In Tech3, the game code is written in C and targets a virtual machine. id released the game code and tools to use it with the released version, allowing a strong modding community to arise and just an opportunity for people to learn from the Q3 game logic.

ID later released the Tech3 engine and game code under the GPL. You could probably completely rewrite the game code license it under a non-GPL license (it only communicates with the engine via syscalls) and only have to distributed the engine source code, which is probably largely code written by others anyway. If you made any improvements you would have to release those too, but that's not really a problem and is contributing back to the community.

Actually just thinking about answering my own question; having real lagged data to the trend data could be useful in correcting for the hype no? Hype is essentially another variable in the regression analysis. I'm not sure where the data would come from for it but if you could estimate the hype factor for recent past data and had some measure of present hype you may be able to correct for some of it right?

How does Google go about adjusting for hype now? Does anyone know?

I hope someone does some regression analysis on this and writes a paper. I would be very interested in how well the google trends data fits with the new rapid CDC data assuming that one of them is a lagged indicator of the other. How well would the data fit? What are the likely sources of error? Omitted variables? Fascinating questions.

I'd say that among the general public relatively few people know about OpenOffice. But among the IT community, or particularly the makeup of CIOs of large organizations, almost all of them are probably aware of the product. There are actually publicly traded companies which deploy OpenOffice throughout their enterprises and don't support the use of Microsoft Office; it's not completely unheard of it's just very uncommon. The real question though is, if it makes sense to switch why doesn't everyone do it? As you've pointed out, people wont switch unnecessarily.* However you also pointed out that there is a recent instance where people were forced to switch applications (and bore significant costs as a result) but they were switching from office 2003 to office 2007. If open office is a perfect substitute for office, and if its switching costs are equivalent or lower than those of switching from office 2003 to office 2007 (a logical inference of your earlier points) why have we not seen a massive migration away from the expensive commercial product?

*if it's working for them that is, and I agree with this, it's also a point supporting non-zero switching costs [i.e. the products are sticky, both of them are]; and having to overcome resistance to change certainly adds to the switching cost.

Fair point, but it still does not provide an explanation as to why businesses have not switched en masse to open office; which based on your most recent point alone should have happened as a result of the interface changes between office 2003 and 2007.

Have you ever seen what happens when you take an average, non tech-savvy expert microsoft office user and then tell them that they have to use open office instead? they can't find anything! File formats can be an effective method of lock-in, but having a large base of users who are completely accustomed to using your product as the standard can be as well.

If OpenOffice were a perfect substitute for Office, and switching costs were zero, that would be it; the story would be over. Microsoft would only be able to give office away as everyone would be completely indifferent and simply switch to the cheaper product (in this case, OO, which is free). [proof by contradiction] Either they are not perfect substitutes or switching costs are non-trivial, or a mixture of both.

it doesn't have to be. it's already their job to ensure that but when they're doing it in house they need to procure a massive amount of infrastructure and a staff to maintain it; which is certainly not easy.

I disagree; there is a lot of lock-in when you consider how different the interfaces between different applications are, and how much effort it would take to switch an entire organization from one to the other (most individual employees are not choosing which software they use). Also, there always seem to be slight and annoying differences in the way a word document opens in open office vs. how it opens in word.

Sorry about the babble, I've been getting used to writing that way. I agree that it's a business process revolution rather than a technical one, but I disagree that timescale is the whole story. I think the real meat on this one is in the economies of scale that can be enjoyed by the cloud services provider. This is also more of a hosted application situation than a flexible scaling situation, but the flexible scaling is important as it translates into significantly greater efficiency on the part of the provider. It reduces the need to purchase hardware and maintain data-centers as well as the need for workers to maintain those systems; and it should translate into a significantly lower cost per user than more traditional approaches (for all of these reasons and also obviously the scale benefits enjoyed by the provider which are very significant).

that's actually a really good point. this is the first application of this system, and if they are able to prove it to be secure and reliable (possibly even more secure and reliable than many internally provisioned government datacenter resources) they will make a metric shit-ton of money. Think of all the other states that would also use the product once it has been vetted extensively through an application, not to mention the federal government itself. This is a huge test of faith, and if they pass, they will get a lot more customers.

not to mention purchase that hardware and replace that hardware regularly as it becomes obsolete or insufficient

They still have quite a good lock on business productivity software (i.e. office). Nobody else even comes close to them on that. Google will probably continue to eat away at it for a long time but it does not look like it will tip away from Microsoft's favor in the near future. Don't forget, Microsoft has a ton of cash and they are probably not sitting on their hands waiting for Google to decapitate their cash cow.

I'm not from the LA IT department but I will say that I think the real feelings of the people making the decisions in the large organizations (business types, not necessarily IT types) are making those decisions based on cost analysis. Hosted/cloud services meet their needs and shift expenses from capital expenditures to operating expenditures (which is really important, smaller regular cost can be substantially better than large upfront cost from a financial perspective, even if the regular operating cost will add up to more than the capital expense given enough time). Not to mention it probably permits significant reductions in IT staffing, which is also very expensive. In the end, if it meets the requirements and it's cheaper it makes sense to do it. Certainly there is a cost associated with diminished reliability, but that's just another variable in the equation in determining which is more financially sound. For most slashdotters this is probably not good news as the story of cloud computing is about increasing productivity while maintaining or reducing IT expenditures over time, not growing them.

applications running on a third party's server being maintained by a third party's employees. This is the first application of their new GovCloud, but I'm sure it wont be the last, and there is virtually no doubt that the resources that they had to create for this project can be utilized in supporting other similar applications. That means that unlike the service that may have been previously provided by the internal resources of the state costs to the provider are actually going to decrease over time on a per user basis as they add more customers and spread the cost of their workforce and equipment out over more clients. It's massively more efficient from a costs perspective which is what really matters here.