He said: "What's wrong with the standard Quicken format that everyone is used to"..
You replied: "There are so many things wrong with the standard Quicken format that your comment is almost comical - chief amongst them being that there is no standard Quicken format. It is a complete clusterfsck, and I take my hat off the developers who managed to make head or tail of it. As for a text format, that's what XML is, and parsing it is a no-brainer in just about any language you care to name. Perhaps you'd care to write a robust parser for your wonderful error-free format?"
I'm not sure just how much of a part you played in GnuCash's development but your attitude confirms my opinion that it would be very dangerous indeed to use an open source product to store important dfinancial data (as opposed to one's pr0n collection).
The fact of life is that using the industry standard file format is incredibly important to acceptance of a product like this. If you can't understand that you are a big part of the problem.
Try and get your head around two facts:
Most accountants could hardly understand a word of your posting. All they would understand is that you think they are stupid for wanting Quicken compatibility.
Nice work, but of course your amazing resilience to the multi-headed hydra that is the slashdot audience is all to do with your BIG PIPE and nothing much to do with your dual headed linux configuration.
While your setup may make you real safe from machine outages, the effects of a slashdotting are to flood your resources rather than break them. So your configuration gives you at best the performance of two machines instead of one - which you could also have achieved by just ramping up the CPU or memory.
1. Release the code under a BSD license via an anonymous web site - hotmail address for admin contact, use an internet cafe without security cameras when doing the deed, absolutely no trace back to you.
2. Hide the web site from search engines. Make sure there's no links from anywhere.
3. Contact a notary and have them go to the web site and record the fact that it exists. You'll need this later.
Copy the code and a little while later, take down the web site.
Now the code is effectively open sourced, and you have an audit trail to prove it, but only you can access it. Since its BSD you can freely create derivative works and sell them without restriction.
The worst that can happen is that if by any chance the actual owners of the code (as per the many other responses to this post, these will likely be some creditors if the company actually did go bankrupt) were to find out what you are doing, your defence will be that the code was open sourced and you thought you had every right to use it. The notary will back you up here.
Of course you would immediately lose the code - but you will be safe from any legal nastiness. So make sure you've taken plenty of money out of the business by then. And better still, create a trademark or brandname that will have some value to the real owners, then you can sell it to them.
What linux needs is not to clone windows, but provide a UI that is more user friendly. It is good to see that linux is starting to stand on its own (with things like bluecurve for example), and not trying to completely copy the windows UI
Why try and build something more user-friendly than Microsoft? They can afford to spend tens of millions of dollars on usability. And usability is not an "aha !!" light-bulb-going-off kind of thing, its a very hard science that involves expensive practices such as sticking hundreds of representative people in labs and training cameras on their eyeballs. And say what you like about them, Microsoft are not stupid people and they do have an intense focus on usability.
Trying to out-MS with even better usability? Stupid.
Copying MS and leveraging their work as much as possible in order to shaft them somewhere else where they're weaker? Priceless.
The suggestions that this is an attempt to create FUD seem a bit off the mark to me. I'm sure MS aren't going to be touting the benefits of Linux, but in a closed environment they have far more to gain from honest testing and competition than they do from convincing a very small number of customers, presumably devoted ones, that Linux sucks.
According to the blurb this is not a closed environment but one that customers attend.
I think its pretty classic marketing - the customer approaches the nice XP box, hand-wringing Microserf sidles up "Hello sir, may I say what a lovely tie you're wearing today, and isn't sir wearing a striking cologne", and then helps guide him through the lovely dialogues.
Customer then wanders across to the (grimy-looking) Linux box and asks how to do something. Microserf grimaces, shows customer an xterm session and says "Geee...I'm not sure how you do that - its pretty complex, you have to use the command line I think. Type "man" in, that works sometimes".
In no way would the lab be about actually achieving interoperability, whatever the stated goal.
