I should point out one difference between the US & Europe. The USPTO is quite pro-software patent, as is the EPO (European Patent Office). However, although the EPO has issued many software patents, they are legally questionable, because the European Patent Convention says that software cannot be patented. So, even though these patents have been issued, it is unclear as to whether they will be held valid by the courts. Some courts have said no, a few have said yes, but on the whole it is still legally undecided. By contrast, in the US the courts have already said yes to software patents. Thus, the US really is in a whole lot worse situation than Europe. (At the end of the day, patent offices can issue patents to their heart's content -- the real issue is whether the courts are willing to enforce them.)
The dispute over who has ultimate control over DNS is of very little practical consequence, given that the US has barely exercised any control over ICANN, and if some other body (the EU, the UN) gained that control, I would wager they would exercise no more control than the US has.
What this is really about for the countries involved is more the principle of the thing, flexing their muscles against the US, demonstrating their independence from US dominance. In particular for the EU it is a demonstration of their commitment to the building of international institutions instead of the US' go it alone, "no one is going to tell me what to do attitude".
That said, while the way this dispute plays out will certaintly have significant implciations for international and especially transatlantic politics, whatever happens will likely have little effect on the commercial or technical worlds.
The attempt of some parties to paint this dispute as having some dire practical consequences ("Watch out, freedom-hating totalitarian dictatorships take over the Internet!") is just a way for those parties to play the transatlantic political game.
One thing that (last time I checked) was missing from pgsql which I find really useful is decent support for doing distributed & heterogenous queries: i.e. join tables in different databases, or join tables on different servers, or even join tables on different vendors. SQL Server will let you do all this, e.g. join a SQL server table against an Oracle table. And it supports any OLEDB data source (at least theoretically -- in practice quite a few don't work very well...) This is a great feature which I wish PostgreSQL would support... its probably the biggest reason for me to stick with MSSQL. MSSQL will also let you do distributed transactions, although I wish its transactional support was better (things I'd really like to see include: snapshot isolation (coming in 2005), nested transactions, nested distributed transactions, savepoints for distributed transaction, more control over distributed transactions from SQL...)
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I should point out one difference between the US & Europe. The USPTO is quite pro-software patent, as is the EPO (European Patent Office). However, although the EPO has issued many software patents, they are legally questionable, because the European Patent Convention says that software cannot be patented. So, even though these patents have been issued, it is unclear as to whether they will be held valid by the courts. Some courts have said no, a few have said yes, but on the whole it is still legally undecided. By contrast, in the US the courts have already said yes to software patents. Thus, the US really is in a whole lot worse situation than Europe. (At the end of the day, patent offices can issue patents to their heart's content -- the real issue is whether the courts are willing to enforce them.)
The dispute over who has ultimate control over DNS is of very little practical consequence, given that the US has barely exercised any control over ICANN, and if some other body (the EU, the UN) gained that control, I would wager they would exercise no more control than the US has.
What this is really about for the countries involved is more the principle of the thing, flexing their muscles against the US, demonstrating their independence from US dominance. In particular for the EU it is a demonstration of their commitment to the building of international institutions instead of the US' go it alone, "no one is going to tell me what to do attitude".
That said, while the way this dispute plays out will certaintly have significant implciations for international and especially transatlantic politics, whatever happens will likely have little effect on the commercial or technical worlds.
The attempt of some parties to paint this dispute as having some dire practical consequences ("Watch out, freedom-hating totalitarian dictatorships take over the Internet!") is just a way for those parties to play the transatlantic political game.
One thing that (last time I checked) was missing from pgsql which I find really useful is decent support for doing distributed & heterogenous queries: i.e. join tables in different databases, or join tables on different servers, or even join tables on different vendors. SQL Server will let you do all this, e.g. join a SQL server table against an Oracle table. And it supports any OLEDB data source (at least theoretically -- in practice quite a few don't work very well...) This is a great feature which I wish PostgreSQL would support... its probably the biggest reason for me to stick with MSSQL. MSSQL will also let you do distributed transactions, although I wish its transactional support was better (things I'd really like to see include: snapshot isolation (coming in 2005), nested transactions, nested distributed transactions, savepoints for distributed transaction, more control over distributed transactions from SQL...)