That's not what they said. What they said was that they considered modules to be data not code and thus not covered by the GPLed i.e. no linking occurred. An explicit statement from the copyright holder that action X is not a copyright violation is a very strong endorsement. Better yet of course would be an explicit written and signed license permitting it, but the statements could and would be considered by the court in a lawsuit.

I'm seeing the same 30 characters for Teradata and Sybase. When I look at the 2008 SQL standard (last version I own) I get totally lost in the notation and I'm just not that motivated, I'm going to take their word for it. As for everyone else that matters I'd say those two matter.

As for it being big enough. Table names can have synonyms and be accessed functionally via. PLSQL. Oracle itself tends to use table names like X12A with another table that uses a descriptor. If you want documentation Oracle provides a means for documentation.

In any case This issue certainly isn't a huge constraint with Oracle. My point is that they are tremendous innovators whether one particular limitation annoys you doesn't change that.

No they aren't. The AC was wrong. It is a lousy GPL test case since the people with standing to sue Revolution have multiple times already said they don't think what they are doing is a violation of the GPL.

The R core team indicated that in their opinion any module code was just data for the GPL-R engine. Also those modules in theory could work with S. So given that Revolution publishes their changes to base R, I think it is a stretch to say they are a GPL violation.

That's not Oracle that's ANSI/ISO SQL Standard. Complain to them. Though 30 characters seems pretty long to me.

This isn't fluff. Though I can see why Dropbox just cares about the results.

You asked for a complex application with good quality source from Facebook. Presto is one notable example.

Oracle invented the commercially viable relational database. That's not a small innovation.
Oracle has consistently pushed the database world with new technologies that really did make a difference on computation speeds.

Lately Oracle has been one of the few vendors to have a a broad range of large enterprise software designed to work together.

Just to add, Microsoft cooperates with lots of projects like this. They are comfortable with this model.

However, Revolution Analytics has lots of the stuff that makes large computations viable like multithreaded / big data parallel R. And that wasn't GNU.

Logitech also makes their quite excellent ones: http://smile.amazon.com/Logite...

Facebook has done releases. To pick one that's pretty good: http://prestodb.io/

What legal action? "We don't want to sell our service to people using it in ways we don't approve of so we aren't."

They aren't selling anything. It is hard to argue a trademark if a transaction has never taken place. Also WhatsApp Plus tries pretty hard to make it clear they aren't the "official client". If WhatsApp Plus were selling then they might be in trouble.

That was a good history. Netscape didn't believe in standards at all. Microsoft believed in flexible standards. A real belief in standards was the Open Source community: Mozilla Suite, Konq, Galeon...

How is WhatsApps living in a word of dozens of major and hundreds of available chat applications having a "monopoly"? A comparison might be something more like A&P not selling WholeFood's brand generics.

And if it doesn't have that code on January 25th what stops it from having that code on January 26th? They can't certify anything.