Except when it doesn't. Current Atom offerings include the 32-bit, no-hyperthreading Z-series aimed for UMPCs, the 32-bit, hyperthreading N-series aimed for netbooks, and the 64-bit, hyperthreading, single-core 200-series aimed for "nettops", and the 64-bit, hyperthreading, dual-core 300-series aimed also aimed for "nettops".
They have licensed Mac OS before, so we know exactly what the outcome of that would be.
Right, because its impossible for changes in either the licensing model or the environment in which the licensing model is applied to have any effect on the outcome: if they license MacOS separate from Apple hardware, the results must be exactly the same as the time they did it in the past, no matter what the market situation is like at the time, and no matter how they manage the separate licensing.
Surely there are security concerns around sites using fonts where the letters are 'swapped' to obfusicate where links are actually directed?
Link addresses appear in the toolbar, which fonts specified in a webpage (whether or not they are embedded in the page) don't affect. The only thing fonts in the page would affect is the presentation of the link text, which the page owner controls from the outset, and can already make as misleading as they want.
No, because "XBMC" is now an opaque identifier, not an acronym. So "XBMC Media Center" doesn't expand to "Xbox Media Center Media Center", or to anything else.
Both the Newsday columnist who resigned over the Newsday paywall and the NY Times columnists who protested the NY Times paywall are just that: columnists, not reporters or journalists.
Columnists are people for whom the newspaper is a vehicle for the broad distribution of their writings, which are not even notionally constrained by the standards of fact reporting, or even news analysis. Columns are vehicles by which the columnists ideas, pet causes, ideology, other products (like books), etc., are promoted. The interests of columnists may be very different than the interests of journalists with regard to paywalls.
No. In the first place, neutrality aside, its not a network.
Now, one could sensibly ask whether AT&T's wireless data network to which the iPhone attaches is a neutral network (to which the answer is clearly "no").
I think it is pretty much the only thing that matters - until you can say when the photons left in relation to each other, there is no way you can say the delay validates or invalidates any of the theories in question.
But we do know that -- to a certain degree of accuracy. Now, its not enough accuracy to say that the photons took the exact same time to travel the exact same distance (which would require the always-unattainable perfect accuracy), but its enough to say that the difference in the travel time was not sufficient to be consistent with the theories at issue.
I'm not sure I see this as a good thing. There's no obvious alternatives to salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story.
There also are essentially none of those left in the national papers, so the lack of an "alternative" is less relevant. Actually, with many papers retooling to shift toward less focus on advertisers for revenue and more focus on readers, there is a good chance that the decline in per-paper circulation will revive journalism, as the business of the papers becomes, once again, delivering news to readers, rather than delivering an audience to advertisers while avoiding offending those same advertisers.
I just can't see the internet producing people like Bernstein and Woodward, Nancy Maynard, Anna Quindlen and others like them.
While you don't see a lot of people like that in any media, at any time, the internet sure isn't doing any worse of a job of producing investigative reporters than the modern print dailies. Which isn't meant, particularly, as praise of the internet news outlets.
Pretend that I don't work in marketing, and thus don't enjoy the frisson of hearing new terms for old rope. If one provider offers me "cloud computing" and the other offers "software as a service", what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?
SaaS is a model of software delivery and licensing (which predates cloud computing, though since cloud computing has been available, it is mostly deployed using cloud technology) in which software is remotely hosted and access is provided over the web, usually for a fee (which may be by number of users, or by some other measure of usage.) The essential feature of SaaS is that the vendor provides a particular suite of packaged software, and the client pays for access.
Cloud computing is a model of server provisioning in which logical/virtual servers are dynamically provisioned under software control in a manner which abstracts the underlying physical hardware. Except for the software which actually manages server instances, and operating system software for the instances, there may be little or no actual software provided by the vendor -- e.g., the more basic EC2 instances -- with the application software provided by the client. The essential feature of cloud computing is dynamic server provisioning, not who provides the application software.
