I'm also an Oracle guy. I find MySQL loathesome and inadquate for all buy toy-level applications. I see Firebird and PostgreSQL both as viable midrange solutions. I think they each could work in settings were you aren't really stressing the newest features of Oracle, but want "standard" RDBMS functionality. Both have stored procedures, triggers, and some kinds of subqueries (at least in the WHERE clause -- oracle has them also in the from clause and even in the SELECT clause).
I think you'll find that materialized views, at least as far as doing refresh-on-commit and query rewriting, are a really advanced feature that only Oracle has. In many warehousing or decision support applications, they are a must have feature that makes the difference between project success and failure.
Assuming you aren't in such a high performance setting, you can often simulate a materialized view by simply populating a transformation table using stored procedures. In such settings, I think either Firebird or PostgreSQL would work fine, cost less, and avoid icky proprietary licence restrictions.
I don't like the way they handled the Mozilla/Firebird naming issue.
If Mozilla had called their browser "Linux" or "Apache" or "Python" would you have taken the same position? Or do you feel it is only an issue if they choose the same name as a project you've personally worked with.
Mozilla was clearly in the wrong there, but they did the responsible thing and renamed their project to Firefox and even came up with a cool logo to match their new name. That issue is resolved to everyone's satisfaction, so why would you keep bringing it up after it is fixed? It's time to move on.
You are free to compete, but nobody owes you anything. The guy in india is a human being too, and probably has had to bust his ass harder than you to get a lot less than the cushy life you've already had if you are a typical American, so spare us the sob story. If you think you can add value, you are free to try. Good luck.
If you can't add value, then unfortunately, you probably won't starve to death because people here who actually can compete in the global job market will end up carrying your weight and paying for your food via their taxes. This is unlike India, where you are free to starve to death and very well might. So again, spare us the sob story.
Actually, I suspect that the timing of this DVD-CCA decision is completely explained by the fact that Jon won in Norway. If Jon's actions were legal under the laws of his country then Bunner's actions in the US are not traceable to an act of misappropriation.
You should first look to register your copyright. This costs $30 and is otherwise relatively simple. This gives you certain legal benefits in a potential litigation and serves as a deterence. You should start pouring over Title 17 so that you know the law. Don't be afraid to read it yourself -- copyright law is actually pretty accessible.
After that you should send them a letter stating that (1) your work is copyrighted and is not public domain (2) you offer a licence (the GPL) which is seeks certain forms of compensation in return for using your work. That compensation comes in the form of reciprical licencing to their derivitive copyrights. Provide them with a copy of the GPL. (3) State that they have made no attempt to comply with those terms. State the actions taken by them that violate the terms. State that they have not purchased or seceured any licence to use your copyrighted material in the manner they are using it. Don't be wishy-washy. Say things like "you are basing your business on piracy of my intellectual property". (4) State that as of this letter they are on notice that they are violating the law and that if they do not cease and desist then any willful and knowing infringment may be subject to increased penelties under the copyight law. (5) Remind them that damages for infringement include any profits attributable to the infringement.
If you feel like it, offer them a real licence to do what they are doing for an appropriate cost, say $2million or some other number you'd be happy with.
Don't be afraid to go talk to an IP lawyer. If you want to proceed beyond telling them to stop pirating your stuff, then this will be essential. Use the phone book. Make it clear to the people you talk to that you are interested in discussing retaining them on a contingency basis only, that your have registered your copyright, and that you believe a business is willfully pirating your code.
This wasn't my mistake, but I guy I work with left a where clause condition of an update SQL statement and released the work to production. In development he was working on a system with a reduced data volumes and it updated a few stray records and he didn't notice. In test, the test cases didn't cause the SQL to run. In production it wiped out about 20000 records and had to full scan a very large table to boot. We actually found it because of the performance problem first. It took us a few weeks to reconstruct all the erased data.
