"I can not cite such companies as successful, because they never release their damn financials! I have no proof for any company but Red Hat and MySQL."
I don't think Nokia is in red numbers, nor it is Novell or IBM. I don't think Patrick Volkerding is losing money either (Slackware being a one person show I don't think it can sustain long term loses). Disregarding companies, Debian, KDE, Gnome or OpenBSD are not in the reds either...
But I see your point. Anyway, you may change your assertion in order to say that you don't know of *publicly traded* companies but this or that (and then again, MySQL can be profitable but it is not directly because of its open source stanza: it's profitable because it sells licenses from a closed sourced software. On this regard it's alike to Microsoft only it uses different marketing tools).
My point is that not all companies are publicly traded companies and that those non publicly traded companies make a big piece of the overall economy and they are successful. Just look for your (almost) mom-n-pop local linux-friendly company and if it's more than five year old I'll show you a successful open source-friendly company. I think it's important to attract attention to them because I do think there's not so much money in the open source field as it is in the closed source camp (in other words, don't expect becoming the new Bill Gates developing open source) and that's a direct result of open source being a better bussiness style for society: show me a bussines that makes over 50% net profit and I'll show you a bussiness that is cheating against free market and making overall market a worse place as a result.
"MySQL has worked out a successful means of being paid while producing Open Source."
That's as irrelevant as saying that a given company has worked out a sucessful means of being paid while producing marketing. The point is that MySQL is not able to leverage open source software directly into money.
Please pay attention that this doesn't mean what they are doing is either good or bad nor that I'm one of those that cry "there's no way to monetarize open source, that's why it's communist and antiamerican".
MySQL has found a way to take advantage from producing open source software to its own benefit, which is fantabulous; other companies like Troll Tech, now under Nokia, found viable the same kind of bussiness strategy. Other companies, like Red Hat, don't develop so much software (so much percentage related to their own bussiness volume) but still manage to make money directly upon the distributed open source software (i.e: by means of support contracts over such software). Others take benefit from open source by means of direct contract for developments, others...
But this doesn't mean that MySQL is able to directly monetarize open source: it doesn't. And it doesn't mean that there isn't a ton of "profitable Open Source companies". There are "profitable Open Source companies". A lot of them. Maybe they are not "big", but there are a lot of them developing code and services upon open source. The company I work for is one of them. We develop services (i.e. installing and customizing groupware servers upon OpenLDAP, Postfix, eGroupware, Debian, courier...); we develop code customizations; we provide patches to upstream maintainers and we develop our own code base distributed under open source licenses. While we are not as big as MySQL or Red Hat we *are* profitable Open Source companies and there are a lot like us.
It's a pity that even such a high profile as Bruce Perens seems to forget what's the "barebones" basis for a profitable open source company: produce code by contract.
Almost no one is able to produce a new operative system nor an office suite from the ground up, even more against the competition from already stablished closed source competition, but there is bussiness place for customizations and partial developments that are indeed possible because there's a hugh amount of already opened source code you can build upon. You cannot provide value by means of a modified version of Windows; only Microsoft can do that, but you can provide value by customizing/extending i.e. Linux because of its open nature.
"We know of only two profitable Open Source companies, MySQL and Red Hat."
I'll repeat it slowerly in case I didn't make myself clear before: MySQL doesn't get direct profit from its open source product but from its closed source product (the fact that both are based out the same codebase is irrelevant here) therefore it is not "an open source company".
Sorry but while quite near the mark, you won't get the cake. MySQL makes/made its money not by its open source distribution but from its *closed* source distribution. They dual license their codebase, you know...
"My personal favourite trick for localized testing is to temporarily set the browser's proxy server to 127.0.0.1:8080 with proxying turned off so that any domain name will serve the pages off the local server on port 8080"
Now try that to test two local sites at the same time.
Folks: is it really *so* dificult to grasp the "name based virtual host" concept? Is it really *so* dificult to populate your computer's host file?