The nice thing from the business point of view is that the continuing costs are lower. You just wipe the storage card and recharge the batteries, and you rent it again. Don't have to pay a couple bucks in film every time you rent the camera. The battery cost is higher than for a "disposable" film camera because the power draw is higher, but without the LCD, not that much higher.
Assuming the camera costs say $80, and your margin is indeed something like $3 per rental - then that would make this possibly the world's highest leveraged ever case of "sell the razor at a loss and make your profit on the blades". Certainly its way higher than Microsoft's play with XBox, or in fact any other loss leader that I've heard of.
Its hard to see such a radical business model working without some extras precautions, like only renting it out inside the theme park, and making sure to use a RFID to stop people carrying them out the gate.
Or they could charge some kind of deposit, refundable when you return the camera - though that degenerates naturally to a pure rental model, which is a whole different value prop.
At these prices, a big competitor could kill you off simply by investing the price of a few hours consultancy in being a "mean corporate bastard" - say $11K - and by doing so, punish you to the tune of $800K. There could be some legal barriers, but maybe not if you're dumb enough to make the offer.
Saying Linux is a failure on the desktop because it isn't a Microsoft product is like saying the Dodge Neon is a failure as an automobile because it doesn't use Ford Taurus parts.
No it ain't.
The Road DOES NOT equal any one brand of car.
The Desktop DOES equal one brand of software - Microsoft's.
In my opinion, his idea is brilliant. Create a corporation that is publicly traded, so that everyone has the chance to 'own' rights to every CD. I'd love to see some lawyers' opinions on this.
Like everyone else responding to this thread IANAL but I see problems here with tax (I'm non-US resident but I'd be pretty sure the same deal applies in the US).
If a corporate that I own happens to own, say, a vehicle, and I take it home every night and use it for my private use, then thats treated as a form of taxable income paid to me by the corporate. Where I come from its called fringe benefit tax.
Surely the same would apply if the company lets me use its musical assets. If I'm allowed to download a $14 CD for 0.50c, thats a taxable benefit to me of $13.50.
This effect doesn't necessarily make the business model unviable but certainly makes it a whole lot less attractive.
Not true. The open nature of Linux will make it VERY easy to remove any offending code and continue on. Sure, anyone that wants to continue to use the offending code will have to pay, however, I don't see anyone doing that. Also, the open nature of Linux will make it VERY easy to replace any funtionality that may have been removed. It is not illegal to reimplement any of the offending code. So, in this respect I think that this document is correct in its assumption that Linux will pretty much be unaffected.
And a big 'ol NOT TRUE right back at ya. Sure, the situation could be put right, so Linux will be fine in the future, but if wrongdoing is proved SCO could certainly go back and look for damages for the period that the "illegal" code was in use. Just because you make it right doesn't mean no harm took place in the past.
Do you know why IExploder and Outlurk have %95+ market share? It's not because Microsoft is a monopoly, or because they are better products, or because Bill Gates is a member of the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderbergers. It's because of the herd instinct. People want to use the same software that other people in their group use. Corporations use IE/Ol because other corporations do. Geeks use Linux because other geeks do. There are rare exceptions, but by and large human beings rival cattle in their ability to be molded by the opinion of their peers.
All true, but sometimes there are a lot of good reasons to be in the herd. Particularly if you're a little slow or uncreative - its the safest place to be.
By and large, slashdotters are probably not in the herd, but it might be interesting for many of them to look back in 20 years time, and question whether the man-months they invested in getting their linux distros installed, and their case-modded machines running with their own custom blend of browsers and email clients would have been better spent just using IE and diverting their creative energies to better uses - like enjoying good movies, good wine and maybe even getting laid one in a while.
In name only. The license fee is effectively a tax on ownership of a television, since every owner of a television must pay it and persistent failure to pay can result in jail time. If it walks like a duck.....
In New Zealand we had the same regime, a "tax but not a tax" that you had to pay if had a TV. One or two brave souls fought their legal battles and avoided paying by soldering their antenna connectors direct to a video machine without a tuner, etc., etc. but most everyone paid.
