This would be a more meaningful point if the EC's objections were founded in preventing a majority market share. But that isn't the case.

The EC thinks that Oracle will acquire MySQL and use its position to force users onto its own proprietary databases, thus acting in an anticompetitive manner (the assumption being that MySQL and Oracle DB are competing products). Check out Groklaw's take on the issue for a breakdown as to why this is pure FUD.

This merger wouldn't be an issue if MS didn't covet MySQL and SAP wasn't a European company.

It's Windows-only and still closed-source, so that's enough of a catch, really. This is a free dev kit, not an id-style open source release of the engine (title was kind of misleading).

Sarcasm doesn't carry well over the intertubes, I'm afraid.

Well, in all seriousness, it is worth noting that Pat Roberts is a Republican pushing for government intervention in an environmental problem. It's not so controversial when it's something an tangible as lead-poisoned children.

I knew SMI still sold SPARC-based servers and systems, and I'd like to know more about what role Sparc International plays, but Google won't let me into www.sparc.org for fear of malware. Yikes.

But as far as I can tell, this is a bitch to set up, and I'm really not inclined to go clicking around some unintuitive menu system to set my sound up right every time I leave home or go back.

Actually I just set this up yesterday with padevchooser. It was remarkably intuitive once I had PA set up correctly. The problem, of course, is that setting up PA in general is an awful experience that creates a boatload of issues with many apps. Once it's up and stable, however, using it to pipe sound over the network seems to work like a charm.

I'm pro-Linux as well, don't get me wrong. But I still think that if Windows had something as fundamentally broken as sound is in Linux, they'd crack down. A good example is the (much-derided) UAC in Vista: the overwhelming majority of Windows applications attempted to use an inordinately high level of access privilege, so MS added a nag. Not the most graceful method, but it set a fire under community's collective feet to convince them to make smarter use of the API.

Pretty much every distribution has standardized on Pulseaudio

This really doesn't matter until application developers do the same thing. If devs continue to not use higher-level APIs like SDL, every program is still going to vie for different resources in different positions on the stack. At some point, the Linux community has to lay down the law and break backwards compatibility for the sake of enforcing real standards.

Seems like the only phone you'd be able to buy with this requirement would be an OpenMoko device. Maybe an Android phone if it's mostly open source.

Closed source and closed hardware devices mean these little surprises will continue to happen.

You seem to be living in some interesting fantasy world where individual actions have no repercussions on a community.

Every time you drive your car, you are polluting the air. Every Watt of energy you use to heat your home can be traced to a portion of greenhouse gas emissions. It's not that you're doing anything morally wrong or actively malicious, and nobody can sue you for it. But energy consumption is tied to energy production, and there are no market incentives in place to keep that energy production clean.

If you want to look at this in terms of property rights, then what right do each of us have to take away each others' clean air, land, and water by going about business as usual?

Only if the article actually is a sensationalist piece of trolling. Sun is releasing an experimental feature to a subset of customers rather than the entire world. And Oracle does not own Sun yet, since the deal has not even been finalized, and therefore is not making decisions about Java.

Slashdot, you disappoint me. Again.

That is kind of the point. Abusing their monopoly gave them an artificially low cost since they didn't really have to compete.

I always thought of it as Love Boat with aliens.

EA just posted a $1 Billion loss. Treating your employees like shit may guarantee you make deadlines, but it won't guarantee a good product.

Why would IBM have been a much better buyer? For reasons we've discussed all over the net, IBM and Sun had too many directly conflicting products and businesses, and that would have just seen a lot of Sun products dissolved and a lot of Sun employees laid off. Oracle actually needs Sun to break into the server business, as they openly stated they want to.