"Multi-domain certificates are available from several different vendors"
And they all show all the valid names to the one that wants to look at them through the SubjectAltName field. Do you really want to share your certificate for christianmorallity.org with your rudesex.com?
"You can do all that on an iPhone too - you just jailbreak it"
Only there's no "just" on jailbreaking the iPhone but a really big deterrent.
How many people do you think you can get to jailbreak their phone even in your wetest dreams? One in ten thousands? Just for a comparation, how many people do you think that unlock their phones after their subsidizing contracts, a perfectly legal and safe practice only a bit obscured by the providers?
Letting the hugh codebase die, as it would have been the case were it closed source, would have mean an even huger waste of time and energy, so still open sourced gets the better output.
"XFree86 is a good example of an OS project with problems."
And the fact it was an open one that allowed itself to be forked away under the "Xorg" name probes that open source projects are in fact superior. Were XFree86 closed sourced it would have gone the CDE path to name an example that can be related to without a XOrg to take the torch. Being open is what allowed it to survive, only under a different name.
"The machine's software should not be capable of triggering the release of that much radiation"
Bullshit.
Do you know why the software was capable of triggering the release of that much radiation? Because the hardware was capable of triggering that much radiation. Do you know why the hardware was capable of triggering that much radiation? Because the system is *expected* to trigger that much radiation under proper operational situations.
"Even an idiot who did not RTFM should not be able to cause harm with the machine."
Good luck with that. Maybe we should cut out your hands just for the case you choose to punch yourself on the head. An idiot who did not RTFM should not be able to get near a hi-tech machine, but a properly trained user is not there to cope with fail-unsafe designs either.
"This particular error is the kind that occurs when you simplify complex procedures in the interest of widespread use."
It doesn't seem so by reading the article. Damn, even the Slashdot version mentions the Therac-25 case, so it's obvious you didn't read the article but you didn't even read the editorial prior to shoot your answer.
Insightful? My ass.
"A certain segment of society--that's mostly us geeks--strives against this tendency"
In turn, it seems that this segment of society you mention -geeks, are the culprit in this case.
This seem to be a case of poor engineering by unsafe failing design. The system locked on a dangerous state on a range of situations due to a certain (valid) procedure which indeed needed the higher radiation dose. That's bad engineering -full stop.
"but most of us find other ways to cope."
One of those geeks you mentioned should design the thingie in such a way that in case of overlooking it resulted on *less* radition exposition than expected by default, not the other way around.
"I would expect that at the TLD level, a change to a configuration file would have to be inspected by someone AND run through some syntax-checking scripts..."
Expect price and time-to-activation increase for second level domains way beyond current status then.
Yeah, but in practice only for individual resources, not whole domains, since negative answers from authoritative sources must include SOA references as per RFC2308.
"Anything anyone did a query on during those 30 minutes will be negatively cached by their system and their local DNS server"
Now you know what happens when you are in a hurry and ask for a to-be-activated resource prior to its inclusion on the zone.
"but it's still going to seriously impact traffic to many, many sites, especially for everyone outside Sweden."
"In this case, the effects were minimized by the nature of DNS itself"
Well, at least somebody shows some common sense.
Of course, losing a whole TLD even if only for half an hour is a shame probably the one that did it won't include in his resume, but the fact is that nobody will expend more on secure a resource than it's very value. DNS is basically distributed, cached information described on plain text files; if an update works (which is vastly most of the time), it works; if it isn't you detect the failure within seconds (logs at reload), it is not so tragical (the previous information will be cached through the Internet), it's easy to spot (is a diff away) and you can easily revert to the previous version plus higher serial number in the meantime. No need for triplechecks that triplicates the costs and will bring in their own share of bugs to the equation.
"When I worked for a major telecomm here in the US, one of our partner companies submitted a text file generated on a *nix machine [...] I found it more interesting that the reason why the partner company didn't want to muck with it was because the file would be 'validated' with their servers. The inclusion of two CRs threw off the checksum value and nothing would work."