The government dropped the charade a few years ago (not least because collection costs were proportionally so high), and the money now comes straight out of tax.
1. Write devastating super-virus
2. Release it
3. Destroy unsuspecting internet
4. ???
5. Profit!
Actually step 4 could be "Sell copy of virus to PR-conscious anti-virus provider (Symantec, etc.) 48 hours before releasing said virus, allowing them time to create antidote and appear as world-saving super-heroes.
So is it any surprise people aren't spending as much IT money today?
Look on this as a return to normality. As the article says, it is things like re-engineering the procurement process that bring the real benefits. Trouble is, during the years of hype, there were plenty of snake oil salesmen around saying that if you focused on that boring, hard-to-do stuff, then you'd miss out on the magic benefits from black magic technologies (crazy shit like personalization servers and anything with the word exchange in it spring to mind). Chuck us a coupla mil, install our crazy cool stuff, and you'll be part of the web economy !
Most IT managers were always aware that there were no magic bullets out there and that most new technologies were a bunch of hacked together BS. Its just that now, they've got the upper hand again so they're calling the shots.
No, you jackass! Your sales are down for other reasons.. not illegal downloading
This (and the other responses to your post) is typical slashdottery double standards. Normally intelligent people bristle (rightly) with rage when their rights are taken away. And then (wrongly) go on to make very unintelligent statements that appear to be sheer propaganda to defend their position.
Even if all you say is true for you (quite possibly it is, what do I know), do you really believe that no-one else in the world is spending less on CDs? Do you really think that some cash-strapped 12 year old, who now has access to $1 ripped copies of the music he wants, is going to keep on begging his parents for $15 to buy a legit copy ? Of course not. Of course he will be contributing to reduced sales.
It is an absolute no-brainer that illegal piracy and downloading is cutting into the industry's sales. No matter how unpalatable that truth is to us.
Before I am modded into oblivion, I am not arguing with any of the following:
CDs are way over-priced
It sucks that the artist gets so little on every sale
The RIAA are pricks and deserve everything coming to them (heh, that should make me safe !)
Downloading free music rocks !
My only point is that is irrational to claim that illegal downloading does not impact on sales. It is blindingly obvious that some people will buy less music if they can get the same thing free or very cheap. And for sure there is not a counter-balancing volume of people out there who are buying more because of illegal copying.
So lets not use untruths to make the industry change their position - it won't work. It plays into their hands.
Use hard facts instead. Unless music becomes cheaper, illegal copying will go on, and will get worse. Citizens will start to see it as their duty to put up illegal P2P nodes. Even now, we are revolting ! So wake the fuck up, RIAA !
I guess these guys are about to find out whether the collective sum of their egos adds up to more than the use of the name "JBoss".
My guess is it doesn't - I don't know much about what JBoss group, but my guess is they do pretty much the same old EJB consulting for customers that everyone else does. Building yet another Customer object for yet another client. Not the sort of thing that requires the world's greatest experts in transaction management, object persistence, etc. etc.
As long as the JBoss group can quickly fill in for these guys with warm bodies who know how to write "Hello world" (any Java programmers on the bench and eager for work right now ? Yep, thought so) then their customer contracts will just keep trucking along. Then these guys and their break-away will be faced with the dilemna that JBoss Group has solved - making money.
Juries do not need to understand kernel code. They need to hear testimony from expert witnesses. Both parties will provide them, lawyers will do their best to refute their testimony, and the jurors will decide who is more convincing.
I'll put my money on the Open Source experts any day.
You are joking right? You think that the technical genius of an "open source expert" will play better to a jury of numbskulls who gatherered all their IT knowledge from using Windows on their home PC, than a charming corporate shmoozer who has been professionally trained in the black arts of PR?