Cloud computing is frequently used by SaaS vendors, sometimes on their own clouds, sometimes on someone else's cloud (e.g., a third-party SaaS vendor may use Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine to host their applications, which is why some have dubbed EC2, AppEngine, and similar cloud offerings "Platform-as-a-Service" offerings.)
But cloud computing can also be used within a company's own datacenters for its own internal applications -- again, the defining characteristic is the dynamic provisioning that abstracts physical servers -- and Software-as-a-service can be done without using cloud technology as all. Cloud computing has approximately the same relationship to Software-as-a-service that freeways have to automobiles; they're related and often used together, but very diffferent things.
How can the DoD release software under a copyleft license when the federal government is incapable of holding copyrights in the first place?
Government agencies are required, IIRC, to respect* private copyrights, and releasing software that is derivative of private works that are under a copyleft license under the same license might be consistent with (and might even be necessary, if the software is released at all, to comply with) those regulations.
* As I understand, its not bound in the same way a private party is, but is restricted under the law in what it can do with copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder.
Since we the taxpayers are paying for National Public Radio
National Public Radio is a private nonprofit that receives most of its funding through membership dues from its member stations, subscription charges from stations to use NPR programming, and corporate sponsorship (corporate sponsorship alone provides around 1/4 of NPR's funding), with somewhere around 2% from various government grants.
What I want to know is, what the heck does a RC build mean to these guys? The (only) RC is dropped one week ahead of the final release? That's not really enough time to even get feedback from the test userbase, much less actually do anything about the bugs that might show up. So, are we to assume that the RC is basically just a marketing stunt?
No, it means that it is an actual RC ("release candidate"). Now, true, some notable large software companies use "release candidate" as just a later beta, but that's not what it should mean.
[Would have been better] had they released it several days ahead of 7.
Which is why they released Jaunty 6 months ahead of Windows 7, when people were less likely to be focussed on Windows upgrades.
(Well, no, its not really why; Ubuntu releases are every six months and have been for quite some time. But, still, if you are worried that 9.10 is going to get lost because it was too close to the Win7 release date, 9.04 was released fairly recently but before Win7, and 10.04 will be released in not too long, but after the immediate Win7 release attention is gone.)
The BSD license and its ilk *are* Free Software licenses, they're just not "copyleft" which is a desirable but not vital quality as far as RMS is concerned. The ones that are OSS-but-not-Free are those like the license of Pine which disallows redistribution of modified works, or some of Microsoft's Shared Source licenses which disallow commercial redistribution at all.
Those licenses are, in addition to not being "Free Software" as defined by Free Software advocates, also aren't "Open Source Software" as defined by "Open Source Software" advocates.
There is very little difference between what the Free Software community considers "Free Software" and what the Open Source Software community considers Open Source Software.
The clash between the two concepts exists primarily in what certain extreme partisans in the Free Software community calls "Open Source".
While the "Open Source" movement as such pretty explicitly adopted the label to avoid the confusion of "Free Software" with (gratis) free software, a term which certainly predates the Free Software movement, yoyu don't find many Open Source advocates pretending that the Free Software movement is about (gratis) free software, whereas you do find plenty of Free Software advocates pretending that the Open Source movement wants something that some software vendors have labelled "open source" (just making the source available under restrictive licensing terms), but which is inconsistent with the actual goals articulated by the movement.
Although many small companies claim to have made money from an Open Source based business, there is no evidence that they actually have because they haven't published their financial information.
Published financial information is not the only evidence that a business is making a profit. Simply remaining a going concern for an extended period of time is evidence that the business is making money. OTOH, published financial information is no more than a written claim of facts, which is no different than the claims made by other companies.