So, the partner company sent you some files. You inserted them on your system which sudden and misteriosuly failed. You blame your partners. Your partners show beyond doubt that *you* trashed the files so it was your problem. And still you find it "interesting"?
"At least these guys could simply open the file and discern what the problem was. Yeah, shame on them."
So in the end, even when it was obviously *your* problem, it was *them* the ones that had to diagnose it and still you "shame on them"?
No wonder you post as an anonymous coward. Certainly I wouldn't want to have you for a bussiness partner.
"For those who love Adam Smith, in Argentina we have only two ISP providers, Telecom and Telefonica. Telefonica has bougth Telecom, so now we have a BIG monopoly on cell phones, wired phones, and internet services."
Ahhh... but that's prue free market in action, señor mío, so you must be grateful.
"The Accenture design is just sloooow and compleeeeex."
But when you have on your side the platform owner and one of the biggest consulting firms, that's shouting out loud to all big corps that it just can't be done faaaaster and simpleeeer, just as Microsoft and Accenture shouted out loud (prior to their fiasco) that Microsoft/Accenture/.Net was the best of the best.
"If it wasn't suitable, then the programmers still botched it by making a stupid environment choice."
Yes. I almost see the scene in front of my eyes. Two big tycoons are about to close a 60 million agreement but, hey, let's the boys make some choices. Yes, Accenture high management does things like that day in day out.
Slashdot Mirror
"if a person has high fever with a sudden onset and extreme fatigue then they won't be back at work in a couple of days."
And then there's the common wisdom about influenza: seven days without treatment; a week with it.
"I can not cite such companies as successful, because they never release their damn financials! I have no proof for any company but Red Hat and MySQL."
I don't think Nokia is in red numbers, nor it is Novell or IBM. I don't think Patrick Volkerding is losing money either (Slackware being a one person show I don't think it can sustain long term loses). Disregarding companies, Debian, KDE, Gnome or OpenBSD are not in the reds either...
But I see your point. Anyway, you may change your assertion in order to say that you don't know of *publicly traded* companies but this or that (and then again, MySQL can be profitable but it is not directly because of its open source stanza: it's profitable because it sells licenses from a closed sourced software. On this regard it's alike to Microsoft only it uses different marketing tools).
My point is that not all companies are publicly traded companies and that those non publicly traded companies make a big piece of the overall economy and they are successful. Just look for your (almost) mom-n-pop local linux-friendly company and if it's more than five year old I'll show you a successful open source-friendly company. I think it's important to attract attention to them because I do think there's not so much money in the open source field as it is in the closed source camp (in other words, don't expect becoming the new Bill Gates developing open source) and that's a direct result of open source being a better bussiness style for society: show me a bussines that makes over 50% net profit and I'll show you a bussiness that is cheating against free market and making overall market a worse place as a result.
"MySQL has worked out a successful means of being paid while producing Open Source."
That's as irrelevant as saying that a given company has worked out a sucessful means of being paid while producing marketing. The point is that MySQL is not able to leverage open source software directly into money.
Please pay attention that this doesn't mean what they are doing is either good or bad nor that I'm one of those that cry "there's no way to monetarize open source, that's why it's communist and antiamerican".
MySQL has found a way to take advantage from producing open source software to its own benefit, which is fantabulous; other companies like Troll Tech, now under Nokia, found viable the same kind of bussiness strategy. Other companies, like Red Hat, don't develop so much software (so much percentage related to their own bussiness volume) but still manage to make money directly upon the distributed open source software (i.e: by means of support contracts over such software). Others take benefit from open source by means of direct contract for developments, others...
But this doesn't mean that MySQL is able to directly monetarize open source: it doesn't. And it doesn't mean that there isn't a ton of "profitable Open Source companies". There are "profitable Open Source companies". A lot of them. Maybe they are not "big", but there are a lot of them developing code and services upon open source. The company I work for is one of them. We develop services (i.e. installing and customizing groupware servers upon OpenLDAP, Postfix, eGroupware, Debian, courier...); we develop code customizations; we provide patches to upstream maintainers and we develop our own code base distributed under open source licenses. While we are not as big as MySQL or Red Hat we *are* profitable Open Source companies and there are a lot like us.