If they told us what lines were in question, we could all write memiors about how those lines came to be, with CVS snapshots and mailinglist discussions to back it up. If they don't tell us we can either do nothing and be unprepared, or start documenting everything and not get any real work done.
It looks to me like they are testing if the Linux comunity is able to generate a coherent document trail faster than they can generate code. We have lots of data. Can we seperate the wheat from the chaff on demand?
I think the key words here are "generate a coherent document trail". Everyone's bleating on about getting SCO to put out their detailed evidence.. but really, why SHOULD they ?
Assume, just for a moment, that SCO's claims are valid. If they were, is their behavior unreasonable ? No.
Lets just try a little thought experiment here.
Imagine a tribe (lets call them the Linusites) of thousands of fanatical devotees. Amongst these devotees, personal status is acquired not by displays of wealth (and certainly not by prowess with the opposite sex or by achievements in personal hygiene), but instead purely by peer recognition of their craftmanship. For most of the devotees, this provides an exciting framework on which to base their personal philosophies and indeed their lives, which by financial necessity are spent in their parent's basements - indeed, it spurs them on to new heights of creativity.
For a few, sad members of the tribe, however, such attainments are beyond them. They turn....to the dark side. One day the temptation becomes too much for them, and, knowing their actions are unaudited, and reasoning "its only a few lines of code anyway", they simply borrow the craftsmanship of someone from another tribe. Because the owner of this craft was a member of a different, more secretive tribe, the theft goes unnoticed - until many months or years later.
Now try, for a moment, to forget that you are (as a slashdot contributor) a member of the Linusites. Imagine, instead, that you are a member of the secretive tribe. This makes you no less a human being with certain unalienable rights.
So what do you do ? By this time, the other members of the Linusites have crafted layer upon layer of their own magic over your original work, until only vestiges remain. Even you have trouble identifying what was yours and what has been added by the Linusites. So do you confront the Linusites and demand their papertrails, their documentary evidence?
Of course not ! You know that the Linusites are (or at least many of them are) fanatics ! If you pointed out to them the 53 cases of exact theft that you have painstakingly uncovered, then as sure as eggs the next day a complete (electronic) paper trail of evidence would be produced by the Linusites proving that THEY, not you, authrored the offending passages. Because thats what fanatics do, they rewrite history.
</thought experiment>
So, summarizing this rather tenuous rant, of COURSE it is not reasonable for SCO to document each and every case of theft.
Thats not to say that SCO has a valid case - but if they do, they are handling it correctly but only leaking information gradually.
The Ozzies stood up with the US to Saddam, and I agree, it had to be done. I am heartened we did it with help from down under. As regards your nationality and your comment on groupthink: tell us about 'groupthink' among the English during the Blitz. They were all like-minded because the provocation and the argument for fighting back were compelling.
Likewise, all of America changed because we recognize a)this is war and b)if we do nothing or just send in a few token cruise missiles the next attack will be much worse.
I agree with you and with the parent - this war had to happen.
Not, however for the reasons you give. You say "the next attack will be worse". Unfortunately for this argument, it has not yet been proven that Saddam was behind the first attack. I think maybe it will be proven in the future - but right now, you can't claim that avoiding the "next attack" was the reason for taking out Saddam.
Another point is that your comparison with the blitz is bogus. During WWII, the English were under immense, ongoing, nightly attack from an easily identifiable, large, rich, technically sophisticated nation, which had invaded an entire continent and was literally within sitght of Britain, and which built hundreds of planes that were flown over Britain by thousands of highly trained pilots and released tens of thousands of bombs. Thats to ignore pilotless bombs and rockets.
9/11 by contrast was a single attack (or at least, a single day's worth of attacks) launched by a handful of fanatics armed with boxcutters.
There is simply no comparison. Thats why I agree with the parent - the US groupthink IS a little bit frightening, because on the scale of things - number of people killed, sophistication of attack - the 9/11 attacks were simply not that significant. Even though Saddam needed to be taken out, and doing so has probably made the world a safer place, it is simply BS to claim that it was justified as a direct response to 9/11. As your message seems to say. Be honest enough to say that the reason was just to make the world safer. Period.
