Yeah, but those who make it mega-big (Facebook, Google, Oracle, IBM ..) all have their "crown jewels" close sourced. There is no equivalent monster company that is exclusively open source.

There are a few. Red Hat is a good sized company. Springsource had a reasonable-sized business (tens of millions in revenue) before being acquired by VMwware. mySQL was similar in revenue, and got acquired for crazy money by Sun. There's SugarCRM. But in general .. most of the really valuable companies have really valuable software they keep under lock and key.

There were quite a few people in the 1999-2000 tech boom who exercised their stock options and kept (rather than immediately sold) their shares, expecting they would go even higher. The problem is, the exercise is treated as a taxable gain. So if the stock later tanks, you have a big tax bill and no money to pay it.

Java in fact shares quite a few concepts with Ada. Packages, array validation, etc. Java has at least as good runtime checks as Ada. And there are Java static analysis tools.

For mySQL, it depends on the storage engine you are using. Postgres has row-level locks I believe but there are still some subtle differences in how Oracle does it.

Oracle uses row-level locks only, and unlike for example MS-SQL or Sybase, will never escalate lock scope to the block or table level. It does not have any limit on the number of rows that can be locked during a transaction.

If you have a mostly-read application this may not matter, but it matters a lot if you have a high update frequency from multiple clients.

You can try to relax the transaction isolation level in MS-SQL to get greater update performance but that does not then provide the same degree of isolation as Oracle.

Oracle is not "plug and play" for developers, far from it. But it is true that recent versions do a lot of auto-tuning, and you can get reasonable performance with not a lot of work (but that assumes you don't have a truly dumb design, and really high performance requires a DBA, for sure). Oracle's superior locking model also in my experience produces less developer pain that many of the alternatives.

That is not my experience. I know several Indian CEOs and they had no more than the usual amount of trouble raising venture capital.

I have a couple thousand bucks invested in commercial software on Windows. I use this stuff daily. Even if it was available on Mac, do I want to buy that stuff all over again? Most of it is not on Linux. It might run under an emulator, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I do also run Linux and it performs well but I only use it for programming, not games, productivity apps, or anything else.

Sybase and Informix are not even nearly major competitors. In the DB market (now a much smaller part of Oracle than previously), that would be DB2 and SQL Server (also mySQL etc. but you could argue that's a different market because most of their users wouldn't ever pay commercial DB license fees, or even support fees).

Larry did, though, buy an awful lot of competitors: PeopleSoft, Hyperion, BEA, Sun, etc.

Markets do a great job at rationing scarce resources. If there are only so many college admissions available, then price is an efficient way of allocating those. But maybe society has an interest in ensuring that more people get into, and complete, college, than a market-based system would accomplish? I think so. You can argue whether government loan programs achieve that or not, but RP seems to believe that government shouldn't even try to achieve that outcome.

IMO there are advantages to being a long-timer at one job. If the company is growing and you have stock options, you will do well, over time. Also if the company is placing you into more senior roles over time you will gain from that too (and not just monetarily, but in terms of valuable experience and job satisfaction). If you are not getting these upsides from staying then that is a reason to be bail.

Software and outsourced services are a big industry in India, but they employ a tiny fraction of the population and they are a relatively small part of GDP (about 5%).

If they (or more likely, their customers) decide they really need RedHat, they can write a big check and buy the company. They could afford it. But they probably won't. As Larry said a few years ago, RedHat doesn't really own any IP. Their stuff is open source. So why pay for something you can just take?

> New brackets every so often that account for inflation, or else a periodic adjustment of all brackets for inflation

FYI the tax bracket thresholds currently are not fixed but change yearly based on inflation. I assume this would be the case with any new bracket placed on very high incomes.