If you instead of "published their financial information" you mean "released independently audited financials as is required of public companies and certain others", which no one, profitable or not, that isn't subject to such mandates generally does, well, those are a little bit stronger evidence than bare statements (though there are certainly plenty of examples of audited financials being inaccurate, so arguably the difference between those and simple statements is one of degree rather than kind), but all that really shows is how many open source businesses are subject to audit and disclosure regulations, not how many and which are actually making money.
Even if we were to suggest the "published financials" standard and grant that MySQL and RedHat were the only ones for which there are evidence of profit: 1) The sample size of 2 wouldn't be enough to draw conclusions about what viable models are available, 2) Even if #1 wasn't true, RedHat doesn't use the MySQL-style assignment-and-dual-licensing model for most of its products (as far as I know, it uses the "open source + support" model primarily), so if, as you claim, those two companies were the entire universe of evidence of profitable open source companies that exists, and any generalization was to be drawn from that evidence, the generalization that would have to be drawn is that the MySQL model is not the only viable model, not your conclusion that the MySQL model is the only viable model.
You do, you just don't couch it in those terms. Many - certainly not all - of us need a business model to justify the production of Open Source software. Certainly that was the case for MySQL AG while Monty and you worked there. I very strongly doubt that you would have been able to operate the company while paying yourselves without the dual licensing paradigm which you and the company espoused at the time.
Based on...what? There are certainly companies that do business around F/OSS (and even F/OSS databases) that don't rely on the "we control the copyright and use the GPL so only we can dual license" MySQL model. Both the "open source + paid support" and the "open source + enhanced proprietary version" models (and often a mix of both, as, e.g., is done at EnterpriseDB) exist in the market. While MySQL surely did use the particular model it used, I can't see any evidence from which one can conclude that that is the only model they could have used.
Although it is early days yet, the concept that you own your data may be what sets this apart from Google Wave.
The centerpiece of Wave is a server-to-server federation protocol that lets anyone control their own data that can be made accessible through Wave. So, with all the things that might set Mozilla's product apart from Wave, "the concept that you own your data" is not one of them.
What it doesn't satisfy is the folks who want a free ride instead of Free Software, because you have to pay for a commercial license.
Dual licensing under the GPL also doesn't satisfy the folks who want to maximize the primary benefit to software users of F/OSS: the guarantee that no matter what the copyright owner, original vendor, or any other single market actor does, maintenance and further development to meet the users evolving need will be viable for either the user's organization itself or third parties.
Yeah, apparently as long as [some of?] the source remains GPL, RMS seems okay with dual licensing.
With the GPLv3 and its differential treatment of B2B vs. B2C software, its pretty clear that the FSF has decided to aggressively leverage the GPL's more restrictive nature, compared to other Free licenses, as a way to push business adoption of the GPL over other Free licenses, and a willingness to restructure where those restrictions cut to meet the preferences of big vendors.
Stallman's praise of the MySQL dual licensing model seems perfectly consistent with this more tribal, less ideological approach of the FSF.
OTOH, I think ultimately the fact that this restrictiveness, which creates a structurally-preferred-vendor for GPL software even if others are theoretically free to create GPL, but not proprietary, alternatives, is a big selling point of the GPL to vendors is also, in the long-term, going to turn into more of a market liability for the GPL than a strength, since its a negative from the point of both downstream developers and non-developer users, since it incorporates the same kind -- though a lesser degree -- of copyright-owner vendor lock-in to GPL-licensed products that exists with proprietary products.
As I read it, RMS is concerned not because Oracle will close future MySQL development but because they will be the only ones that can profit from dual licensing MySQL and they won't do that because it would make it competing against their cash cow.
Right, because Oracle doesn't currently do what it can to make money off its various lower-end (both compatible and incompatible with the flagship server) database products, since they would provide less-expensive alternatives that some people might choose instead of the flagship, top-end DB server offering. Well, except in the real world, that is.
Oracle would be much better served if they allow MySQL to slowly stagnate
Right, because if MySQL slowly stagnates, the people who are interested in an open-source or lower-end database system will instead purchase Oracle's flagship product, rather than moving to less expensive and open source third-party offerings like PostgreSQL.
and the point is that they can do it since noone else will be able to cash out the dual license path, than if they close the shop allowing for a faster substitution from another open alternative.