Then why in the name of all holy cows does the anniversary Dark Side of the Moon cost the same as the newest girl/boy band CD?
You don't need to record it, you don't need to promote it. (Have you seen much Pink Floyd on MTV lately?) You just remix it and press it. Voila!
I'm not an apologist for these monopolists but what you're saying cuts both ways. Most CDs cost more or less the same amount right now. If they did what you say, and introduced a "cost plus" pricing model, then sure some CDs would be cheaper - but then also some others would become more expensive. Because presumably the industry would demand the same profits at the end of the day.
There's nothing wrong with the "one size fits all" pricing model, and it may even be a more efficient model overall (lower administrative costs than running a shop where every unit has a different price).
The problem is simply that the price is too damn high.
Everyone's all about freedom, but nobody seems to want to pay the price for it.
Yeah, real nice use there of a catchy soundbite to obscure the reality. Try this instead:
Everyone's all about free software, but nobody seems to want to pay the price for it. (Well, duhhh ??)
Not everyone who is in favour of open source buys into your heavy community gig, man. There's no moral obligation on anyone to give cash to anyone just because they're doing something labelled "open source". There are good ways to make money from open source and many companies have found them. Those ones don't need our charity - anyone that does is likely to go belly up soon anyway, taking your money down with them.
Slashdot Mirror
You replied: "There are so many things wrong with the standard Quicken format that your comment is almost comical - chief amongst them being that there is no standard Quicken format. It is a complete clusterfsck, and I take my hat off the developers who managed to make head or tail of it. As for a text format, that's what XML is, and parsing it is a no-brainer in just about any language you care to name. Perhaps you'd care to write a robust parser for your wonderful error-free format?"
I'm not sure just how much of a part you played in GnuCash's development but your attitude confirms my opinion that it would be very dangerous indeed to use an open source product to store important dfinancial data (as opposed to one's pr0n collection).
The fact of life is that using the industry standard file format is incredibly important to acceptance of a product like this. If you can't understand that you are a big part of the problem.
Try and get your head around two facts:
BROUGHTON, REGINALD C.: Declared Holdings
SCO GROUP INC
Senior Vice President
NasdaqSC:SCOX (historical quotes, profile, other insiders)
2003-08-05 120,000 Direct Insider & restricted shareholder transactions reported over the last two years
Date Shares Stock Transaction ADVERTISEMENT
Nice work if you can get it !
Actually daemon and demon are different words, at least where I come from. For example:
The demon favoured linux in his data centre, and he made use of a long-running database search daemon to select which virgin he would debauch next.
While your setup may make you real safe from machine outages, the effects of a slashdotting are to flood your resources rather than break them. So your configuration gives you at best the performance of two machines instead of one - which you could also have achieved by just ramping up the CPU or memory.
Now the code is effectively open sourced, and you have an audit trail to prove it, but only you can access it. Since its BSD you can freely create derivative works and sell them without restriction.
The worst that can happen is that if by any chance the actual owners of the code (as per the many other responses to this post, these will likely be some creditors if the company actually did go bankrupt) were to find out what you are doing, your defence will be that the code was open sourced and you thought you had every right to use it. The notary will back you up here.
Of course you would immediately lose the code - but you will be safe from any legal nastiness. So make sure you've taken plenty of money out of the business by then. And better still, create a trademark or brandname that will have some value to the real owners, then you can sell it to them.
Why try and build something more user-friendly than Microsoft? They can afford to spend tens of millions of dollars on usability. And usability is not an "aha !!" light-bulb-going-off kind of thing, its a very hard science that involves expensive practices such as sticking hundreds of representative people in labs and training cameras on their eyeballs. And say what you like about them, Microsoft are not stupid people and they do have an intense focus on usability.
