Well, you will pay more (through incarceration and costs of the crime to society) if you don't prevent it in the first place.

It doesn't matter if you don't think you should pay for it. That's not how the world works.

Just having that much money means that the organization becomes bloated, and then produces worse and worse software due to design-by-committee and such.

Can Slashdot at least try to tone down the retardation?

I bet that's because there are few new perl devs, so on average they are far more experienced.

Got to be something like that. Perl is worse than C for the ability to have subtle errors, and it doesn't have C's excuse of manual memory management.

Which industry are you talking about? Because almost all your points are true for all industries to some extent. If that's your explanation why women are reluctant to study CS, you haven't proved your case.

Systemd does not need to die. All the more power to those who wish to use it.

However, it is undesired by a significantly large portion of users and sysadmins, and it is unsuitable for those who still actually want to run Linux as a Unix-like OS.

For these reasons, in my opinion, it is not (yet) ready to become the init for a number of general-purpose distributions out there. Moreover, it is unacceptable for the udev subsystem to reside in the same source tree as systemd, and it is unacceptable for udev to integrate, except through the use of a stable and init-independent interface, into any particular init implementation or design.

Clean room reimplementation is legal as long as the specification used by the implementors is free of copyright (and other I.P.) issues.

I definitely agree that some of the prior cases of clean-room implementation is at odds with the notion that APIs are copyrightable. To be honest, copyright law has never been logically consistent to me -- which is why I don't even pretend to have knowledge of it unless I'm arguing about legal topics on slashdot ...

The "wrong decision" referred to the GP isn't about the trivial range check, but rather the notion that APIs are not copyrightable.

It would be really shitty if APIs were copyrightable, but, as the GP said, that has been the conventional understanding of copyright law for a long time.

It would be interesting to see how the story unfolds, but really, there's nothing funny about the notion of APIs being copyrightable.

Right. When gc happens, good garbage collectors don't freeze the whole application for hundreds of milliseconds to scan through the allocated memory looking for objects to free.

It is legal paranoia. Just like how IT-types have network security paranoia and ban a bunch of software/tools that *could* *potentially* introduce security issues to the company network...

I mean, sure, if you spend time looking at an individual license it could be OK. But why spend the time to investigate? Just blanket deny, and if somebody thinks it's worth fighting the bureaucracy to use a damn piece of software, *then* it might be worth looking into making an exception...

Duh. Have you discovered any language beyond what you already knew about sound waves and ink? I thought not.

Most critical production systems have alerts to pagers and phones. Nobody exclusively relies on email for this kind of stuff.

What makes you think that the Java API is "public"? At least Sun/Oracle never said that anyone can use those APIs. Which is why there was this compatibility certification crap.

I read somewhere that Oracle wasn't interested in buying Sun until they learnt about Android's use of Java APIs. If they were successful in suing Google for this, the damages could make up the purchase price anyway.

I agree with your list, except this one:

Welcome to the real world, where there are deadlines and sometimes it's a necessary evil to write crap to fix later.