liraz - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google was 3 hours away from DOJ antitrust charges (typepad.com)

Submitted by

turnkeylinux

on Thursday December 04, 2008 @07:42AM

turnkeylinux writes: "Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. called off their joint advertising agreement just three hours before the Department of Justice planned to file antitrust charges to block the pact, according to the lawyer who would have been lead counsel for the government. "We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day," says Litvack, who rejoins Hogan & Hartson today. "We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of day. Three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement.""

Submission + - Amazon launches public data sets to ease research (earthtimes.org)

Submitted by

turnkeylinux

on Thursday December 04, 2008 @07:33AM

turnkeylinux writes: "Amazon just launched its Public Data Sets service. The project encourages developers, researchers, universities and businesses to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon — things like census data, genomes, etc. — and then let others integrated that data into their own AWS applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all of AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various U.S. Census databases, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl."

Submission + - eBay holiday contest overruns by automated scripts (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by

turnkeylinux

on Thursday December 04, 2008 @07:19AM

turnkeylinux writes: "TechCrunch is reporting that eBay is under fire from users because of a holiday giveaway contest gone awry. On Tuesday 25 November, eBay announced its $1 Holiday Doorbusters deals promotion, giving away 100 gifts ranging from jewelry, clothing, digital cameras, GPS devices to a brand-new Chevrolet Corvette for a $1 fixed price on a daily basis. The only catch is that there's no announcement on when these items are released or in which category they will be in. But cheaters came up with a clever way of winning deals on an automated basis by running scripts to continuously bid on items for $1."

Submission + - Former OSDL CEO: opensource business model broken (businessweek.com)

Submitted by

liraz

on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @05:59PM

liraz writes: "Stuart Cohen, former CEO of Opensource Development Labs has written an op-ed on BusinessWeek claiming that the open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors. He discusses the "great paradox" of the opensource business model, saying: for anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open-source business model is broken. Open-source code is generally great code, not requiring much support. So open-source companies that rely on support and service alone are not long for this world."

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