My biggest mistake was in my first programming job years ago. I intentionally wrote an infinite loop into a program that was running on a very powerful (for the time) reasearch unix box used at the Naval research lab where I had an internship. It was a sonar imaging optimization routine and I would let it run for short periods (10-30 seconds typically) and then CTRL-C it to force it to stop and inspect the log file to find the results. I was new to unix and so I would use "ps" as opposed to "ps -aux" to see what processes I had running. I had multiple sessions up and managed to leave one of my programs running, switched sessions, ran ps which showed no processes running and went to lunch. The sysadmin was also a meeting and then lunch. When I returned I had a bunch of nastygrams telling me to kill my job immediately, not to run processes that hog the CPU because other projects couldn't use the system and to get approval before running long running jobs because the CPU time was billed (this was around 1985). I actually sat down, ran ps again, saw no job, and wrote back saying I didn't know what they were talking about. The sysadmin (who had returned from lunch) came over to visit me and educated me on a whole bunch of things.
Whenever the law provides definitions, those definitions are valid ONLY WHEN THOSE TERMS ARE USED IN THE THE LAW ITSELF. The sec. 101 definition of financial gain therefore applies only to uses of the term "financial gain" in title 17.
This is a point that Darl's company is making in litigation. So this is, in fact, a legal discussion about whether "IN THE LAW" the GPL does or does not reward authors with "financial gain".
Linus has shown quite conclusively that it is black letter law that the kind of IP barter arrangement that the GPL proposes is "financial gain" under the law. Thus, even in Darl's pretend world, Darl's argument is a bunch of crap.
This is mostly foolish because of course if the computer had seen anything better to play it wouldn't have repeated the position three times whether it was aware of the implications of the repetition or not.
Actually the computer playing the white pieces (Shredder) was in a position that it evaluated as overwhelmingly better. Because of a bug in its programming, it didn't factor 3-fold repitition when it had a forced win. It had engaged in the repition in order to fully calculate all the way to mate. When it found the winning line it happened to go through a position that had been repeated twice before and it wasn't programmed to avoid the draw in a line with a forced win.
I actually think the ruling was absurd -- the computer did announce to its human user ahead of time the move it intended to play and the fact that it was a threefold repitition. The programmers intent in this situation was perfectly clear. To put the burden on the human to decide whether or not to claim the draw kind of defeats the idea of it being computer chess. Clearly the computer was observing that the draw rule was satisfied, even if it didn't say "I claim a draw".
As a result of this ruling, I see no reason that a human user couldn't throw a game on purpose for the benefit of a third party competitor by ignoring the computers move and playing another. I mean after all perhaps e2-e4 is just an observation of a legal move.
If anything, the program playing the black pieces should have been DQ'd from the program for allowing human discretion in the situation.
Remove the GPL code and pay damages. The actual damages would probably be $0. IANAL and don't know if punitive damages would apply.
The law is not kind to businesses that base their products on stolen IP. You don't have to be a lawyer to read chapter 5 of USC Title 17.
Actual damages include profits due to infringement and lost licencing fees. In particular, read 17 USC 504(b). The burden of proof is on the infringer to EXCLUDE revenue not due to infringement. The licencing fees here would be non-GPL licencing costs, that is what they have had to pay on the open marketed for what they stole. You could present purchase prices of comparable proprietary products for a per-copy damage, as well as modification-licening comparables for a derivitive creation licencing damage.
There are statutory damages under copyight law, per 17 USC 504(c), but you either pick the statuory damages or the actual damages. Statuory damages are of three classes: unknowning, general and willful infringement (my terminology). For general, you get between $750 and $30,000 per *infringing work* as the court considers just. For willful, this can increase to $150,000. For unknowning infringement, it can be reduced to $200. I suspect that a C&D letter is sufficient notice to eliminate this last category.
Because Microsoft has declared that thir next operating system will only run on Trusted Computing hardware and it is flat-out IMPOSSIBLE to sell hardware if it can't run Windows.