It's a pity that even such a high profile as Bruce Perens seems to forget what's the "barebones" basis for a profitable open source company: produce code by contract.
Almost no one is able to produce a new operative system nor an office suite from the ground up, even more against the competition from already stablished closed source competition, but there is bussiness place for customizations and partial developments that are indeed possible because there's a hugh amount of already opened source code you can build upon. You cannot provide value by means of a modified version of Windows; only Microsoft can do that, but you can provide value by customizing/extending i.e. Linux because of its open nature.
"We know of only two profitable Open Source companies, MySQL and Red Hat."
I'll repeat it slowerly in case I didn't make myself clear before: MySQL doesn't get direct profit from its open source product but from its closed source product (the fact that both are based out the same codebase is irrelevant here) therefore it is not "an open source company".
"GPLv3 software is software that I cannot contribute to in good faith, because I disagree with the fundamental terms of the license."
That's perfect. The only thing you need to do to support your policy is... well, do nothing.
"MySQL"
Sorry but while quite near the mark, you won't get the cake. MySQL makes/made its money not by its open source distribution but from its *closed* source distribution. They dual license their codebase, you know...
"My personal favourite trick for localized testing is to temporarily set the browser's proxy server to 127.0.0.1:8080 with proxying turned off so that any domain name will serve the pages off the local server on port 8080"
Now try that to test two local sites at the same time.
Folks: is it really *so* dificult to grasp the "name based virtual host" concept? Is it really *so* dificult to populate your computer's host file?
"The restriction is one certificate per IP, rather than one site per IP."
The restriction is one certificate per IP/Port pair.
"Multi-domain certificates are available from several different vendors"
And they all show all the valid names to the one that wants to look at them through the SubjectAltName field. Do you really want to share your certificate for christianmorallity.org with your rudesex.com?
"Hosting providers do not know how to use ssl certificates in a responsible/correct way"
Can you please illuminate all of us about what's the proper way a hosting provider should use ssl certificates the proper way?
"It wouldn't change how I actually test in the slightest. I'd still go to http://192.168.1.2:81/ for testing"
Don't worry. Sooner or later you'll discover the joy of name-based virtual hosts and you'll be glad again.
"You can do all that on an iPhone too - you just jailbreak it"
Only there's no "just" on jailbreaking the iPhone but a really big deterrent.
How many people do you think you can get to jailbreak their phone even in your wetest dreams? One in ten thousands? Just for a comparation, how many people do you think that unlock their phones after their subsidizing contracts, a perfectly legal and safe practice only a bit obscured by the providers?
"The fork was a huge waste of time and energy"
Letting the hugh codebase die, as it would have been the case were it closed source, would have mean an even huger waste of time and energy, so still open sourced gets the better output.
"XFree86 is a good example of an OS project with problems."
And the fact it was an open one that allowed itself to be forked away under the "Xorg" name probes that open source projects are in fact superior. Were XFree86 closed sourced it would have gone the CDE path to name an example that can be related to without a XOrg to take the torch. Being open is what allowed it to survive, only under a different name.
"The machine's software should not be capable of triggering the release of that much radiation"
Bullshit.
Do you know why the software was capable of triggering the release of that much radiation? Because the hardware was capable of triggering that much radiation. Do you know why the hardware was capable of triggering that much radiation? Because the system is *expected* to trigger that much radiation under proper operational situations.
"Even an idiot who did not RTFM should not be able to cause harm with the machine."
Good luck with that. Maybe we should cut out your hands just for the case you choose to punch yourself on the head. An idiot who did not RTFM should not be able to get near a hi-tech machine, but a properly trained user is not there to cope with fail-unsafe designs either.
"This particular error is the kind that occurs when you simplify complex procedures in the interest of widespread use."
It doesn't seem so by reading the article. Damn, even the Slashdot version mentions the Therac-25 case, so it's obvious you didn't read the article but you didn't even read the editorial prior to shoot your answer.