Sure, no one else can cash out the "dual license" path (which does produce a very weak form of vendor lock-in [much less than with any purely-proprietary product] which is a weakness, from a customers point of view, in choosing a dual-licensed product where the Free version uses a GPL-style license rather than a BSD-style one), but that hardly means that no one else can subsidize open source development of a MySQL fork from related operations (such as support.)
And given that Oracle is acquiring MySQL with this merger, I think the EU certainly has a point, the only other sizeable players remaining are PosGreSQL and Microsoft.
First, its PostgreSQL, not "PosGreSQL". Second, you left out, at least, IBM of the significant DB vendors.
Second, except as a ploy to give up marketshare to its existing competitors, I don't see the value proposition to Oracle of buying and killing MySQL. Heck, even just buying MySQL and putting it into permanent maintenance, rather than killing it outright, would seem to be an expensive way for Oracle to promote other third-party open-source DB server products, including the various MySQL forks, PostgreSQL, Firebird, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Except when it doesn't. Current Atom offerings include the 32-bit, no-hyperthreading Z-series aimed for UMPCs, the 32-bit, hyperthreading N-series aimed for netbooks, and the 64-bit, hyperthreading, single-core 200-series aimed for "nettops", and the 64-bit, hyperthreading, dual-core 300-series aimed also aimed for "nettops".
Right, because its impossible for changes in either the licensing model or the environment in which the licensing model is applied to have any effect on the outcome: if they license MacOS separate from Apple hardware, the results must be exactly the same as the time they did it in the past, no matter what the market situation is like at the time, and no matter how they manage the separate licensing.
Link addresses appear in the toolbar, which fonts specified in a webpage (whether or not they are embedded in the page) don't affect. The only thing fonts in the page would affect is the presentation of the link text, which the page owner controls from the outset, and can already make as misleading as they want.
No, because "XBMC" is now an opaque identifier, not an acronym. So "XBMC Media Center" doesn't expand to "Xbox Media Center Media Center", or to anything else.
Both the Newsday columnist who resigned over the Newsday paywall and the NY Times columnists who protested the NY Times paywall are just that: columnists, not reporters or journalists.
Columnists are people for whom the newspaper is a vehicle for the broad distribution of their writings, which are not even notionally constrained by the standards of fact reporting, or even news analysis. Columns are vehicles by which the columnists ideas, pet causes, ideology, other products (like books), etc., are promoted. The interests of columnists may be very different than the interests of journalists with regard to paywalls.
No. In the first place, neutrality aside, its not a network.
Now, one could sensibly ask whether AT&T's wireless data network to which the iPhone attaches is a neutral network (to which the answer is clearly "no").
But we do know that -- to a certain degree of accuracy. Now, its not enough accuracy to say that the photons took the exact same time to travel the exact same distance (which would require the always-unattainable perfect accuracy), but its enough to say that the difference in the travel time was not sufficient to be consistent with the theories at issue.
There also are essentially none of those left in the national papers, so the lack of an "alternative" is less relevant. Actually, with many papers retooling to shift toward less focus on advertisers for revenue and more focus on readers, there is a good chance that the decline in per-paper circulation will revive journalism, as the business of the papers becomes, once again, delivering news to readers, rather than delivering an audience to advertisers while avoiding offending those same advertisers.
While you don't see a lot of people like that in any media, at any time, the internet sure isn't doing any worse of a job of producing investigative reporters than the modern print dailies. Which isn't meant, particularly, as praise of the internet news outlets.
SaaS is a model of software delivery and licensing (which predates cloud computing, though since cloud computing has been available, it is mostly deployed using cloud technology) in which software is remotely hosted and access is provided over the web, usually for a fee (which may be by number of users, or by some other measure of usage.) The essential feature of SaaS is that the vendor provides a particular suite of packaged software, and the client pays for access.