That's not true, but if it was, it would be great news. This would be the surest way for MS to lose it's stranglehold on the desktop because it would cut off the entire installed base from upgrading within the MS product line.
And business understanding is only valuable if it leads to results. It's unlikely that Cobol is the source of the next breakthrough. If you are lazy and expensive, expect "but I understand how our business works" to be met with "what have you done for me lately?".
Companies don't care about domain experience, they care about business results. Be the kind of IT worker that generates these results and you have nothing to fear.
You go where the jobs are, regardless of the moral implications of said job. It really should be up to the American people to decide that they shouldn't have to spend $500 billion a year to KILL PEOPLE.
No, you go where the jobs are, especially because of the moral implications. It is a very fine time to work for the military and people who do deserve credit.
And contrary to your rediculous position, the American people have decided. It sounds like you are pretending they haven't because you are in denial about the fact that they just don't find your warm-ed over '60's mentality very persuasive when radical extremists would like to destroy us because we don't subscribe to their wacked out world view.
The simple fact is that America has rightly decided some people need to be killed and are acting accordingly. When the alternative is doing nothing and watching our buildings fall down or watching Israeli babies blown to bits by suicide bombers, it's immoral to not persue the will of the American people to use the military to destroy the evil which assails us.
If all you do is programming, then I suppose that your job is not hard. But if your job includes analysing your company's business and using information technology to solve business problems that affect the bottom line, then your job is very hard, very valuable, not exportable, and very secure.
There are many good programmers that don't understand business and want to be handed clean coding tasks. These are the people that are whining incessantly because their requirements documents aren't right. They want somebody else to do the hard part. The simple fact is that if you A) understand the business and B) can read the code that drives it, then you are better positioned than most people in the company to actually create revenue enhancing process changes.
Are you blind man? The reason that SCOX is trading at $17.50 (that's American dollars, not Italian Lire or EverQuest gold pieces, that's American dollars my man!) is that a whole bunch of people are betting!
NO!! It means that a few people are betting a LOT of money. And you don't exactly know WHY they are betting on SCO. It's entire possible that they expect to lose their bet on SCO but to recoup the money in other places.
For example, I happen to believe that MS and probably also Sun are happy to fund SCO's suicide because they believe that if they create fear, uncertainty and doubt in Linux along the way that they will recoup their investment in other places. Think about it -- if MS slows down Linux adoption by say 1%, they will more than pay for a $25 million loss.
SCO is not violating the copyright, they are violating the GPL
I really have no idea why you think there is a difference. Federal law says you must have permission from the copyright owner. That permission IS the license. Violating the licences is completely equivalent to violating copyright law.
SCO is going to get handed its head on this issue. They have based their entire Linux business on piracy of GPL software.
You most certainly can sue corporations, local or foreign, in most small claims courts.
This is absolutely true -- BUT -- copyright is exclusively a federal law issue, so you cannot sue ANYBODY for copyright violations in state court (small claims or otherwise). There is no federal small claims court, so you'll eventually litigate any copyright claim in a US District Court.
on some theoretical JIT, might actually run faster than a snail.
You do know that java is faster than C# for non-GUI apps, right? source. I suspect that if you dump swing and go with the eclipse SWT, you probably equalize the GUI speed issue too, which would mean that on windows platforms Java is faster than C#.
The "java is slow" reputation was earned with java 1.1 and was fixed long ago when the JIT VM's came out (they are part of all modern JVM's). Memory use issues might give you a real issue to knock java on, but you really shouldn't repeat untrue lore.
C# 1.0 is a reality. The posting is about the "design specifications document for C# 2.0". How would you classify that -- "talk or reality". (The correct answer is talk).
On the other hand Java 1.5 is talk that is on the verge of release (weeks or months away), while C# 2.0 is just getting started.
And while,.net is a reality, it isn't a very pretty one. It's about where JDK 1.2 was. Most people don't realize that C# is SLOWER than java on MS platforms, which is fscking SAD, given that java has to be cross platform which costs speed. (source: results from Aldo Calpini's windows port of Doug Bagley's Language shootout).
