tamarindo

Yes, but when you have "questions" about something's authenticity, it means you are the one asking for proof. If you claim that it's a phony, however, the burden is on you to show why you think it is so.

  Facebook claims Ceglia remained silent for more 
  than six years and his claim is probably too 
  old to pursue.

Have any independent legal experts corroborated Facebook's statement that "his claim is too old to pursue"?

I wouldn't worry about him. According to his resume, he is still working at Charles River:

http://benjismith.net/resume.php

He wouldn't be the first person to quit his blog.

I like your idea a lot but I'm guessing that monitoring the site for copyright violations would be a major headache. This seems to be a showstopper for a lot of music startups that do not have affiliations with big music companies.

   imagine Amazon came up with a really good payment 
   services platform, and then said that in order to 
   use it, you had to live in their cloud. The market 
   would have to interact with their cloud to get access 
   to the payment services. Rackspace would lose access 
   to the segment of the target market that needed 
   this functionality.

Good example, but I thought the idea with OpenStack is to allow anyone to take this and run with it, customize it as they like and eventually end up with their own platform, potentially distinct from Rackspace's. In your example, Amazon says "in order to use the payment system, you have to live on the Amazon cloud" but I don't see any parallel restrictions in OpenStack, simply because it's open source and can be tailored unpredictably.

It's for this same reason that I question whether the benefits to Rackspace that you pointed out above really are such a sure thing for them. Seems like it could just as easily turn against them if someone else turns their open source solution to better advantage (assuming the open source license permits this).

So you're saying that they are maybe deliberately understating the pain of migrating platforms with this solution simply to achieve recognition as being in a leadership position.

If you are correct, this sounds like quite a cynical move to try to hoodwink potential customers into a false sense of security with an apparent promise of platform independence.

What do you mean by "commoditise the software"? If it's open source, how much of a commodity can it be?

Also, and again I apologize for not understanding your language here, but what do you mean by a "vertically integrated solution"? Could you give an example to illustrate what it would mean for a competitor to do this?

It would be interesting if there is a competing solution on the horizon, the success of which Rackspace is trying to preempt with this offering. I guess time will tell.

What benefit does Rackspace get from doing this?

It's not a "piece about AirBnB":

"While AirBnB is the largest of these new services, it isn’t the only one. A half-dozen upstarts have emerged in the last two years, with names like iStopOver.com and Crashpadder.com, offering the convenience of a hotel, the comforts of a home and the price tag of an up-market hostel. Call them social B&B networks, or maybe peer-to-peer hotels."

Maybe it didn't work because your site doesn't have any way to process payments? I wonder if Paypal imposes a per-transaction upper limit.

In places like downtown Tokyo you may encounter some resistance.

If you're not in the majority, it really sucks though:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205794/Rape-horror-...

Anyone else find the opening image reminiscent of Da Vinci's Last Supper?

http://media.photobucket.com/image/last%20supper/thecathoder...

By that logic we also own Japan and Taiwan.

Who is behind this service and why should I trust them with my customers' credit card data?

$495 for Rails screencasts?

Last time I checked Railscasts.com was still free and better than any other screencasts I've ever seen, free or paid.

Interesting discussion of a topic I haven't read much about elsewhere.

Anyone know of any books that dig into this or related topics?