I actually use this for making presentations for church and my kids use it for school presentations. I also like using spreadsheets for budgeting and items like that for the home. Just throwing out a few situations where a cheaper license like this is useful. Before it was available I would not consider getting Office because of the price and the rest of the family did not want to learn a different (free) office suite so they did not have anything to use.

I would say that Japan was known for innovation at one time. Look back at the 80's with the "car wars". Japanese innovation in car production allowed them to out perform American car makers on quality of the final product and profits. This had a huge effect on the American car industry.

As to the original post about innovation without borders, I agree that the ideas will make things better for the overall community. However, there will be initial consequences. If one country had been the leader in a certain sector, following behind in that sector due to being stagnant could lead to loss of jobs and impacts to the overall economy. Eventually, the hope is that new innovations will continue to build upon earlier ones ... but there can be losses in the short term. Of course, this is capitalism at work :)

I was just about to post the same point. From a large company perspective, the purchase of the premium JVM will most likely get you different tiers of support. For example, if you have a critical software project and for some reason the JVM is not playing nice with your project you could ring up support. The free JVM would allow you to submit bug reports I'm sure, that will then get rack and stacked in whatever priority Oracle chooses. Paying for support gets you much better, guaranteed support.

Also, this seems just like the model that larger Linux distros have been taking. Anyone can get the free version, but to get premium support and additional "features" from the companies you pay for it.

As someone who has been a development team lead (responsible for schedules, explaining budget variances, providing cost estimates etc. to upper management) and a strong developer I would agree with some of what you are saying. However, the one item that I do have a problem with is the written status reports. I know it seems lame to the folks that really are great developers but you also have to contend with people who "think" they are really good developers. If you are having problems with individuals like that, HR and upper management cannot act on just a leads observations. They need documented evidence that either the person is or is not doing their job. Chances are, if the person really is not as good as they think and you need to get them off your team, their status reports will reflect how simple tasks are taking them extremely too long. And the best thing is, it's in their own words! The other benefit is that with the really great developers turning in status reports you have good objective evidence to show to HR types to say, "Look everyone else on the team performs exceptionally well. How can you not agree that this individual is an issue?" Just my 2 cents. Luckily I'm out of the team lead business for now and am having fun just being a dev and designer again :)