For the exact reason you state: the potential consumers. Branding would be useful in getting more people to give ol' Moz a try. One of the main things about the average surfer, I find, is that (s)he simply doesn't know about it.
While I agree to some extent that people have to recognize your name before they will consider you, I think this wreaks of marketing fluff. The best way to get people to know about you is to offer innovative new features that people really WANT.
Mozilla set out to be the most cross-platform standards compliant browser. Well, there are a lot of new W3C standards out there like SVG, XForms, XML Events, and I don't see Mozilla leading the standards compliance charge. If you want to follow IE and do the same old boring HTML functionality, then I really don't think branding is a marketing strategy that gets you anywhere.
Even if you can get people to know the Mozilla name, aren't they just going to say: "OK, so Mozilla is like IE, but why would I switch to it?"
You must be a marketing guy's dream. It's all about you, isn't it. You ask for a feature, you get a feature, and everybody else gets locked in to the only proprietary office suite that has that feature, even though the benefit of that feature is so obscure 99% of people won't even know it exists.
The feature I NEED most is no new features. If you have a need that isn't met by existing word processors, then I don't want to share documents with you. The fact of the matter is that not only do I NOT CARE what you *think* you need, I need you NOT to have it and to be forbidden from using it.
That's because I need an office suite that doesn't lock my business information into a proprietary format that cannot be supported by open source tools. Both of those drive cost for my business and home PC.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also an Oracle guy. I find MySQL loathesome and inadquate for all buy toy-level applications. I see Firebird and PostgreSQL both as viable midrange solutions. I think they each could work in settings were you aren't really stressing the newest features of Oracle, but want "standard" RDBMS functionality. Both have stored procedures, triggers, and some kinds of subqueries (at least in the WHERE clause -- oracle has them also in the from clause and even in the SELECT clause).
I think you'll find that materialized views, at least as far as doing refresh-on-commit and query rewriting, are a really advanced feature that only Oracle has. In many warehousing or decision support applications, they are a must have feature that makes the difference between project success and failure.
Assuming you aren't in such a high performance setting, you can often simulate a materialized view by simply populating a transformation table using stored procedures. In such settings, I think either Firebird or PostgreSQL would work fine, cost less, and avoid icky proprietary licence restrictions.
I don't like the way they handled the Mozilla/Firebird naming issue.
If Mozilla had called their browser "Linux" or "Apache" or "Python" would you have taken the same position? Or do you feel it is only an issue if they choose the same name as a project you've personally worked with.
Mozilla was clearly in the wrong there, but they did the responsible thing and renamed their project to Firefox and even came up with a cool logo to match their new name. That issue is resolved to everyone's satisfaction, so why would you keep bringing it up after it is fixed? It's time to move on.
Why do we ask companies to GPL their aging products and then ask if anyone cares?
This RDBMS is a viable peer to PostgreSQL. It has many features that MySQL does not have.
Just the other day, there was a good article about this database.
So your saying I'm free to starve to death?
You are free to compete, but nobody owes you anything. The guy in india is a human being too, and probably has had to bust his ass harder than you to get a lot less than the cushy life you've already had if you are a typical American, so spare us the sob story. If you think you can add value, you are free to try. Good luck.
If you can't add value, then unfortunately, you probably won't starve to death because people here who actually can compete in the global job market will end up carrying your weight and paying for your food via their taxes. This is unlike India, where you are free to starve to death and very well might. So again, spare us the sob story.
Actually, I suspect that the timing of this DVD-CCA decision is completely explained by the fact that Jon won in Norway. If Jon's actions were legal under the laws of his country then Bunner's actions in the US are not traceable to an act of misappropriation.
