I wonder how soon the O from FYO will take this post down? For those who haven't noticed, this post was written in 2004. While I was reading it I thought this must be the guy's last day at this job.
1,171 karma · joined February 20, 2007
The firmware story is hilarious. You should go read some comments on Sun's website. People bought Sun hardware and when they went to download drivers to make that hardware work with their OS, they were told they needed to pay for "software support" to get them. What they got with hardware was apparently "hardware support" and it doesn't cover drivers/firmware. One word: insane.
If they implemented the whole thing themselves (I would say that should take more than 4 years in a couple-of-guys setup) then maintaining that compatibility must be/will be a nightmare. If you sold me a product as MySQL-compatible and I find that some bizarre and undocumented side-effect of MySQL implementation that my code relies on is missing, you will have to emulate that side effect.
If, on the other hand, they based their implementation on MySQL code, then this raises some licensing questions (MySQL is GPL so they will have to make their changes public). They may have separated the code somehow so that this is less of an issue, though it adds a bit of uncertainty to the whole setup.
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If you look at the "wait time" for your application (provided you managed to meet all the requirements, which are not trivial, BTW), on average it is about 1.5-2 years. What do you think will happen to these guys' startup/idea if they had to wait for a couple of years before they could start the business in Canada?
" BUGS
Ron is written in Ruby and depends on nokogiri and rdiscount, native extension libraries that are non-trivial to install on some systems. A more portable version of this program would be welcome. "
It stinks even more when Apple adds new built-in functionality that competes with your existing application and you are notified that your application is no more. In fact, the more successful your application, the greater the chances Apple will decide to make it part of the OS.
Zed's point is that the "BSD folks" seem to complain more when someone releases their code under the GPL than when a company releases this same code under a completely proprietary license. In case of the GPL'ed code you can at least study it, get some ideas, and perhaps provide your own BSD'ed implementation. In other words you complain more about people that give you something than about people that give you nothing. I do find this strange.
What I am trying to say is that to me the user of libgcc or the LLVM version there is not difference between BSD and LGPL conditions.
Had the subject of this story kept at least some basic track of his financial position, I am sure he would have been able to flag the problem much earlier and probably avoid the disaster. Something basic like how much money comes in, goes out, what's owed to you and by you.
And it doesn't seem there is a way to start a business in Canada without a permanent residence.
Every time there is a post about D on Slashdot, Reddit, etc., there are people saying that D is such a wonderful language that they have migrated/are busy migrating all their projects to it. My answer to them: where is the result? Name at least one useful piece of software written in D?
Think, for example, about the folks who work on the Microsof's C/C++ compiler. I doubt any of them need to worry about their job. On the other hand, if all you did is implemented the Shutdown button for the next release of Windows then, sure, you can be easily replaced.