Cloud computing is a model of server provisioning in which logical/virtual servers are dynamically provisioned under software control in a manner which abstracts the underlying physical hardware. Except for the software which actually manages server instances, and operating system software for the instances, there may be little or no actual software provided by the vendor -- e.g., the more basic EC2 instances -- with the application software provided by the client. The essential feature of cloud computing is dynamic server provisioning, not who provides the application software.
Cloud computing is frequently used by SaaS vendors, sometimes on their own clouds, sometimes on someone else's cloud (e.g., a third-party SaaS vendor may use Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine to host their applications, which is why some have dubbed EC2, AppEngine, and similar cloud offerings "Platform-as-a-Service" offerings.)
But cloud computing can also be used within a company's own datacenters for its own internal applications -- again, the defining characteristic is the dynamic provisioning that abstracts physical servers -- and Software-as-a-service can be done without using cloud technology as all. Cloud computing has approximately the same relationship to Software-as-a-service that freeways have to automobiles; they're related and often used together, but very diffferent things.
Government agencies are required, IIRC, to respect* private copyrights, and releasing software that is derivative of private works that are under a copyleft license under the same license might be consistent with (and might even be necessary, if the software is released at all, to comply with) those regulations.
* As I understand, its not bound in the same way a private party is, but is restricted under the law in what it can do with copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder.
National Public Radio is a private nonprofit that receives most of its funding through membership dues from its member stations, subscription charges from stations to use NPR programming, and corporate sponsorship (corporate sponsorship alone provides around 1/4 of NPR's funding), with somewhere around 2% from various government grants.
No, it means that it is an actual RC ("release candidate"). Now, true, some notable large software companies use "release candidate" as just a later beta, but that's not what it should mean.
Which is why they released Jaunty 6 months ahead of Windows 7, when people were less likely to be focussed on Windows upgrades.
(Well, no, its not really why; Ubuntu releases are every six months and have been for quite some time. But, still, if you are worried that 9.10 is going to get lost because it was too close to the Win7 release date, 9.04 was released fairly recently but before Win7, and 10.04 will be released in not too long, but after the immediate Win7 release attention is gone.)
There is no such thing as "the Linux Desktop Environment".
They get sued for malpractice. Or someone files a complaint with the State Bar. Or both.
Those licenses are, in addition to not being "Free Software" as defined by Free Software advocates, also aren't "Open Source Software" as defined by "Open Source Software" advocates.
There is very little difference between what the Free Software community considers "Free Software" and what the Open Source Software community considers Open Source Software.
The clash between the two concepts exists primarily in what certain extreme partisans in the Free Software community calls "Open Source".
While the "Open Source" movement as such pretty explicitly adopted the label to avoid the confusion of "Free Software" with (gratis) free software, a term which certainly predates the Free Software movement, yoyu don't find many Open Source advocates pretending that the Free Software movement is about (gratis) free software, whereas you do find plenty of Free Software advocates pretending that the Open Source movement wants something that some software vendors have labelled "open source" (just making the source available under restrictive licensing terms), but which is inconsistent with the actual goals articulated by the movement.
Published financial information is not the only evidence that a business is making a profit. Simply remaining a going concern for an extended period of time is evidence that the business is making money. OTOH, published financial information is no more than a written claim of facts, which is no different than the claims made by other companies.
If you instead of "published their financial information" you mean "released independently audited financials as is required of public companies and certain others", which no one, profitable or not, that isn't subject to such mandates generally does, well, those are a little bit stronger evidence than bare statements (though there are certainly plenty of examples of audited financials being inaccurate, so arguably the difference between those and simple statements is one of degree rather than kind), but all that really shows is how many open source businesses are subject to audit and disclosure regulations, not how many and which are actually making money.