You should first look to register your copyright. This costs $30 and is otherwise relatively simple. This gives you certain legal benefits in a potential litigation and serves as a deterence. You should start pouring over Title 17 so that you know the law. Don't be afraid to read it yourself -- copyright law is actually pretty accessible.
After that you should send them a letter stating that (1) your work is copyrighted and is not public domain (2) you offer a licence (the GPL) which is seeks certain forms of compensation in return for using your work. That compensation comes in the form of reciprical licencing to their derivitive copyrights. Provide them with a copy of the GPL. (3) State that they have made no attempt to comply with those terms. State the actions taken by them that violate the terms. State that they have not purchased or seceured any licence to use your copyrighted material in the manner they are using it. Don't be wishy-washy. Say things like "you are basing your business on piracy of my intellectual property". (4) State that as of this letter they are on notice that they are violating the law and that if they do not cease and desist then any willful and knowing infringment may be subject to increased penelties under the copyight law. (5) Remind them that damages for infringement include any profits attributable to the infringement.
If you feel like it, offer them a real licence to do what they are doing for an appropriate cost, say $2million or some other number you'd be happy with.
Don't be afraid to go talk to an IP lawyer. If you want to proceed beyond telling them to stop pirating your stuff, then this will be essential. Use the phone book. Make it clear to the people you talk to that you are interested in discussing retaining them on a contingency basis only, that your have registered your copyright, and that you believe a business is willfully pirating your code.
No. How funny would that have been.
It was at Applied Research Labs in Austin, TX. in the late '80s.
This wasn't my mistake, but I guy I work with left a where clause condition of an update SQL statement and released the work to production. In development he was working on a system with a reduced data volumes and it updated a few stray records and he didn't notice. In test, the test cases didn't cause the SQL to run. In production it wiped out about 20000 records and had to full scan a very large table to boot. We actually found it because of the performance problem first. It took us a few weeks to reconstruct all the erased data.
My biggest mistake was in my first programming job years ago. I intentionally wrote an infinite loop into a program that was running on a very powerful (for the time) reasearch unix box used at the Naval research lab where I had an internship. It was a sonar imaging optimization routine and I would let it run for short periods (10-30 seconds typically) and then CTRL-C it to force it to stop and inspect the log file to find the results. I was new to unix and so I would use "ps" as opposed to "ps -aux" to see what processes I had running. I had multiple sessions up and managed to leave one of my programs running, switched sessions, ran ps which showed no processes running and went to lunch. The sysadmin was also a meeting and then lunch. When I returned I had a bunch of nastygrams telling me to kill my job immediately, not to run processes that hog the CPU because other projects couldn't use the system and to get approval before running long running jobs because the CPU time was billed (this was around 1985). I actually sat down, ran ps again, saw no job, and wrote back saying I didn't know what they were talking about. The sysadmin (who had returned from lunch) came over to visit me and educated me on a whole bunch of things.
Whenever the law provides definitions, those definitions are valid ONLY WHEN THOSE TERMS ARE USED IN THE THE LAW ITSELF. The sec. 101 definition of financial gain therefore applies only to uses of the term "financial gain" in title 17.
This is a point that Darl's company is making in litigation. So this is, in fact, a legal discussion about whether "IN THE LAW" the GPL does or does not reward authors with "financial gain".
Linus has shown quite conclusively that it is black letter law that the kind of IP barter arrangement that the GPL proposes is "financial gain" under the law. Thus, even in Darl's pretend world, Darl's argument is a bunch of crap.
Note to self: Actually look at the preview before hitting submit.
The sad thing is that Beanshell actually should be called Javascript, since that is exactly what it is. LiveScript or ECMAScript are both superior names. Perhaps it could be called rhinoscript or webscript, too. Anything else would have been better.
[whipes tears of laughter from eyes]
[breaths]
I'd like to see a list of some of the competitors before I proclaim it THE funniest post. Perhaps it would be a good topic for a poll.
This is mostly foolish because of course if the computer had seen anything better to play it wouldn't have repeated the position three times whether it was aware of the implications of the repetition or not.