Insightful? My ass.
"A certain segment of society--that's mostly us geeks--strives against this tendency"
In turn, it seems that this segment of society you mention -geeks, are the culprit in this case.
This seem to be a case of poor engineering by unsafe failing design. The system locked on a dangerous state on a range of situations due to a certain (valid) procedure which indeed needed the higher radiation dose. That's bad engineering -full stop.
"but most of us find other ways to cope."
One of those geeks you mentioned should design the thingie in such a way that in case of overlooking it resulted on *less* radition exposition than expected by default, not the other way around.
"Then why did they stop doing it?"
Because it didn't scalate not because Linus thought his previous procedure made kernel quality lacking.
"I would expect that at the TLD level, a change to a configuration file would have to be inspected by someone AND run through some syntax-checking scripts..."
Expect price and time-to-activation increase for second level domains way beyond current status then.
"DNS servers (and individual computers!) cache negative results."
Yeah, but in practice only for individual resources, not whole domains, since negative answers from authoritative sources must include SOA references as per RFC2308.
"Anything anyone did a query on during those 30 minutes will be negatively cached by their system and their local DNS server"
Now you know what happens when you are in a hurry and ask for a to-be-activated resource prior to its inclusion on the zone.
"but it's still going to seriously impact traffic to many, many sites, especially for everyone outside Sweden."
The fact is, well, it won't.
"In this case, the effects were minimized by the nature of DNS itself"
Well, at least somebody shows some common sense.
Of course, losing a whole TLD even if only for half an hour is a shame probably the one that did it won't include in his resume, but the fact is that nobody will expend more on secure a resource than it's very value. DNS is basically distributed, cached information described on plain text files; if an update works (which is vastly most of the time), it works; if it isn't you detect the failure within seconds (logs at reload), it is not so tragical (the previous information will be cached through the Internet), it's easy to spot (is a diff away) and you can easily revert to the previous version plus higher serial number in the meantime. No need for triplechecks that triplicates the costs and will bring in their own share of bugs to the equation.
"When I worked for a major telecomm here in the US, one of our partner companies submitted a text file generated on a *nix machine [...] I found it more interesting that the reason why the partner company didn't want to muck with it was because the file would be 'validated' with their servers. The inclusion of two CRs threw off the checksum value and nothing would work."
So, the partner company sent you some files. You inserted them on your system which sudden and misteriosuly failed. You blame your partners. Your partners show beyond doubt that *you* trashed the files so it was your problem. And still you find it "interesting"?
"At least these guys could simply open the file and discern what the problem was. Yeah, shame on them."
So in the end, even when it was obviously *your* problem, it was *them* the ones that had to diagnose it and still you "shame on them"?
No wonder you post as an anonymous coward. Certainly I wouldn't want to have you for a bussiness partner.
"For those who love Adam Smith, in Argentina we have only two ISP providers, Telecom and Telefonica. Telefonica has bougth Telecom, so now we have a BIG monopoly on cell phones, wired phones, and internet services."
Ahhh... but that's prue free market in action, señor mío, so you must be grateful.
"we don't know if there was any effect on Earth as a result of large impacts on the moon."
Large impacts? What do you mean, large impacts? The probe is the size of a car, man!
"The Accenture design is just sloooow and compleeeeex."
But when you have on your side the platform owner and one of the biggest consulting firms, that's shouting out loud to all big corps that it just can't be done faaaaster and simpleeeer, just as Microsoft and Accenture shouted out loud (prior to their fiasco) that Microsoft/Accenture/.Net was the best of the best.
"If it wasn't suitable, then the programmers still botched it by making a stupid environment choice."
Yes. I almost see the scene in front of my eyes. Two big tycoons are about to close a 60 million agreement but, hey, let's the boys make some choices. Yes, Accenture high management does things like that day in day out.
"As a member of the Front for Data Liberation"
You!!!??? Our damn enemy!!!??? We are the Data Liberation Front, you unsensitive clod!