Trying to out-MS with even better usability? Stupid.
Copying MS and leveraging their work as much as possible in order to shaft them somewhere else where they're weaker? Priceless.
According to the blurb this is not a closed environment but one that customers attend.
I think its pretty classic marketing - the customer approaches the nice XP box, hand-wringing Microserf sidles up "Hello sir, may I say what a lovely tie you're wearing today, and isn't sir wearing a striking cologne", and then helps guide him through the lovely dialogues.
Customer then wanders across to the (grimy-looking) Linux box and asks how to do something. Microserf grimaces, shows customer an xterm session and says "Geee...I'm not sure how you do that - its pretty complex, you have to use the command line I think. Type "man" in, that works sometimes".
In no way would the lab be about actually achieving interoperability, whatever the stated goal.
Assuming the camera costs say $80, and your margin is indeed something like $3 per rental - then that would make this possibly the world's highest leveraged ever case of "sell the razor at a loss and make your profit on the blades". Certainly its way higher than Microsoft's play with XBox, or in fact any other loss leader that I've heard of.
Its hard to see such a radical business model working without some extras precautions, like only renting it out inside the theme park, and making sure to use a RFID to stop people carrying them out the gate.
Or they could charge some kind of deposit, refundable when you return the camera - though that degenerates naturally to a pure rental model, which is a whole different value prop.
At these prices, a big competitor could kill you off simply by investing the price of a few hours consultancy in being a "mean corporate bastard" - say $11K - and by doing so, punish you to the tune of $800K. There could be some legal barriers, but maybe not if you're dumb enough to make the offer.
This will never work.
No it ain't.
The Road DOES NOT equal any one brand of car.
The Desktop DOES equal one brand of software - Microsoft's.
Like everyone else responding to this thread IANAL but I see problems here with tax (I'm non-US resident but I'd be pretty sure the same deal applies in the US).
If a corporate that I own happens to own, say, a vehicle, and I take it home every night and use it for my private use, then thats treated as a form of taxable income paid to me by the corporate. Where I come from its called fringe benefit tax.
Surely the same would apply if the company lets me use its musical assets. If I'm allowed to download a $14 CD for 0.50c, thats a taxable benefit to me of $13.50.
This effect doesn't necessarily make the business model unviable but certainly makes it a whole lot less attractive.
Of course I know jackshit about the law !
And a big 'ol NOT TRUE right back at ya. Sure, the situation could be put right, so Linux will be fine in the future, but if wrongdoing is proved SCO could certainly go back and look for damages for the period that the "illegal" code was in use. Just because you make it right doesn't mean no harm took place in the past.
All true, but sometimes there are a lot of good reasons to be in the herd. Particularly if you're a little slow or uncreative - its the safest place to be.
By and large, slashdotters are probably not in the herd, but it might be interesting for many of them to look back in 20 years time, and question whether the man-months they invested in getting their linux distros installed, and their case-modded machines running with their own custom blend of browsers and email clients would have been better spent just using IE and diverting their creative energies to better uses - like enjoying good movies, good wine and maybe even getting laid one in a while.
In name only. The license fee is effectively a tax on ownership of a television, since every owner of a television must pay it and persistent failure to pay can result in jail time. If it walks like a duck.....
In New Zealand we had the same regime, a "tax but not a tax" that you had to pay if had a TV. One or two brave souls fought their legal battles and avoided paying by soldering their antenna connectors direct to a video machine without a tuner, etc., etc. but most everyone paid.
The government dropped the charade a few years ago (not least because collection costs were proportionally so high), and the money now comes straight out of tax.
But yeah, it was always a tax.
2. Release it
3. Destroy unsuspecting internet
4. ???
5. Profit!
Actually step 4 could be "Sell copy of virus to PR-conscious anti-virus provider (Symantec, etc.) 48 hours before releasing said virus, allowing them time to create antidote and appear as world-saving super-heroes.