Actually the computer playing the white pieces (Shredder) was in a position that it evaluated as overwhelmingly better. Because of a bug in its programming, it didn't factor 3-fold repitition when it had a forced win. It had engaged in the repition in order to fully calculate all the way to mate. When it found the winning line it happened to go through a position that had been repeated twice before and it wasn't programmed to avoid the draw in a line with a forced win.
I actually think the ruling was absurd -- the computer did announce to its human user ahead of time the move it intended to play and the fact that it was a threefold repitition. The programmers intent in this situation was perfectly clear. To put the burden on the human to decide whether or not to claim the draw kind of defeats the idea of it being computer chess. Clearly the computer was observing that the draw rule was satisfied, even if it didn't say "I claim a draw".
As a result of this ruling, I see no reason that a human user couldn't throw a game on purpose for the benefit of a third party competitor by ignoring the computers move and playing another. I mean after all perhaps e2-e4 is just an observation of a legal move.
If anything, the program playing the black pieces should have been DQ'd from the program for allowing human discretion in the situation.
Remove the GPL code and pay damages. The actual damages would probably be $0. IANAL and don't know if punitive damages would apply.
The law is not kind to businesses that base their products on stolen IP. You don't have to be a lawyer to read chapter 5 of USC Title 17.
Actual damages include profits due to infringement and lost licencing fees. In particular, read 17 USC 504(b). The burden of proof is on the infringer to EXCLUDE revenue not due to infringement. The licencing fees here would be non-GPL licencing costs, that is what they have had to pay on the open marketed for what they stole. You could present purchase prices of comparable proprietary products for a per-copy damage, as well as modification-licening comparables for a derivitive creation licencing damage.
There are statutory damages under copyight law, per 17 USC 504(c), but you either pick the statuory damages or the actual damages. Statuory damages are of three classes: unknowning, general and willful infringement (my terminology). For general, you get between $750 and $30,000 per *infringing work* as the court considers just. For willful, this can increase to $150,000. For unknowning infringement, it can be reduced to $200. I suspect that a C&D letter is sufficient notice to eliminate this last category.
Because Microsoft has declared that thir next operating system will only run on Trusted Computing hardware and it is flat-out IMPOSSIBLE to sell hardware if it can't run Windows.
That's not true, but if it was, it would be great news. This would be the surest way for MS to lose it's stranglehold on the desktop because it would cut off the entire installed base from upgrading within the MS product line.
And business understanding is only valuable if it leads to results. It's unlikely that Cobol is the source of the next breakthrough. If you are lazy and expensive, expect "but I understand how our business works" to be met with "what have you done for me lately?".
Companies don't care about domain experience, they care about business results. Be the kind of IT worker that generates these results and you have nothing to fear.
You go where the jobs are, regardless of the moral implications of said job. It really should be up to the American people to decide that they shouldn't have to spend $500 billion a year to KILL PEOPLE.
No, you go where the jobs are, especially because of the moral implications. It is a very fine time to work for the military and people who do deserve credit.
And contrary to your rediculous position, the American people have decided. It sounds like you are pretending they haven't because you are in denial about the fact that they just don't find your warm-ed over '60's mentality very persuasive when radical extremists would like to destroy us because we don't subscribe to their wacked out world view.
The simple fact is that America has rightly decided some people need to be killed and are acting accordingly. When the alternative is doing nothing and watching our buildings fall down or watching Israeli babies blown to bits by suicide bombers, it's immoral to not persue the will of the American people to use the military to destroy the evil which assails us.
Speak for yourself.
If all you do is programming, then I suppose that your job is not hard. But if your job includes analysing your company's business and using information technology to solve business problems that affect the bottom line, then your job is very hard, very valuable, not exportable, and very secure.
There are many good programmers that don't understand business and want to be handed clean coding tasks. These are the people that are whining incessantly because their requirements documents aren't right. They want somebody else to do the hard part. The simple fact is that if you A) understand the business and B) can read the code that drives it, then you are better positioned than most people in the company to actually create revenue enhancing process changes.
