame.