First, I should state that it's really not about the language, it's about the coder. You can build great and crappy things with any language. And every language has it's warts.
That said, the best language I've used in the past 20 years of programming has got to be Modern Perl. Not the chicken scratch Perl you saw 5 or 10 years ago, but Modern Perl. Here are some of the strengths of modern Perl:
We were rejected because somehow Polaroid might object to our online photo sharing application. All Apple would say was:
"WebGUI Gallery appears to include features that associate with POLAROID or resemble Polaroid photographs. Polaroid has previously objected to other applications that include such features and believes that they infringe its rights."
We don't mention Polaroid, we don't produce physical pictures. The only thing that could be construed as being related to Polaroid is the template that we used on the web site, which has a white border around the photograph. So if now all white bordered photographs resemble Polaroid's IP, I think that the whole world is in trouble.
The summary seems to automatically assume that the the people downloading and converting to safari are Internet Exploder users. It's more likely that they are alternative browser users like Firefox and Opera. The 75% that IE has left isn't likely to leave anytime soon simply because they either don't know that other browsers exist, what a browser is (the difference between IE and Outlook for example), or are too lazy to care.
As someone who's taken both the high paying job and the fun job, I'd say take fun 98% of the time. The only 2% where I'd take the high paying job are:
1%: The high paying job is also the fun job.
1%: You are very deep in debt and need the high paying job.*
*If you're at this one, making more money likely won't help you. The more money you make the more money you'll spend because you likely have a money management problem.
Lulu.com sells MP3s, among other things for you. They just take a small bandwidth fee. They'll also let you sell CD's off their site so that your fans can buy CD's instead of downloadable MP3's if that's they way they roll.
I run a small open source startup that's doing quite well. We've been profitable every year, and keep doubling (or more) our revenues year after year. I sometimes think that I should seek out Venture Capital to take the business to the next level, but in same thought, I talk myself out of it. The conversation in my head goes, why would I give up a portion of a company that's doing so well to some outside firm? What realistic gains could I make in a short time if I had some VC funding that I can't make now? And I always come to the conlusion that VC funding is a much bigger risk than organic growth. So big of a risk, in fact, that it's benefits don't outweigh the risks. However, since we have this opportunity, I thought I'd ask: Why would an already successful startup want to seek venture capital? And what benefits, besides funding, does a VC firm such as yours bring to the table?
As the President of a web applications development company, I can tell you that you absolutely can prove ROI prior to building a web site. And not only can you prove it, I believe it's an absolute must to prove it before you start. If you don't have an absolute measurable objective going into a project like that, no amount of success will be enough to prove ROI. And that's because you had no meaningful data going into it.
I've never heard of about half of the myths you do on the show. Who comes up with all the myths you try to bust and will they ever run out of myths to bust?
I don't believe in God, but I agree with what you're saying. There's no reason that God couldn't have created the life that created all other life. Evolution and belief in God don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Afterall, what's more god like than creating something that can create something else?
U.S. society seems to be getting more and more religous every day. I don't understand it. Personally I have no need for faith in an all powerful being, but I do understand that many people do.
The thing that really irks me though is that the people causing this trial are a bunch of liars putting up smoke and mirrors. They say that they want a new definition of evolution for "science" sake, but really they don't agree with science at all. They want to do away with anything that contradicts their religious texts, and that is pretty much everything in science. They don't agree that the universe was created billions of years ago. Most don't agree that even small scale evolution is possible. It's rediculous.
Any good scientist knows that there can be flaws in any theory, but you go with the best evidence you have on hand. You don't dismiss evidence just because you don't like what it suggests.
These people are using several thousand year old religious texts that were written by men, not a God. The texts themselves were first carried through oral tradition and written down by scribes with their own biases. They were copied by additional scribes who added their own interpretations, biases, and just plain human error. They were edited by the Catholic church for the purposes that the Catholic church deemed necessary, and they were translated from language to language page to page. This whole process can lead to nothing but a work that even if it were true at the beginning is highly inaccurate, at best. It's like playing the telephone game over several hundred years, languages, and cultures. There's no way it can come out right.
So now they're trying to apply this stuff to science. This shouldn't even be legal. Since it's the public school system, it's the definition of the seperation of church and state.
I'll tell you what you should open source, and why it will benefit MS in the long run.
1) Internet Explorer
IE is free anyway, so there's no money to be lost. But what you are losing is marketshare to Mozilla and Opera-based browsers. This is due mainly to the security problems in IE. You could save developer resources AND marketshare by just releasing the source of IE so that it can be fixed/expanded more easily and quickly.
2) Visual Studio
There's nothing that will get developers rallying around your product like allowing them to customize the development tools they have to use every day. In addition, more people could/would write apps for Windows if they didn't have to spend a bunch of money purchasing compilers that they can get for free on Mac/Linux/Unix. You're already dominating on user-level market share. Having free development tools will undoubtedly convert developers, and the universities that are teaching those developers.
3) MSN Messenger
Instant messaging is a hot topic everywhere. AIM obviously dominates the market now, and open source systems like Jabber are starting to take a small foothold in businesses. A quick way for you to crush all of that is to open source your IM client and it's protocols. It's already in use by a lot of people, but it could be in use by a lot more. In addition, you'll likely get a lot of free ports to Mac/Linux/Unix and draw customer-base from there as well. This will give you more ad revenue, and may also lead to people getting MSN internet, hotmail, as well as purchasing your server products.
4) Virtual PC
I know you guys just paid a lot of money for buying it, but the whole purpose of buying it was to get Mac and Linux geeks to start using and relying on Windows apps, wasn't it? By providing it as open source you'll get faster adoption than ever before, which will only increase the number of Windows apps in use by these non-Windows markets.
5) Direct X
This is likely to be the most controversial one internal to MSFT. I know that a lot of people in MSFT believe that the gamer market is the second biggest reason people are holding on to Windows (2nd to MS Office). You're losing that war though. More and more games are being developed to Open GL and other open standards to make them more portable. Giant games like Unreal Tournament, Savage, and America's Army ship with Linux versions these days. And others like Doom 3 and Neverwinter Nights put out Linux versions shortly after their release. In addition, MSFT has become a huge publisher in the gaming market. Releasing Direct X as open source would allow more of your games to be played on more systems, which will increase the profits of that division. In addition, it may help you to hold on to your lead role in the game technology world, instead of losing it to other open standards.
A lot of people fault you for developing your own standards. If you take some of these technologies, and open source them, you can permanently make them become the standard.
I actually find both PhotoShop and The Gimp a complete pain in the ass to use. I really like Paint Shop Pro. I just wish they'd port it to Linux. After a while I have been able to get used to both PhotoShop and The Gimp. As far as power goes, Photoshop, then PSP, then The Gimp. Easy of use is PSP, then Photoshop, then The Gimp. And for extensibility, The Gimp, then Photoshop, then PSP.
I've made hundreds of small games, and have even had a few of them professionally produced. For book type games (like RPGs), I go with Documation. They're inexpensive, will do small runs, and do a great job. For card game printing, I send my stuff out to India to a place called Print Masters.
Eugenia doesn't know jack, or Linux for that matter either. Fedora Core 1 is easily (and I really do mean easily) the best Linux distro I've ever used on the desktop. I've switched both my home and work PC's to it and have had exactly 0 (that's zero) problems with it.
The install went faster than any other Linux install I've ever done. It boots slightly faster than RH9, and it's got all kinds of eye candy. Not to mention all of the latest stuff.
The only gripe I have, and it's not a big one is that it didn't have wine installed by default (I had to compile it myself), which I need so I can run Lotus Notes at work.
I give FC1 six big thumbs up (I figured that since it's installed on three of my machines I'd get an extra set of hands for each machine).
Every old UNIX hand knows that SCO has always been the ugly second-cousin of real unix environments like DEC Unix, AIX, HPUX, and Solaris. No real unix administrator would ever *choose* to use SCO if s/he had the choice.
And I can honestly say that after having administered all of the OS's mentioned above, Linux is vastly more innovative than any of them these days. Sure all of them have thier cool utilities, but feature-for-feature Linux wins hands down.
Pax Imperia was the best game in this genre. Don't get me wrong, I like MoO as well, but Pax is the crown jewel. Too bad the company is out of business.
(Sorry, the formatting was lost in the first post.)
Since the original poster, and subsequently many of those responding made a mistake in their interpretation of our membership agreement, we felt it only fair to present the truth.
First, our membership agreement is for the Support Center, which is where our technicians provide answers to specific problems that our customers are experiencing. The poster applied this agreement to WebGUI's manual, Ruling WebGUI, which is a mistake. Ruling WebGUI has its own license which is not much more than a restatement of United States copyright law, saying that you don't have the right to make copies of, or distribute, the book for anything more than your own personal use.
Second, the person who submitted the original story, though making an argument against our NDA, actually has a problem with paying for services of any kind. He made no claims against our NDA when he was posting on our discussions, nor in any emails to us. Instead his claim was that since WebGUI is open source that everything related to WebGUI should be free (as in beer).
Third, we have taken in your responses about our NDA. Many of you are right, as worded it was unfair. We have decided to reword the NDA to better suit the community. While we're certain that it will not satisfy those of you that believe that no profit should be made from information and services, it should alleviate those of you who want to help out your neighbor with your new-found knowledge.
Fourth, the intent of our NDA is to protect ourselves from our competitors. It is not meant to stifle knowledge sharing, but instead to stop those that would try to make a profit by our labor. Indeed there have already been several attempts to make this play by various "companies".
Finally, a comment about the business of open source software. Many people mistakenly believe that open source software means that the software, beyond sharing its source code, is free of charge. There is no OSI approved license that we are aware of that implicitly states this. Instead they speak loudly to freedom of expression and knowlege sharing.
Furthermore, several posters correctly made the observation that open source needs to find its niche in business, and not the other way around. Like it or not we live in a world of capitalism. And in our world of capitalism small businesses drive the economy. If small businesses like Plain Black are not able to survive on an open source model (and I'm not saying that our model is the best or only) then open source is doomed to be a hobbist's affair. Everyone who works at Plain Black strongly believes in open source. If we didn't we wouldn't build our business around it. But at the same time, if profits are unsustainable in the open source world, then the economy of open source will wither and die; and the funding for all but the biggest of projects will die with it.
Since the original poster, and subsequently many of those responding made a mistake in their interpretation of our membership agreement, we felt it only fair to present the truth.
First, our membership agreement is for the Support Center, which is where our technicians provide answers to specific problems that our customers are experiencing. The poster applied this agreement to WebGUI's manual, Ruling WebGUI, which is a mistake. Ruling WebGUI has its own license which is not much more than a restatement of United States copyright law, saying that you don't have the right to make copies of, or distribute, the book for anything more than your own personal use.
Second, the person who submitted the original story, though making an argument against our NDA, actually has a problem with paying for services of any kind. He made no claims against our NDA when he was posting on our discussions, nor in any emails to us. Instead his claim was that since WebGUI is open source that everything related to WebGUI should be free (as in beer).
Third, we have taken in your responses about our NDA. Many of you are right, as worded it was unfair. We have decided to reword the NDA to better suit the community. While we're certain that it will not satisfy those of you that believe that no profit should be made from information and services, it should alleviate those of you who want to help out your neighbor with your new-found knowledge.
Fourth, the intent of our NDA is to protect ourselves from our competitors. It is not meant to stifle knowledge sharing, but instead to stop those that would try to make a profit by our labor. Indeed there have already been several attempts to make this play by various "companies".
Finally, a comment about the business of open source software. Many people mistakenly believe that open source software means that the software, beyond sharing its source code, is free of charge. There is no OSI approved license that we are aware of that implicitly states this. Instead they speak loudly to freedom of expression and knowlege sharing.
Furthermore, several posters correctly made the observation that open source needs to find its niche in business, and not the other way around. Like it or not we live in a world of capitalism. And in our world of capitalism small businesses drive the economy. If small businesses like Plain Black are not able to survive on an open source model (and I'm not saying that our model is the best or only) then open source is doomed to be a hobbist's affair. Everyone who works at Plain Black strongly believes in open source. If we didn't we wouldn't build our business around it. But at the same time, if profits are unsustainable in the open source world, then the economy of open source will wither and die; and the funding for all but the biggest of projects will die with it.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I should state that it's really not about the language, it's about the coder. You can build great and crappy things with any language. And every language has it's warts.
That said, the best language I've used in the past 20 years of programming has got to be Modern Perl. Not the chicken scratch Perl you saw 5 or 10 years ago, but Modern Perl. Here are some of the strengths of modern Perl:
It's object system: https://metacpan.org/module/Moose
It's web frameworks, especially Dancer: https://metacpan.org/module/Dancer
It's ORM: https://metacpan.org/module/DBIx::Class
It's package installer: https://metacpan.org/module/App::cpanminus
And so much more. Do yourself a favor and at least have a look at Perl.
Check out The Lacuna Expanse, a browser, iPhone, and iPad game that doesn't at all feel like a browser game.
WebGUI is a much more powerful CMS than Joomla, and it's much easier to write plugins for.
No Apple hasn't, The Game Crafter has created the perfect board game platform.
We were rejected because somehow Polaroid might object to our online photo sharing application. All Apple would say was:
"WebGUI Gallery appears to include features that associate with POLAROID or resemble Polaroid photographs. Polaroid has previously objected to other applications that include such features and believes that they infringe its rights."
We don't mention Polaroid, we don't produce physical pictures. The only thing that could be construed as being related to Polaroid is the template that we used on the web site, which has a white border around the photograph. So if now all white bordered photographs resemble Polaroid's IP, I think that the whole world is in trouble.
Every other week some idiot is telling us the internet is going to die soon.
The summary seems to automatically assume that the the people downloading and converting to safari are Internet Exploder users. It's more likely that they are alternative browser users like Firefox and Opera. The 75% that IE has left isn't likely to leave anytime soon simply because they either don't know that other browsers exist, what a browser is (the difference between IE and Outlook for example), or are too lazy to care.
As someone who's taken both the high paying job and the fun job, I'd say take fun 98% of the time. The only 2% where I'd take the high paying job are: 1%: The high paying job is also the fun job. 1%: You are very deep in debt and need the high paying job.* *If you're at this one, making more money likely won't help you. The more money you make the more money you'll spend because you likely have a money management problem.
Lulu.com sells MP3s, among other things for you. They just take a small bandwidth fee. They'll also let you sell CD's off their site so that your fans can buy CD's instead of downloadable MP3's if that's they way they roll.
I run a small open source startup that's doing quite well. We've been profitable every year, and keep doubling (or more) our revenues year after year. I sometimes think that I should seek out Venture Capital to take the business to the next level, but in same thought, I talk myself out of it. The conversation in my head goes, why would I give up a portion of a company that's doing so well to some outside firm? What realistic gains could I make in a short time if I had some VC funding that I can't make now? And I always come to the conlusion that VC funding is a much bigger risk than organic growth. So big of a risk, in fact, that it's benefits don't outweigh the risks. However, since we have this opportunity, I thought I'd ask: Why would an already successful startup want to seek venture capital? And what benefits, besides funding, does a VC firm such as yours bring to the table?
As the President of a web applications development company, I can tell you that you absolutely can prove ROI prior to building a web site. And not only can you prove it, I believe it's an absolute must to prove it before you start. If you don't have an absolute measurable objective going into a project like that, no amount of success will be enough to prove ROI. And that's because you had no meaningful data going into it.
I agree that this site is perfect for comparing these sorts of sites, but then I probably should, my company created it. =)
I've never heard of about half of the myths you do on the show. Who comes up with all the myths you try to bust and will they ever run out of myths to bust?
Of the people on the show, who was already working at M5 prior to MythBusters, and who was brought in just for the show?
I don't believe in God, but I agree with what you're saying. There's no reason that God couldn't have created the life that created all other life. Evolution and belief in God don't have to be mutually exclusive. Afterall, what's more god like than creating something that can create something else?
U.S. society seems to be getting more and more religous every day. I don't understand it. Personally I have no need for faith in an all powerful being, but I do understand that many people do.
The thing that really irks me though is that the people causing this trial are a bunch of liars putting up smoke and mirrors. They say that they want a new definition of evolution for "science" sake, but really they don't agree with science at all. They want to do away with anything that contradicts their religious texts, and that is pretty much everything in science. They don't agree that the universe was created billions of years ago. Most don't agree that even small scale evolution is possible. It's rediculous.
Any good scientist knows that there can be flaws in any theory, but you go with the best evidence you have on hand. You don't dismiss evidence just because you don't like what it suggests.
These people are using several thousand year old religious texts that were written by men, not a God. The texts themselves were first carried through oral tradition and written down by scribes with their own biases. They were copied by additional scribes who added their own interpretations, biases, and just plain human error. They were edited by the Catholic church for the purposes that the Catholic church deemed necessary, and they were translated from language to language page to page. This whole process can lead to nothing but a work that even if it were true at the beginning is highly inaccurate, at best. It's like playing the telephone game over several hundred years, languages, and cultures. There's no way it can come out right.
So now they're trying to apply this stuff to science. This shouldn't even be legal. Since it's the public school system, it's the definition of the seperation of church and state.
I'll tell you what you should open source, and why it will benefit MS in the long run.
1) Internet Explorer
IE is free anyway, so there's no money to be lost. But what you are losing is marketshare to Mozilla and Opera-based browsers. This is due mainly to the security problems in IE. You could save developer resources AND marketshare by just releasing the source of IE so that it can be fixed/expanded more easily and quickly.
2) Visual Studio
There's nothing that will get developers rallying around your product like allowing them to customize the development tools they have to use every day. In addition, more people could/would write apps for Windows if they didn't have to spend a bunch of money purchasing compilers that they can get for free on Mac/Linux/Unix. You're already dominating on user-level market share. Having free development tools will undoubtedly convert developers, and the universities that are teaching those developers.
3) MSN Messenger
Instant messaging is a hot topic everywhere. AIM obviously dominates the market now, and open source systems like Jabber are starting to take a small foothold in businesses. A quick way for you to crush all of that is to open source your IM client and it's protocols. It's already in use by a lot of people, but it could be in use by a lot more. In addition, you'll likely get a lot of free ports to Mac/Linux/Unix and draw customer-base from there as well. This will give you more ad revenue, and may also lead to people getting MSN internet, hotmail, as well as purchasing your server products.
4) Virtual PC
I know you guys just paid a lot of money for buying it, but the whole purpose of buying it was to get Mac and Linux geeks to start using and relying on Windows apps, wasn't it? By providing it as open source you'll get faster adoption than ever before, which will only increase the number of Windows apps in use by these non-Windows markets.
5) Direct X
This is likely to be the most controversial one internal to MSFT. I know that a lot of people in MSFT believe that the gamer market is the second biggest reason people are holding on to Windows (2nd to MS Office). You're losing that war though. More and more games are being developed to Open GL and other open standards to make them more portable. Giant games like Unreal Tournament, Savage, and America's Army ship with Linux versions these days. And others like Doom 3 and Neverwinter Nights put out Linux versions shortly after their release. In addition, MSFT has become a huge publisher in the gaming market. Releasing Direct X as open source would allow more of your games to be played on more systems, which will increase the profits of that division. In addition, it may help you to hold on to your lead role in the game technology world, instead of losing it to other open standards.
A lot of people fault you for developing your own standards. If you take some of these technologies, and open source them, you can permanently make them become the standard.
I actually find both PhotoShop and The Gimp a complete pain in the ass to use. I really like Paint Shop Pro. I just wish they'd port it to Linux. After a while I have been able to get used to both PhotoShop and The Gimp. As far as power goes, Photoshop, then PSP, then The Gimp. Easy of use is PSP, then Photoshop, then The Gimp. And for extensibility, The Gimp, then Photoshop, then PSP.
I've made hundreds of small games, and have even had a few of them professionally produced. For book type games (like RPGs), I go with Documation. They're inexpensive, will do small runs, and do a great job. For card game printing, I send my stuff out to India to a place called Print Masters.
Eugenia doesn't know jack, or Linux for that matter either. Fedora Core 1 is easily (and I really do mean easily) the best Linux distro I've ever used on the desktop. I've switched both my home and work PC's to it and have had exactly 0 (that's zero) problems with it. The install went faster than any other Linux install I've ever done. It boots slightly faster than RH9, and it's got all kinds of eye candy. Not to mention all of the latest stuff. The only gripe I have, and it's not a big one is that it didn't have wine installed by default (I had to compile it myself), which I need so I can run Lotus Notes at work. I give FC1 six big thumbs up (I figured that since it's installed on three of my machines I'd get an extra set of hands for each machine).
Every old UNIX hand knows that SCO has always been the ugly second-cousin of real unix environments like DEC Unix, AIX, HPUX, and Solaris. No real unix administrator would ever *choose* to use SCO if s/he had the choice.
And I can honestly say that after having administered all of the OS's mentioned above, Linux is vastly more innovative than any of them these days. Sure all of them have thier cool utilities, but feature-for-feature Linux wins hands down.
Pax Imperia was the best game in this genre. Don't get me wrong, I like MoO as well, but Pax is the crown jewel. Too bad the company is out of business.
At 10-12mph you're not really jogging so much as sprinting. Your average jogger cannot and does not keep up a pace of a 5-6 minute mile.
Since the original poster, and subsequently many of those responding made a mistake in their interpretation of our membership agreement, we felt it only fair to present the truth.
First, our membership agreement is for the Support Center, which is where our technicians provide answers to specific problems that our customers are experiencing. The poster applied this agreement to WebGUI's manual, Ruling WebGUI, which is a mistake. Ruling WebGUI has its own license which is not much more than a restatement of United States copyright law, saying that you don't have the right to make copies of, or distribute, the book for anything more than your own personal use.
Second, the person who submitted the original story, though making an argument against our NDA, actually has a problem with paying for services of any kind. He made no claims against our NDA when he was posting on our discussions, nor in any emails to us. Instead his claim was that since WebGUI is open source that everything related to WebGUI should be free (as in beer).
Third, we have taken in your responses about our NDA. Many of you are right, as worded it was unfair. We have decided to reword the NDA to better suit the community. While we're certain that it will not satisfy those of you that believe that no profit should be made from information and services, it should alleviate those of you who want to help out your neighbor with your new-found knowledge.
Fourth, the intent of our NDA is to protect ourselves from our competitors. It is not meant to stifle knowledge sharing, but instead to stop those that would try to make a profit by our labor. Indeed there have already been several attempts to make this play by various "companies".
Finally, a comment about the business of open source software. Many people mistakenly believe that open source software means that the software, beyond sharing its source code, is free of charge. There is no OSI approved license that we are aware of that implicitly states this. Instead they speak loudly to freedom of expression and knowlege sharing.
Furthermore, several posters correctly made the observation that open source needs to find its niche in business, and not the other way around. Like it or not we live in a world of capitalism. And in our world of capitalism small businesses drive the economy. If small businesses like Plain Black are not able to survive on an open source model (and I'm not saying that our model is the best or only) then open source is doomed to be a hobbist's affair. Everyone who works at Plain Black strongly believes in open source. If we didn't we wouldn't build our business around it. But at the same time, if profits are unsustainable in the open source world, then the economy of open source will wither and die; and the funding for all but the biggest of projects will die with it.
Since the original poster, and subsequently many of those responding made a mistake in their interpretation of our membership agreement, we felt it only fair to present the truth. First, our membership agreement is for the Support Center, which is where our technicians provide answers to specific problems that our customers are experiencing. The poster applied this agreement to WebGUI's manual, Ruling WebGUI, which is a mistake. Ruling WebGUI has its own license which is not much more than a restatement of United States copyright law, saying that you don't have the right to make copies of, or distribute, the book for anything more than your own personal use. Second, the person who submitted the original story, though making an argument against our NDA, actually has a problem with paying for services of any kind. He made no claims against our NDA when he was posting on our discussions, nor in any emails to us. Instead his claim was that since WebGUI is open source that everything related to WebGUI should be free (as in beer). Third, we have taken in your responses about our NDA. Many of you are right, as worded it was unfair. We have decided to reword the NDA to better suit the community. While we're certain that it will not satisfy those of you that believe that no profit should be made from information and services, it should alleviate those of you who want to help out your neighbor with your new-found knowledge. Fourth, the intent of our NDA is to protect ourselves from our competitors. It is not meant to stifle knowledge sharing, but instead to stop those that would try to make a profit by our labor. Indeed there have already been several attempts to make this play by various "companies". Finally, a comment about the business of open source software. Many people mistakenly believe that open source software means that the software, beyond sharing its source code, is free of charge. There is no OSI approved license that we are aware of that implicitly states this. Instead they speak loudly to freedom of expression and knowlege sharing. Furthermore, several posters correctly made the observation that open source needs to find its niche in business, and not the other way around. Like it or not we live in a world of capitalism. And in our world of capitalism small businesses drive the economy. If small businesses like Plain Black are not able to survive on an open source model (and I'm not saying that our model is the best or only) then open source is doomed to be a hobbist's affair. Everyone who works at Plain Black strongly believes in open source. If we didn't we wouldn't build our business around it. But at the same time, if profits are unsustainable in the open source world, then the economy of open source will wither and die; and the funding for all but the biggest of projects will die with it.