Site was slow for me (not quite slashdotted), but got through OK.

See Wikipedia on Submarine patents. Notably:

The ruling was upheld on September 9, 2005 by a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit under the doctrine of laches, citing "unreasonably long delays in prosecution"

So, it seems there's a chance that waiting too long can invalidate your claims.

Compare with trademark law where you have to defend it whenever it may be seen to be infringed (see the case where Hoover corp lost the right to have the exclusive rights to the term "hoover"); the same doctrine should apply for patents. Of course, the whole patent system is a mess these days as it was designed in a different age with different industries. Scrapping patents isn't the solution as they provide valuable protection to inventors who put effort into designing something, but they're horribly abused by various parties.

The issue seems to be fundamentally down to someone with DBA rights on a database issuing "ALTER DATABASE BEGIN BACKUP" which then causes an "interlinked" database to also increment its SCN; anyone know what the "interlinking" is? I'm guessing DB links but it's a bit vague on details and high on the scaremongering... FWIW, the ALTER DATABASE command will require DBA rights to implement, so I'm not seeing the apocalypse that Infoworld is punting; if you've got DBA rights, you can do lots of stuff like drop user, drop table etc, etc, etc...

At work, we're being told our website is "in the cloud". To which I respond "you mean it's on some external webhosting? Like people have been doing for over 10 years?"

"Cloud" is being attached to all sorts of things to make them sound hip & trendy.

Wrong - if it was in userspace, it would be tied to the permissions granted the logged on user. I'm not 100% sure, but even as admin, UAC should still have blocked the worst of the behaviour. Once you're running code in the kernel, you can pretty much do whatever you want and the user's permissions and UAC become irrelevant.

If they've released the code under GPL and you still have a copy of it, you're entitled to do what you want with it, up to and including rebranding it and maintaining it as a GPL product for the future. The GPL granted you permissions to do certain things (copy, change, distribute the code) under certain conditions (you had to provide source code if requested). As far as I'm aware, they can't revoke those rights unless you break the other conditions; see Open Office/Libre Office for a similar situation.

Ok, scenario time:

One of your key system daemons has just crashed (SEGFAULT). Restarting it causes yet another crash; what do you do? If you know C coding, you start doing stack traces. If you have a support contract, you call them up. If you have neither C skills or a support contract, you hope like hell that Google can help you. If not, you're reliant on someone on a webforum/mailing list helping you out, possibly including handholding on "how to run a debugger on a core file".

I don't care whether it's 1993 or 2011, the fact is if something goes wrong, you need someone who can investigate, find root cause and recommend a fix. That pretty much has to be a skilled internal admin with C skills or a 3rd party support contract.

It's easy to maintain an OS (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, whatever) when things are working, the problem is what you do when things go wrong. That's when you need the support.

This very much depends on the organisation and the risk appetite.

If you have a technically skilled support team who are willing and able to get into a bit of C coding, the "free" linux distros are viable. If your support staff are pure admins and don't do C coding much/at all, they'll struggle to maintain Linux without someone like Redhat backing them up.

Also, it depends on the app - if it can fall over for 2 days at a time without much of an issue, who cares about support? If an hour of downtime is a big issue, you need someone who is able to fix it Right Now (TM). If your local team is good enough, that's fine, but mailing list/forum support of free software is down to the goodwill of the community. They don't care if your app is down, they have day jobs and social lives as well. With Redhat, you can get someone on the end of the phone 24x7.

Bastard... I only just managed to avoid coating my monitor with coffee...

BT are pretty notorious about their self-renewing contract. Sometimes if you shout at them loudly enough you can get out of it, though. I think Oftel had raised some concerns about it with a view to stopping them doing it...