bitdiddle

really? Could you cite an instance of this, where IBM sued a company over software patents right before an IPO.

Eben Moglen's arguments are quite convincing. His talk titled "Die Gedanken Sind Frei"[1] really strengthened my convictions in favor of free software.

[1] http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.h...

Thanks for the clarification, my interest was academic and piqued by the use of hierarchical structures. Best of luck with it!

agreed! I just downloaded and installed and can't for the life of me find the source code.

perhaps by open source they mean the collection of clients on Github

agree, it's kind of like MS Access was, right? Dirt simple to use, lots of neat add on tools over the years, and great for rapid prototyping, but not really a database.

I totally agree, I've used CouchDB a lot myself and a "mental note to self" or other best practice can suffice, especially if programmers leave or otherwise document those notes for their successors :)

CouchDB views are really neat, something that distinguishes it from others.

Yes, this is often overlooked, and one of the main downsides to NoSQL databases. Schemas don't really go away they just get pushed into the application layer. When multiple apps use the same database, schema maintenance and evolution become a real issue.

Perhaps it's because much of web scale data is arguably tissue paper data, more useful in the aggregate. Transactions and constraints on the data seem to be less a concern.

In this regard I think key-value stores are preferred over document stores such as MongoDB and CouchDB. A key value store makes it clear where the semantics of the data belong.

Interesting that Emmy Noether was Ashkenazi, I knew of Einstein and Bernstein. This theory has been around for a while, not sure what to make of it given what we know now about IQ.

Cute name. I wonder to what extent the language has anything to do with Frege's work in logic. I mean Haskell's last name was Curry, and currying is a big deal in FP. Thankfully that wasn't named after Moses Schoenfinkel.

Yes, there's a lot of subtlety to licensing. Personally I think it should be taught in computer science schools. Open source software has really changed the dynamics of corporations. Of course we wouldn't have the open source movement without free software and imho free software is more important than ever. You seemed to have struck a nice balance with this exception that protects your interests in the database space.

And yes, getting RMS to change something is quite the accomplishment :) His ability to walk the talk is impressive.

I don't quite follow, in that all dual-licensed business models seem to be based on this exploitation? What's different about AGPL?

I agree, though it's notable that open source is quite distinct from free software. I recall the beginning of the open source movement well. I would argue that the GPL is Stallman's greatest contribution to programming.

emacs

What I find interesting are the claims Penrose[1] and others make about human versus machine intelligence based on Godel's results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_artificial_intel...

Emacs, imho, will get a whole lot better when it runs on Guile[1]. This was a great presentation. I've been using emacs since the mid-eighties, it's so easily programmable that hackers are always hacking new things for it, so it keeps up with the latest fashion.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-07/msg0006...

you're not missing something, I believe the comment just got it flipped, and was referring[1] to problems relating to covariance and contravariance, when one tries to view OOP in terms of type theory.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_and_contravariance_(...

I'm not sure if his email address is current, but I emailed Frank Oles about this. He and I used to collaborate a bit and he was a student of Reynolds. He might know. The math genealogy project also lists it as unknown.

Some things Google doesn't know :)

perhaps, I think it's some what of a myth that one can't make money from free software. Sure one can't erect flimsy toll booths and extract rents but as I look around I see lots of companies, .eg. IBM profiting quite nicely from free software.

yes I was being very sarcastic

right, like for example Git. No one has built any commercial ventures around Git that I know of.

well sure, McCarthy worked on that when at MIT, right? That AI group was also doing a computer algebra system, so symbolic differentiation was a current problem.

He is credited with the invention of Lisp though, and had a lot to do with Algol. I'm just curious when the connections between lisp and lambda calculus came about. Did it come later with the Scheme work at T at Yale or was it there also in the earlier work on Lisp.

I asked a former colleague about this, Jim Griesmer (who worked on getting the 704 lisp running on the 360 machines), and it was he who mentioned McCarthy's background in analysis.

EDIT: ha!, a little googling reveals[1] this story, not very definitive but interesting nonetheless. I should add that Jim Griesmer also told me that Minsky wrote his thesis on turing tapes or some such thing, because his advisors thought AI wasn't yet a developed field.

[1] http://brainbrain.blogspot.com/2006/06/dinner-with-john-mcca...

I've always been curious about McCarthy's motivations and whether he was informed by Church's work on the lambda calculus. I heard he was schooled in functional analysis and symbolic differentiation and operator theory were what drove the invention of lisp, AI came later. I'm sure I could research it but I'm too lazy :)

I think this notion of the drugs companies needing incentives for R&D is somewhat of a myth. A large amount of the research, which they avail themselves of, is publicly funded at places like NCI and NIH. That's right, we the taxpayer helps produce these 70K dollar drugs.

sure sounds just like it. History repeats itself.

for sure, what folks complain about the most (syntax) is where it's power is.

I've been getting Guile recently and find the very tight integration with C to quite nice. It's like the best of both worlds

I haven't really thought this out, but superficially I read things like this and wonder how any investor can hold Facebook stock.

+1 - a wonderful story and very accessible

Love the symbolics.com address

Well the one true lisp of course was given to us by Alonzo Church, that other guy we rarely hear of :)

The one true lisp.