Are you blind man? The reason that SCOX is trading at $17.50 (that's American dollars, not Italian Lire or EverQuest gold pieces, that's American dollars my man!) is that a whole bunch of people are betting!
NO!! It means that a few people are betting a LOT of money. And you don't exactly know WHY they are betting on SCO. It's entire possible that they expect to lose their bet on SCO but to recoup the money in other places.
For example, I happen to believe that MS and probably also Sun are happy to fund SCO's suicide because they believe that if they create fear, uncertainty and doubt in Linux along the way that they will recoup their investment in other places. Think about it -- if MS slows down Linux adoption by say 1%, they will more than pay for a $25 million loss.
SCO is not violating the copyright, they are violating the GPL
I really have no idea why you think there is a difference. Federal law says you must have permission from the copyright owner. That permission IS the license. Violating the licences is completely equivalent to violating copyright law.
SCO is going to get handed its head on this issue. They have based their entire Linux business on piracy of GPL software.
You most certainly can sue corporations, local or foreign, in most small claims courts.
This is absolutely true -- BUT -- copyright is exclusively a federal law issue, so you cannot sue ANYBODY for copyright violations in state court (small claims or otherwise). There is no federal small claims court, so you'll eventually litigate any copyright claim in a US District Court.
on some theoretical JIT, might actually run faster than a snail.
You do know that java is faster than C# for non-GUI apps, right? source. I suspect that if you dump swing and go with the eclipse SWT, you probably equalize the GUI speed issue too, which would mean that on windows platforms Java is faster than C#.
The "java is slow" reputation was earned with java 1.1 and was fixed long ago when the JIT VM's came out (they are part of all modern JVM's). Memory use issues might give you a real issue to knock java on, but you really shouldn't repeat untrue lore.
2. JSRs are talk. C# is a reality.
.net is a reality, it isn't a very pretty one. It's about where JDK 1.2 was. Most people don't realize that C# is SLOWER than java on MS platforms, which is fscking SAD, given that java has to be cross platform which costs speed. (source: results from Aldo Calpini's windows port of Doug Bagley's Language shootout).
C# 1.0 is a reality. The posting is about the "design specifications document for C# 2.0". How would you classify that -- "talk or reality". (The correct answer is talk).
On the other hand Java 1.5 is talk that is on the verge of release (weeks or months away), while C# 2.0 is just getting started.
And while,
For the exact reason you state: the potential consumers. Branding would be useful in getting more people to give ol' Moz a try. One of the main things about the average surfer, I find, is that (s)he simply doesn't know about it.
While I agree to some extent that people have to recognize your name before they will consider you, I think this wreaks of marketing fluff. The best way to get people to know about you is to offer innovative new features that people really WANT.
Mozilla set out to be the most cross-platform standards compliant browser. Well, there are a lot of new W3C standards out there like SVG, XForms, XML Events, and I don't see Mozilla leading the standards compliance charge. If you want to follow IE and do the same old boring HTML functionality, then I really don't think branding is a marketing strategy that gets you anywhere.
Even if you can get people to know the Mozilla name, aren't they just going to say: "OK, so Mozilla is like IE, but why would I switch to it?"
How do you know what I need?
You must be a marketing guy's dream. It's all about you, isn't it. You ask for a feature, you get a feature, and everybody else gets locked in to the only proprietary office suite that has that feature, even though the benefit of that feature is so obscure 99% of people won't even know it exists.
The feature I NEED most is no new features. If you have a need that isn't met by existing word processors, then I don't want to share documents with you. The fact of the matter is that not only do I NOT CARE what you *think* you need, I need you NOT to have it and to be forbidden from using it.
That's because I need an office suite that doesn't lock my business information into a proprietary format that cannot be supported by open source tools. Both of those drive cost for my business and home PC.