There, fixed that subject line for you.

Learn your history. Eric Bina [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Bina] co-authored Mosaic along with Mr. Andreesen, and I'll bet there were other team members at the NCSA who made non-trivial contributions to the project. At Netscape I doubt he did any development at all. Marc's fame came from being a well-known dot-com businessman, not for single-handedly developing the graphical web browser.

Is your hypothetical nightmare worse than the nightmares created by the choices you have with an abandoned closed library? It pretty much boils down to:

a). Doing nothing and living with a buggy closed library you can't fix at all, at unknown cost, placing your business at risk?
b). Being forced to migrate entirely to a new library with all the "technical debt" that entails, at unknown cost, placing your business at risk?

Those are just about the only two choices with a closed source library (aka binary blob), commercial or not. I could add a few more extreme cases:

c). Reverse engineer the closed library and write your own code
d). Sue the vendor for support if the contract or license gives you a toehold.

That's about it.

Having the source available gives you more choices. More choices lets you manage the risk more adroitly. Having source available means you can fix things well enough to live with what you have while you migrate to something else at a pace of your own choosing, with risks and cost known and controlled by you. Having source available means you can weigh the cost between migration, short-term internal patching, long-term internal adoption, hiring a contractor, resurrecting the project and building a community etc. Having more options seems a superior situation to me, and source available gives you those options.

In fact, if you look back at the genesis of FLOSS, the whole point was that source gives you the option of fixing problems yourself rather than being at the mercy of a greedy, irresponsible (or no longer existing) vendor.

You conveniently left the time others did your work for you at little or no cost to you out of your technical debt calculations. That's a gift you're not entitled to in perpetuity and you should always be prepared to bear the cost yourself should the situation arise.

You're splitting hairs. Companies are run by people. They have or lack the morals the people who run them have.

Also, Monty announced leaving Sun in Feb 2009 to create his own company. The Oracle merger was completed in Jan 2010. So he conceived of and created his own company to compete with the one he sold to well before Oracle owned MySQL.

My pleasure.

Damn. Forgot about that. You are absolutely right. Wish I could edit posts.

I'll agree with you except for the part where they'd be happy if he just took it and STFU. I think Oracle knew exactly what they were doing when they bought Sun, and they cared quite a lot about MySQL. I think Oracle was happy to try and exploit MySQL's popularity as a "gateway drug" - they would be poised and waiting with salespeople to offer a "real database" when folks who built a business on LAMP outgrew it and were looking for something better. To support this opinion, I'll remind you that Oracle bought Sleepycat Software (makers of Berkeley DB) in 2006 directly, not indirectly through a merger. I'd argue that Berkeley DB was the one database that was MORE popular than MySQL for simple web applications. I certainly used BerkeleyDB a hell of a lot, and it was a damned fine tool that didn't try to be more (or pretend to be more) that it was. Still is, IMHO.

Monty has long made excuses for MySQL's inadequacies (most notably the pre-INNODB argument that foreign key constraints weren't really that important and you could just enforce such constraints in software). So there *were* attempts to pretend that MySQL was a "serious" database equivalent to better alternatives. Many of the shortcuts MySQL uses (or used - some of this is historical) apply to edge cases that aren't apparent to "I'm not a DBA" developers creating simple LAMP applications. But when you *do* run into one of those edge cases, then you quickly feel the pain and realize that it could have all been avoided.

Here's a good read: http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else

1. Create a popular but flawed FLOSS product (MySQL).
2. Build a business atop flawed FLOSS product (MySQL AB).
3. Ca$h out by selling your baby to formerly glorious tech company on the ropes (FGTCOTR, aka SUN).
4. Profit!
5. Leave FGTCOTR after a tasteful waiting period to start your own company DOING THE SAME THING YOU JUST SOLD because you can fork the OSS codebase you just sold.
6. Take public potshots at EVIL Corp (who very predictably acquired FGTCOTR) for mismanaging the baby you sold (because EVIL), while flogging your fork of the product you sold as a viable alternative (FLOSS, to cloak yourself in the veneer of legitimacy because you can live off of steps 3 and 4).
7. Reunite to form company that does the same thing the company you sold for big $$$ did, to compete with the product you willingly relinquished control over.
8. GOTO #1?

I can't decide whether to admire Monty for successfully gaming the system, or condemn him as an amoral manipulator who wasted no time screwing over the very people he sold out to at the earliest possible opportunity.

Grudgingly, I lean toward admiration. Nicely done, sir.

That said, I avoid MySQL as the half-baked relational DB pretender that it is and use PostgreSQL whenever possible. Better technology without the drama. I have never regretted PgSQL once, MySQL many times.

You're seriously calling 7 colored blinking LEDs in your peripheral vision a "hud screen"? You did' reinforce ZeroPly's point - his scenario seems very innovative compared to what you could do with 7 head-mounted LEDs.

That's what I bought my tablet for. An autorotating screen with dimensions roughly equivalent to a standard printed page seems to hit the sweet spot for me. Flip it vertically and the screen autorotates to 'portrait' mode. Great for reading documents, comics, ebooks or anything else that works best on a tall/narrow screen. Turn horizontally to "landscape" mode, and I can read spreadsheets, watch Netflix, look at pictures etc. I think I would find "essentially square" incredibly annoying.

That's all that needs to be said, oh clueless A/C. Go look at Svartalf's profile to get yourself a free helping of context.

And yet ...

Everything is listed as having DRM, and for a reasonable percentage of the customer base, affixing a DRM label to an ebook *will* cause lost sales. That's not exactly a harmless error, whether or not DRM is actually present. The author has a legitimate grievance.

Because I'm old-fashioned and as a general rule-of-thumb don't pay for services rendered until, well, they are rendered. I generally don't pay for promises, and when you get right down to it, that's what Kickstarter projects are. So if a project sets a funding goal to get off the ground and pledges meet or exceed that goal, it's time to sit back and see how they do before "throwing more money into the mix". Even an established person or group with a track record isn't a guarantee of success - an extreme example would be 3D Realms and Duke Nukem Forever. So if I'm interested in helping a project get off the ground and while I'm thinking about it they reach or exceed their "get off the ground" goal, I'll say I missed the boat and wait for something more substantial or ask them to make another funding request. Makes perfect sense to me.