Look on this as a return to normality. As the article says, it is things like re-engineering the procurement process that bring the real benefits. Trouble is, during the years of hype, there were plenty of snake oil salesmen around saying that if you focused on that boring, hard-to-do stuff, then you'd miss out on the magic benefits from black magic technologies (crazy shit like personalization servers and anything with the word exchange in it spring to mind). Chuck us a coupla mil, install our crazy cool stuff, and you'll be part of the web economy !
Most IT managers were always aware that there were no magic bullets out there and that most new technologies were a bunch of hacked together BS. Its just that now, they've got the upper hand again so they're calling the shots.
There is no spoon
No, you jackass! Your sales are down for other reasons.. not illegal downloading
This (and the other responses to your post) is typical slashdottery double standards. Normally intelligent people bristle (rightly) with rage when their rights are taken away. And then (wrongly) go on to make very unintelligent statements that appear to be sheer propaganda to defend their position.
Even if all you say is true for you (quite possibly it is, what do I know), do you really believe that no-one else in the world is spending less on CDs? Do you really think that some cash-strapped 12 year old, who now has access to $1 ripped copies of the music he wants, is going to keep on begging his parents for $15 to buy a legit copy ? Of course not. Of course he will be contributing to reduced sales.
It is an absolute no-brainer that illegal piracy and downloading is cutting into the industry's sales. No matter how unpalatable that truth is to us.
Before I am modded into oblivion, I am not arguing with any of the following:
- CDs are way over-priced
- It sucks that the artist gets so little on every sale
- The RIAA are pricks and deserve everything coming to them (heh, that should make me safe !)
- Downloading free music rocks !
My only point is that is irrational to claim that illegal downloading does not impact on sales. It is blindingly obvious that some people will buy less music if they can get the same thing free or very cheap. And for sure there is not a counter-balancing volume of people out there who are buying more because of illegal copying.So lets not use untruths to make the industry change their position - it won't work. It plays into their hands.
Use hard facts instead. Unless music becomes cheaper, illegal copying will go on, and will get worse. Citizens will start to see it as their duty to put up illegal P2P nodes. Even now, we are revolting ! So wake the fuck up, RIAA !
No way - Patti Smith (and her album "Horses" in particular) is most depressing ever. And I like the Smiths too !
My guess is it doesn't - I don't know much about what JBoss group, but my guess is they do pretty much the same old EJB consulting for customers that everyone else does. Building yet another Customer object for yet another client. Not the sort of thing that requires the world's greatest experts in transaction management, object persistence, etc. etc.
As long as the JBoss group can quickly fill in for these guys with warm bodies who know how to write "Hello world" (any Java programmers on the bench and eager for work right now ? Yep, thought so) then their customer contracts will just keep trucking along. Then these guys and their break-away will be faced with the dilemna that JBoss Group has solved - making money.
I'll put my money on the Open Source experts any day.
You are joking right? You think that the technical genius of an "open source expert" will play better to a jury of numbskulls who gatherered all their IT knowledge from using Windows on their home PC, than a charming corporate shmoozer who has been professionally trained in the black arts of PR?
You do indeed live in hope.
I think the key words here are "generate a coherent document trail". Everyone's bleating on about getting SCO to put out their detailed evidence .. but really, why SHOULD they ?
Assume, just for a moment, that SCO's claims are valid. If they were, is their behavior unreasonable ? No.
Lets just try a little thought experiment here.
Imagine a tribe (lets call them the Linusites) of thousands of fanatical devotees. Amongst these devotees, personal status is acquired not by displays of wealth (and certainly not by prowess with the opposite sex or by achievements in personal hygiene), but instead purely by peer recognition of their craftmanship. For most of the devotees, this provides an exciting framework on which to base their personal philosophies and indeed their lives, which by financial necessity are spent in their parent's basements - indeed, it spurs them on to new heights of creativity.
