Did you miss the part where he mentioned the business liaisons? Dropping out helpdesk and directly involving developers goes against all that ITIL and other best practices suggest - sure, direct access to developers may work on on a very small to modest size setups but once you get users counted in hudreds and not tens your model very easily becomes expensive and inflexible. And heldesk should not be just help desk (reset passwords, install software) but a service desk - *they* are the ones doing the service to the user and handle communication so that developers can do their work effectively - and that is precisely what previous poster described. Sure - sometimes you need to connect developer directly to the user, and that that should be defined too (when, how problem is handled so that other developers can pick up if needed and how to keep service desk in the loop) - sometimes you really need that, but in environment which is bigger than 3 developers and 50 users always connecting users to developers is asking for trouble and inefficient.

This of course requires that service desk knows their job and is competent to actually service the users and not just be replacement to sticky notes app. But that is not what the poster described - from what I'm seeing doing service desk how he described makes very happy users (in my workplace we continuously monitor end-user satisfaction about service desk and issue-solving times and user satisfaction about the whole process and we have quite happy users, scoring over industry averages every time).

It is happening everywhere. I have not been following Canadian internal politics lately but if the summary is correct this is at least partly used as a weapon on domestic political battle.

When times get tough it is easy to market to voters that "those others" are the bad people and we are stronger by not taking part in their business.

It is sad because things like climate are not things you can agree on per-election term basis. It is easy to walk away and portrait yourself as a national hero saving the nation and every family $1600 when you don't have to give a crap about what your decisions cause 20 years from now. Same can be seen everywhere - people are protesting in the UK, Italy and Greece about pensions - when the cold truth is that when people are living longer now than in the 1960s and greater part of people are on pension the levels must be frozen and retirement age has to go up - there simply is not enough money. But who gets elected again and again - those who promise to raise pensions and not touch retirement age and usually at the same time they tell that this is possible by for example resigning from international treaties and "save $1600 per family".

Details are not known to only those who are licensees but Google apps (GMail, Maps, Market etc.) are closed source and distributing them is not possible without a license (yes, they can be downloaded for free but for manufacturer to bundle them they have to make a deal with Google - I don't have the details about the cost of this deal and how money flows and in which direction...).

Linksys is a bad example (and you know that they are a subsidiary of Cisco, right?) - they use OSS as much as everybody else does, ie. they bundle busybox and Linux kernel with their own closed bits (UI, etc.) - they are not an OSS company.

And Google is in fact making money from Android - yes, they are giving the base for free but to get the Google logo and bundled software you have to pay - and a lot of manufacturers pay for that.

Success stories would include also MySQL, they really made it profitable with dual-licensing but I'm not really sure if they were OSS from day 1.

For the original poster: Think about what you can accomplish with going OSS (and what license you use!). It seems like you work in a niche industry and your software is not going to get millions of deployments so you are not going to get a lot of "crowd-sourcing" to do the grunt work - however, your clients (or partners) may be willing to pay more for open access so use your business sence. Choosing a very lax license were your competitors can basicly comple your library and bundle them with their hardware would definitely be a bad move if the core of your revenue is from your hardware which depends heavily on your software. On the other hand if your core revenue is services going OSS might produce more value to the customer.

So I do agree with parent - if it is software you are selling it propably is a bad move in business sense to give it away. But are you? I have worked in a similar field for a client (their "secret sauce" was an AI library for liquid chemistry) and after all it would not have really mattered if the "crown jewel" was Open Source from the start because their business was to bring clear improvements to their clients (you see, as our equipment has analyzed your process can be improved by tweaking this and that) and the software itself was just a tool, but knowing how to use the tool efficiently was the real business.

It varies greatly in Europe too. Some Scouts are sponsored by church and leaded by religious people and they tend to lean towards the religious stuff.

Baden-Powell is also not exactly very neutral person and he is interpreted in many ways.

My scout times...yes, it was mainly about building contraptions and camping in the woods, and occasionally making things explode when thrown into bonfire (canned peasoup does make a nice boom when cooked right...). And sneaking out nightly to Girl Guides tents was part of the fun on camps :)

There are people who, when given the opportunity, will lie and cheat about finances of whole countries or companies. Also there are sysadmins who have the power to read email or sniff network data to their benefit or just because they are curious and because they can. When there is opportunity to peek, there are people who will peek. Cops into crime databases, doctors and nurses to patient records, you name it.

Neither really is a surprise. These actions can be discouraged by logging and auditing and by making sure that if and when caught they can't get easily away with it. And reasonable precautions should be taken (use encryption and other best practices etc.) to not make such things extremely easy and undetectable.

