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What was the problem with unloading Symphony on consulting support based upon LibreOffice? Given that this is a business they want to be rid of, I would expect they would not need to bolt proprietary stuff on to it any longer.
Regarding MariaDB support, I think you're correct that they're treating it as a competitor. This wasn't really the case for MySQL. IBM provided a supported version of MySQL.
IBM is most visible around Apache OpenOffice. What they are doing around MySQL v. MariaDB is tacit support through inaction. They didn't turn to supporting MariaDB or another MySQL version when Oracle de-supported MySQL on IBM platforms. They did something similar during Oracle v. Google - they chose just that time to abandon the Harmony project and commit to Oracle's JDK.
Your memory of IBM differs from my own.
I can't say I've had that much to do with them. HP, on the other hand, I could rant about for a while...
I had the same idea 8 years ago. I was going to put a server in every office building, and offer internet access and tech support to small businesses. It was past its prime then too.
If they own the copyright, they are free to relicense a piece of data
Sorry to be pedantic, but replace "a piece of data" with "a work of authorship". If there isn't the creative work of a human being involved, it's not copyrightable. And then we get to this:
17 CFR 102(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
And that means that even when the hand of man is involved, a lot of things are still not copyrightable.
How is that a failure?
Under that legal regime, if you don't lose a dollar, you can't charge your customers $1.06 to cover it with a little profit.
If Bell Labs spends (for example) a hundred million and makes nothing, AT&T would have charged the ratepayers a hundred six million and made six million dollars. But when Bell Labs spent (again for example) a hundred million and made a hundred and one million licensing their inventions, AT&T doesn't get to charge its customers an extra hundred six million and only makes one million dollars, not six million.
And they get to cry all the way to the bank.
Of course it soon made enough that they were farther ahead of the amount Bell would have made by soaking the customers. But the original plan was a "failure".
I wish I could "fail" that way, even on a somewhat smaller scale. B-)
Let's look at what Oracle is doing. I'll start the list of moves that appear to be intended to alienate the community around the very software they're promoting and cause the Open Source community to create viable forks that end up absconding with the product and its market. You guys contribute additional examples...
IBM isn't known for dumb moves, but partnering with Oracle on this sure is one.
Bruce
However, many aircraft are still "then". Switching them to unleaded will destroy their engines after a while - requiring, at least, head and valve replacement. And if you can't get a replacement head with hardened valve seats and slides for the vintage engine, you're S.O.L.
The free market won't solve anything because there is no free market.
We could probably survive without #3 though.
#3 was not just about letting the cops use your house for staking out your neighbors or the army using your home for a free bed-and-breakfast.
It was to keep them from planting a spy in your house, to report on all your activities.
IMHO it is even more apropos now than back when the "quartered troops" were redcoats. Now they're spyware or hardware keyloggers planted in your computer, or racks of tapping equipment in server rooms, as with "Study Group 3" or "Prisim".
We just need a supreme court decision that these automated agents, located on people's or companies' premises, consuming their space and resources, and spying on their activities, are "quartered troops" within the meaning of the Third Amendment for it to become as important in the electronic legal landscape as the First, Fourth, and Fifth are in meatspace.
According to Lapsley's account Draper just tagged along with the real hackers.
I knew him in those days. He really was quite innovative.
But also quite talkative. I have amazed others who knew him when I describe the time he was staying at my place I actually got him to shut up for over a minute in the middle of a technical discussion.
Of course I did it by showing him something with a phone that he didn't think was possible. (He then shut up while he worked out some of the ramifications.)
Were hackers really racking up millions of dollars of fraudulent calls, or was AT&T using the same inflated math that the BSA use to calculate loss of revenue from piracy -- by using full retail prices, even though there may have been no loss of revenue or cost to the carrier.
To some extent it was the inflated math case. The retail rates on long distance service were set very high, to generate money that subsidized rural phone service (which ran at a loss, due to line length, but had to be provided as part of the deal that gave Bell their monopoly charter). The Phreaks mostly used the lines at off-peak hours, when the trunks they used would otherwise be idle.
if the last slot was used by a hacker, there was one less slot for a paying customer.
But the network traffic, like power consumption, varied a lot with time-of-day, and the network had to be sized to handle the peaks. The phone phreaks usually did their deeds at off-peak hours.
Even if they DID have to install extra equipment, that just meant they made MORE money. The arrangement that granted their monopoly, in return for providing universal service, let them (in cooperation with the regulatory bodies) set prices so they received a guaranteed rate of return. The more they spent, the more profit they made. So as long as the phreaks weren't disrupting things too badly they weren't a financial drag.
That, by the way, is apparently the genesis of Bell Labs. As long as they spent money on something plausibly related to improving telephone service, every dollar they spent brought in a dollar and six cents or so. So Bell hired a lot of smart people, gave them equipment, and told them to go to it (and just publish a couple articles a year in the company journal). (Financially, though, it was a "failure": Chartered to lose money, it actually made money, even in its first year, by licensing the technology it developed.)
The clothes have no emperor. -- C.A.R. Hoare, commenting on ADA.