You may not care about this, owning your own personal Hawaiian island, but there's a reason people give a shit about Bill Gates and even that notorious asshole Steve Jobs, but you, you're just an object of derision!
Other people have already provided some real insight into the issue. It doesn't sound like it's a major issue. Larry just wants people to pay or do the work themselves, if they're going to lag behind on older versions. It costs him extra money and development wasted time. He should make it even more painful so companies must upgrade. When I hear people tell me they're still using Java 1.4, I find it very hard to think they're not being extremely lazy.
or they are running an app that they either don't have the source, or don't have the budget to update.
Besides, like you said, there were other people to provide real insight into the issue. My post was just what it was, and you can downvote it accordingly...
Requirements may not change, but environments do, and continuing to meet requirements in the face of changing environments is something that will often mandate changing code or requirements.
When the world shifts, something often has to shift along with it, lest the whole thing break.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est (“Of the dead nothing but good is to be said”)
As for Ellison, I think the Christian warning about mammon applies:
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - Matthew 6:19-21,24 (KJV)
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/latinlearning/qt/passivep...
As that page notes, it's the same construction as in "Carthago delenda est [Carthage must be destroyed]".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerundive
> It is used to indicate that someone or something (the referent of the noun it modifies) needs or deserves to be the object of an action.
Also some of this spills into common names of people today:
> The name Amanda is the feminine gerundive of amare ("to love"), and thus means roughly ... "worthy of being loved", ... Similarly with the name Miranda; ... "worthy of admiration" ...
Given all the nasty stuff we've seen Linus Torvalds write on public forums, should we say that Linus was absolutely a nice guy after he dies? That would absolutely be revisionist history. Speaking the truth would not take anything away from the amazing contributions Linus Torvalds has bestowed on this world, nor his self-evident genius.
Ripped off the Woz...
Parking in handi-cap spots...
Buying a new mercedes whenever it came time to register his car cause he hated license plates...
His collusion with publishers to artificially inflate the cost of e-books...
The likelihood that he bought his way to the top of the donor list for a kidney transplant (that's more of a strong rumor than verifiable fact)
Or don't I don't care...
I respect his drive and his vision for his company and products, and how he got a lot of good work out of some talented people. That's it though.
Maybe the world is a bad place and money shouldn't enter the equation at all, but resisting the temptation to take advantage of your wealth in this situation is not an asshole/not asshole test. It's more like a saint/not saint test.
I'd instead turn my formidable wealth towards "grow me a new liver tech" while waiting it out on dialysis. Shitty for me maybe, but I'm a big believer in egalite, as the French put it. I could then probably turn around and roll-out the new liver tech at an affordable cost for everyone and recoup my R&D, if I had survived long enough.
Incidentally, you really need to let go of the kidney/dialysis thing. There is no equivalent of dialysis for liver disease. If your liver stops working they cannot hook you up to a machine, you either get a liver transplant in a day or two or you die.
my only excuse last night was that it was late, I was exhausted from a long day, and I kept conflating the two for some reason
cheers
It's easy to forget, but even very powerful people are just people and are prone to each and every failing less powerful humans, such as you and I, are.