And obligatory self-promotion: I have been an email admin since high school, and while sometimes temptation was high (it would be soooo easy to check who the girl I'm interested in is emailing with...) I never abused that power. And I have kept that attitude in the workplace and underlined that when training fellow sysadmins by directly confronting them, and so far results have been good. Everyone I have trained has figured out that logs are logs and you might see something interesting when doing admin work but you are not payed to dig deeper into that but instead you are trusted because you make things work. Zero problems so far. Attitude is what counts and training, role models and simply discussing these things openly in my experience greatly reduce problems, accountability by technical means comes as a great tool but it is no solution.

To be fair - governments in Europe are not doing that well either on the debt front (see the ongoing Euro-crisis), here governments have taken the money, borrowed more from the Chinese (and US) and handed out benefits which they really couldn't have afforded in the first place to everybody...

But back to privacy and on topic: Yes, this is "old news" in the sense that US has always been a bit of a bogeyman used in negotiations, before it was NSA or some of the other three letter agencies and it was implied that they secretly spy for big US money. Now the talking point is PATRIOT and it can be used as "see here, they really do this stuff and they don't even have to tell about it". While at the same time ignoring the fact that Europe has similar laws too regarding terrorism. What is interesting is that people in the US are generally more aware of privacy issues and don't like all kinds of registers of people. But when the the bad, bad terrorism is mentioned...all data is free loot. In the Europe it is quite other way around - laws are needed to actually protect people from themselves concerning data collection, and the means for law enforcement to collect data are strictly controlled (for the most part...)

I actually prefer them not to care. It seems in this case email was hijacked and GoDaddy is not supposed to deny the transfer if everything is done properly. It is a real pain in the ass trying to obtain an "utility bill" or other "proof" from $5 / month web service customer when all they want is to get their domain transferred from the previous $15 / month provider (provided of course that the previous ISP who registered the domain was generous enough to put a real owner contact email to whois data...). It *should* be that easy for you average low-cost domain.

If you want your domain provider to "care" - which in this case is that you get personal service and are not just using automation yourself - you pay (actually GoDaddy also offers phone verification option for extra fee...). If you are bankofamerica.com or microsoft.com you should really do take a bit more expensive option - it is not likely that you change your registrar yearly to the cheapest alternative. But if you are a random website (this is first time I heard about css-tricks.com, I really don't know if they are big and famous site on web design field) looking for the cheapest option this is how it should be, because on the other side you have very angry customers complaining that registrars hold their domains hostage; been there in the middle answering to customer on the other side that no, this is not that easy because your registrar requires this and that and I have to bill you by the hour and on the other side having the registrar jump me through obstacle course to transfer ordinary domains by just flagging transfer "suspicious" and everything from first tier customer support is some form of "sorry, I can't do that".

By the way US registrars - identification by utility bill is something we do not do in Europe - the whole concept is strange, so please do not ask me for my clients electricity bill, they most likely can't provide one.

Europe has its own problems, to simplify things (hey, isn't that what discussing on Internet is for?) historically it has been that in Europe, you have passports, are required to have a social security number and uniquely identified and once you are cleared you are free to travel. See the Schengen treaty. This of course involves all kinds of nasty stuff of information exchange between authorities but it has been quite non-intrusive - if you have a passport from Schengen country and are not on Interpol/Europol list you have quite a clear passage. Same has been true for "outsiders" entering EU - once you are in and cleared a few basic database checks you are ok to travel without difficulty.

Then enter 9/11 and the security hysteria. Now we have the worst of both worlds - the USA is demanding passanger information from EU (in addition to which it has collected before, plus fingerprinting and photographs) and EU has to implement the intrusive technical measures; visit Schipol, Amsterdam for an example, the nudescanners and extra checks are only for USA-bound flights because USA requires them.

So - we now have the pat-this, register that, screen-your-shoes of USA (where "serial numbering" of people has been and is a great big scary no-no) and the data collecting tradition of Europe (bio-passports, RFID:s, possibility to abuse on global travel databases) combined. If you ask me this is a) a huge money sink and b) a disaster waiting to happen.

Large databases of people ("proving you are not armed criminal") is problematic, yes. Can it be abused, yes. Is it foolproof, no way. Does it prevent cross-border crime (remember, Europe is not as tight union as the USA yet and there are internal treaties inside- and outside EU states), yes, somewhat, and it has to be done, and USA is doing exactly the same but you just have dozens of different data sources because "GUID for people" is scary shit. Combine these approaches and watch the mess boiling...

Not hard to check - direct as a download from Adobe webshop $50 right now (it comes with "50% discount" so "normal" price would be $100, but I really don't know if anyone has to ever pay that much).

I don't have the data but I would guess most sales of these versions come from bundles with digital cameras and printers with a few casual upgraders here and there. I tend to agree with the parent - Adobe doesn't gain much by lowering the price of Photoshop, price really is the perception of quality. Even Microsoft does this with Office - while you can get a "home" or educational license for $99 or so when you know to ask about it (or it comes bundled with purchase of new computer) it is very important to their image that there are the nice boxed double- or triple priced versions on display at store.