For a few, sad members of the tribe, however, such attainments are beyond them. They turn....to the dark side. One day the temptation becomes too much for them, and, knowing their actions are unaudited, and reasoning "its only a few lines of code anyway", they simply borrow the craftsmanship of someone from another tribe. Because the owner of this craft was a member of a different, more secretive tribe, the theft goes unnoticed - until many months or years later.
Now try, for a moment, to forget that you are (as a slashdot contributor) a member of the Linusites. Imagine, instead, that you are a member of the secretive tribe. This makes you no less a human being with certain unalienable rights.
So what do you do ? By this time, the other members of the Linusites have crafted layer upon layer of their own magic over your original work, until only vestiges remain. Even you have trouble identifying what was yours and what has been added by the Linusites. So do you confront the Linusites and demand their papertrails, their documentary evidence?
Of course not ! You know that the Linusites are (or at least many of them are) fanatics ! If you pointed out to them the 53 cases of exact theft that you have painstakingly uncovered, then as sure as eggs the next day a complete (electronic) paper trail of evidence would be produced by the Linusites proving that THEY, not you, authrored the offending passages. Because thats what fanatics do, they rewrite history.
</thought experiment>
So, summarizing this rather tenuous rant, of COURSE it is not reasonable for SCO to document each and every case of theft.
Thats not to say that SCO has a valid case - but if they do, they are handling it correctly but only leaking information gradually.
As regards your nationality and your comment on groupthink: tell us about 'groupthink' among the English during the Blitz. They were all like-minded because the provocation and the argument for fighting back were compelling.
Likewise, all of America changed because we recognize a)this is war and b)if we do nothing or just send in a few token cruise missiles the next attack will be much worse.
I agree with you and with the parent - this war had to happen.
Not, however for the reasons you give. You say "the next attack will be worse". Unfortunately for this argument, it has not yet been proven that Saddam was behind the first attack. I think maybe it will be proven in the future - but right now, you can't claim that avoiding the "next attack" was the reason for taking out Saddam.
Another point is that your comparison with the blitz is bogus. During WWII, the English were under immense, ongoing, nightly attack from an easily identifiable, large, rich, technically sophisticated nation, which had invaded an entire continent and was literally within sitght of Britain, and which built hundreds of planes that were flown over Britain by thousands of highly trained pilots and released tens of thousands of bombs. Thats to ignore pilotless bombs and rockets.
9/11 by contrast was a single attack (or at least, a single day's worth of attacks) launched by a handful of fanatics armed with boxcutters.
There is simply no comparison. Thats why I agree with the parent - the US groupthink IS a little bit frightening, because on the scale of things - number of people killed, sophistication of attack - the 9/11 attacks were simply not that significant. Even though Saddam needed to be taken out, and doing so has probably made the world a safer place, it is simply BS to claim that it was justified as a direct response to 9/11. As your message seems to say. Be honest enough to say that the reason was just to make the world safer. Period.
Payroll processing is where the action is. COBOL rocks! And you'll score loadsa chicks.
I'm not an apologist for these monopolists but what you're saying cuts both ways. Most CDs cost more or less the same amount right now. If they did what you say, and introduced a "cost plus" pricing model, then sure some CDs would be cheaper - but then also some others would become more expensive. Because presumably the industry would demand the same profits at the end of the day.
There's nothing wrong with the "one size fits all" pricing model, and it may even be a more efficient model overall (lower administrative costs than running a shop where every unit has a different price).
The problem is simply that the price is too damn high.
Yeah, real nice use there of a catchy soundbite to obscure the reality. Try this instead:
Everyone's all about free software, but nobody seems to want to pay the price for it. (Well, duhhh ??)
Not everyone who is in favour of open source buys into your heavy community gig, man. There's no moral obligation on anyone to give cash to anyone just because they're doing something labelled "open source". There are good ways to make money from open source and many companies have found them. Those ones don't need our charity - anyone that does is likely to go belly up soon anyway, taking your money down with them.