Even if we were to suggest the "published financials" standard and grant that MySQL and RedHat were the only ones for which there are evidence of profit:
1) The sample size of 2 wouldn't be enough to draw conclusions about what viable models are available,
2) Even if #1 wasn't true, RedHat doesn't use the MySQL-style assignment-and-dual-licensing model for most of its products (as far as I know, it uses the "open source + support" model primarily), so if, as you claim, those two companies were the entire universe of evidence of profitable open source companies that exists, and any generalization was to be drawn from that evidence, the generalization that would have to be drawn is that the MySQL model is not the only viable model, not your conclusion that the MySQL model is the only viable model.
Based on...what? There are certainly companies that do business around F/OSS (and even F/OSS databases) that don't rely on the "we control the copyright and use the GPL so only we can dual license" MySQL model. Both the "open source + paid support" and the "open source + enhanced proprietary version" models (and often a mix of both, as, e.g., is done at EnterpriseDB) exist in the market. While MySQL surely did use the particular model it used, I can't see any evidence from which one can conclude that that is the only model they could have used.
The centerpiece of Wave is a server-to-server federation protocol that lets anyone control their own data that can be made accessible through Wave. So, with all the things that might set Mozilla's product apart from Wave, "the concept that you own your data" is not one of them.
Dual licensing under the GPL also doesn't satisfy the folks who want to maximize the primary benefit to software users of F/OSS: the guarantee that no matter what the copyright owner, original vendor, or any other single market actor does, maintenance and further development to meet the users evolving need will be viable for either the user's organization itself or third parties.
With the GPLv3 and its differential treatment of B2B vs. B2C software, its pretty clear that the FSF has decided to aggressively leverage the GPL's more restrictive nature, compared to other Free licenses, as a way to push business adoption of the GPL over other Free licenses, and a willingness to restructure where those restrictions cut to meet the preferences of big vendors.
Stallman's praise of the MySQL dual licensing model seems perfectly consistent with this more tribal, less ideological approach of the FSF.
OTOH, I think ultimately the fact that this restrictiveness, which creates a structurally-preferred-vendor for GPL software even if others are theoretically free to create GPL, but not proprietary, alternatives, is a big selling point of the GPL to vendors is also, in the long-term, going to turn into more of a market liability for the GPL than a strength, since its a negative from the point of both downstream developers and non-developer users, since it incorporates the same kind -- though a lesser degree -- of copyright-owner vendor lock-in to GPL-licensed products that exists with proprietary products.
Right, because Oracle doesn't currently do what it can to make money off its various lower-end (both compatible and incompatible with the flagship server) database products, since they would provide less-expensive alternatives that some people might choose instead of the flagship, top-end DB server offering. Well, except in the real world, that is.
Right, because if MySQL slowly stagnates, the people who are interested in an open-source or lower-end database system will instead purchase Oracle's flagship product, rather than moving to less expensive and open source third-party offerings like PostgreSQL.
Sure, no one else can cash out the "dual license" path (which does produce a very weak form of vendor lock-in [much less than with any purely-proprietary product] which is a weakness, from a customers point of view, in choosing a dual-licensed product where the Free version uses a GPL-style license rather than a BSD-style one), but that hardly means that no one else can subsidize open source development of a MySQL fork from related operations (such as support.)
IME, this is at best only marginally less true if you install Windows fresh, or get it pre-installed.
They are quite interested in owning the dominant player in a segment of the market where Oracle doesn't have products with significant penetration.
That's not exactly the same thing as a "a big competitor".
First, its PostgreSQL, not "PosGreSQL". Second, you left out, at least, IBM of the significant DB vendors.
Second, except as a ploy to give up marketshare to its existing competitors, I don't see the value proposition to Oracle of buying and killing MySQL. Heck, even just buying MySQL and putting it into permanent maintenance, rather than killing it outright, would seem to be an expensive way for Oracle to promote other third-party open-source DB server products, including the various MySQL forks, PostgreSQL, Firebird, etc.