I'm confused here - In what way is MySQL not a "true" open source project?

I do however agree with you that proper abstraction layers are a good practice and help reduce reliance on any particular DBMS.

IMHO game publishers are coming at this from the wrong angle - they should be looking at the second hand market as an opportunity rather than a threat. Over the last year or two there has been a growing trend for games to have paid-for DLC (see Guitar Hero/Rock Band as prime examples). Since this content doesn't get resold when the game does the new owner may well then re-buy the DLC.

So although yes they might miss out on the profit from the original game sale (assuming that the person who bought it second hand would otherwise have bought a new copy) they ARE still making money.

Also don't forget trade ins - many console owners I know (myself included) will trade old games for money off new ones, often allowing us to buy more NEW games then we would have done otherwise. Why not embrace this? Publishers could offer incentives if people trade in one their older games for a sequel, or a direct competitor to their game - say trading in Guitar Hero for Rock Band etc.

When the music market changed under them (i.e. the internet) the industry tried to fight the change rather than embracing it as a new opportunity, that didn't work out too well did it?

I hate tabbed browsing

Seriously I just don't get on with the damn things. I find them very restrictive on how I manage my desktop real estate and they can make it quite awkward for me to find a specific page view that I'm looking for. Fortunately both IE and FF let me turn it off!

Anyway I know I'm a very small minority on this but it has given me a perspective on this question, and what I would say to the Mozilla devs is do what ever you want but make sure you still give the user the power to choose. As long as users can choose the work flow that suits them then I think its all good for them to be offering new solutions for organising things.

Fanboy. Next!

Horse Bolted. Gate Shut

I can see why they are angry.. I can even see why they might want to sue but aren't they leaving a bit late? 3DR has already gone bankrupt, so they unlikely to be able to pay them any substantial cash anyway.

The whole DNF failure is largely 3DR's fault - they were the guys with their fingers on the keys, but Take Two have got to accept some responsibility for letting them get away with consistently failing to produce the goods for such a long time - I mean a few delays are to be expected in any project of this size but surely t some point you've got to get the distinct impression that all is not well. And I would have thought that would have been, y'know - in less than twelve years. Surely if nothing else the continual industry ridicule must have been a small clue?

it might not be "enough" to fully fund the work they are doing but it is certainly a substantial chunk of cash and if the work shows promise they might continue to fund it? Also it will raise the profile of the work which might lead to further donations from other parties.

"You can't own property man!" - Free Waterfall Jr.

Ahh the rallying cry of those who want to freeload off someone else's hard work.

Seriously though, this guy is an idiot. In a broad sense he is all for "freedom" as long as that freedom isn't in the hands of the original developers. As things stand those developing original software have lots of choices in how they send their creation out into the world. They can choose what to do with the source - There's closed source, open source, there's the various open source licences. Same with name they can choose to TM the name or not. And if they do choose to TM it then they can still choose to let people use it. Where's the problem?

From reading TFA it sounds like the guy got his wrists lightly slapped over slapping Ubuntu branding everywhere and now has his panties in a serious bunch. Since when were cry-babies like this news?!?

I reckon they are deliberately screwing with the user experience to make windows look more favourable, and I think they are being stupid in doing that

I was waiting for that... of course vendors that are inexperienced at selling Linux machines could NEVER have just screwed up and done a crap job. No they are doing it because they are being paid by Microsoft to "bring Linux down". After all they all LOVE dealing with returns and negative press!

Now if either grow the hell up or put the keyboard away and get yourself a nice tinfoil hat.

well given that most seriously unstable windows systems I've seen have been that way due to badly written 3rd Party Drivers. However all the user sees is that "Windows has crashed again" and blames MS so I can't say I blame them for trying to ensure some QA on drivers. Also while I'm not sure on Vista and 7 I know that on XP you could happily install non-signed drivers - the system just warned you.

Me and a friend at uni always knew we were on a proper epic coding run when one of us would say "the damn birds have started"

1) Well traditionally Oracle has made various contributions to Linux to try and help it establish itself as an enterprise platform for its products. Whereas now it might prefer to use Sun's platforms instead. However as ZFS is OSS anyway it doesn't mean someone else couldn't do it. Anyway I think that the Lustre FS will be of more interest to Oracle than plain old ZFS

2) That really depends on which side is asking the question. I would suggest its better for some parts of Sun (somehow I think MySQL conflicts less with Oracle's DB then it does with DB2) and call me an optimist but I think the consumer will be better off.

I think you'll see the culture at Sun become very much sublimated by that of Oracle - after all you could argue that the way that Sun has been run has contributed to them needing a buyer in the first place. Hopefully Oracle will be able to keep the "good bits" - the ones that lead to the innovation that Sun was traditionally known for. I won't however be holding my breath.

Congratulations Apple - you've now managed to get the iPhone to be ALMOST the phone I wanted 18 months ago. Too bad the tech hasn't stood still in that time eh? *sigh* still, I'm sure it will continue to sell in droves and within a month I will have to threaten bodily harm to some goon who tries to tell me how great it is that they can now send MMS!

I've got to give kudos to them for patching older phones and not just forcing a new purchase though - that's very un-Apple and I'm almost impressed enough to completely ignore the continuing gouge against the iPod Touch owners, so this is great for the existing fools that bought a crippled phone but I for one won't be rushing out to get one.

You're right - it is by no means a certainty that firefox will continue its decline, and even though its never been my broswer of choice I hope it does rally round - I have the utmost respect for all the hard work that'd gone into it and I would hate to see that go to waste but on the evidence already out there IE is slowly improving and FF is declining.

Regarding IE's support for complex applications you are right in that it has nothing to do with being a standards compliant browser but then the web standards don't cover this sort of thing. While ActiveX may have been a complete train wreck at least it showed that browers can be more than a window to display content. Silverlight is a step in the right direction but its still early days - so far however I'm not seeing where the real "next step" is coming from in terms of FireFox

I would hardly call IE "irrelevant" with its current market share - that share isn't going to dissappear overnight and at the rate which the quality of firefox is declining by the time it's even equalled IE's share its going to be thoroughly rubbish.

Also, assuming for the moment that you are right and the "cloud" will soon be the be-all and end-all of desktop computing (which IMO is a long way off) I think its worth pointing out that traditionally speaking IE has been the better platform for complex browser based applications while firefox has been better at "traditional" web browsing tasks so surely a move towards a more productivity based web browser would only play to Microsoft's strengths?