So... about that Heartbleed
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@The_Assimilator said:
If they weren't going to support SA, then why. the. FUCK did they allow boxed copies of their games to be legally bought in the same country?
How do you know they did? South Africa ain't exactly known for rule-of-law. Sorry to break this to you.
@The_Assimilator said:
For that matter, why the hell does an ONLINE SERVICE need to know, or care, where you live?
Each country has its own laws; Microsoft tries very hard not to violate a country's laws.
@The_Assimilator said:
Literally everything about region-based gaming in the Internet age is an anachronism.
Yeah, then MS gets busted by the EU for violating some bullshit regulation that only applies to Belgium and their year's profit goes straight into some fat Belgian's cigar budget. Or Australia busts their ass because God forbid you ship a game in Australia that features tits and blood. Or Germany railroads you into a court because it's illegal to display Nazi symbolism in a game, even one that makes it blatantly obvious the Nazis were bad people.
Your opinion about region-based Internet doesn't match well with reality. Sorry to break this to you.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@The_Assimilator said:
Literally everything about region-based gaming in the Internet age is an anachronism.
Well, assuming they aren't using geographically-local servers. Honestly, a user in S.A. connecting directly to a server in the U.S. seems like more of an anachronism to me..
While a user in U.S. connecting to a S.A. server is pretty much par for the course when trying to escape the fucking brazillians and russians who infest the U.S. servers for no good reason.
I'm not kidding, I actually queue up for South African servers sometimes just to find english speakers in DOTA 2.
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@The_Assimilator said:
I don't dispute this; we can blame 20 years of freedom (aka the ruling party running this country into the ground) for that.
Your Internet connection was better than 4Mbits twenty years ago? Wow! (I'm joking, I'm joking.)
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@Snooder said:
DOTA 2.
Day of the Anemone 2? Is that a gritty reboot of the Day of the Tentacle series?
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@The_Assimilator said:
I don't dispute this; we can blame 20 years of freedom (aka the ruling party running this country into the ground) for that.
You know, I've got no idea what country you're talking about there. That phrase applies so well to so many. Oh sure, they might change the colour of the hats on the sock puppets from time to time, but that's just so you ignore where the puppetmasters' hands are…
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@dkf said:
@The_Assimilator said:
I don't dispute this; we can blame 20 years of freedom (aka the ruling party running this country into the ground) for that.
You know, I've got no idea what country you're talking about there. That phrase applies so well to so many. Oh sure, they might change the colour of the hats on the sock puppets from time to time, but that's just so you ignore where the puppetmasters' hands are…Well, his profile says SAfrica and we've made several references to South Africa in this very thread..
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@morbiuswilters said:
Well, his profile says SAfrica and we've made several references to South Africa in this very thread..
I was just observing how it fits very well elsewhere too.
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@dkf said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Well, his profile says SAfrica and we've made several references to South Africa in this very thread..
I was just observing how it fits very well elsewhere too.OIC
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@El_Heffe said:
The Official Spaces in Path Names FAQ:
Q: Why can't many [b]Oracle[/b] programs handle paths that contain spaces?
A: Look . . . over there . . . behind those bushes . . . if you rename notepad.exe to program.exe something bad happens.
See? It makes perfect sense.
FTFY. Seriously, Oracle, get a grip on the 21st century already.@morbiuswilters said:
@dkf said:
Control and ownership? Lots of people feel that if they're building a business on something, they want to be sure they're not going to have some vendor pull the rug out from under their feet. With a commercial vendor, there's always that risk; you can't be sure that you won't get shafted. OSS doesn't stop the current vendor-group from pulling out, but it does at least give people a guaranteed route to pick up the pieces.
You know, this is the same thinking that drives people who keep a few tons of MREs in a bunker in the woods. At least for those people, they're actually worried about dying. Intentionally choosing inferior software because you're afraid good software might disappear on you really doesn't make sense.
That's an overgeneralisation, even if you assume OSS is always inferior to the equivalent proprietary software, which I'm happy to concede. It's a standard risk assessment question: does the risk of the product going away outweigh the difference in quality? That's something that has to be decided on a case by case basis. In our case, we went with the commercial offering, only to have the company that made it bought up by Oracle and the product discontinued. We've been trying to migrate to Oracle's competing product (which is vastly over-engineered for our needs) for about three years now, I think. In the meantime we maintain a separate environment for the old product because it won't work on a more recent OS version or database client version. It's turned into a pretty expensive decision. Now, I don't know what alternatives there are in this particular case; maybe the same decision would still have been made even if we'd known in advance how much pain it would cause, but you can't just ignore the real-world costs of the "vendor pulls the plug" scenario. It is a real thing.
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@Scarlet Manuka said:
@El_Heffe said:
The Official Spaces in Path Names FAQ:
Q: Why can't many Oracle programs handle paths that contain spaces?
A: Look . . . over there . . . behind those bushes . . . if you rename notepad.exe to program.exe something bad happens.
See? It makes perfect sense.
FTFY. Seriously, Oracle, get a grip on the 21st century already.@morbiuswilters said:
@dkf said:
Control and ownership? Lots of people feel that if they're building a business on something, they want to be sure they're not going to have some vendor pull the rug out from under their feet. With a commercial vendor, there's always that risk; you can't be sure that you won't get shafted. OSS doesn't stop the current vendor-group from pulling out, but it does at least give people a guaranteed route to pick up the pieces.
You know, this is the same thinking that drives people who keep a few tons of MREs in a bunker in the woods. At least for those people, they're actually worried about dying. Intentionally choosing inferior software because you're afraid good software might disappear on you really doesn't make sense.
That's an overgeneralisation, even if you assume OSS is always inferior to the equivalent proprietary software, which I'm happy to concede. It's a standard risk assessment question: does the risk of the product going away outweigh the difference in quality? That's something that has to be decided on a case by case basis. In our case, we went with the commercial offering, only to have the company that made it bought up by Oracle and the product discontinued. We've been trying to migrate to Oracle's competing product (which is vastly over-engineered for our needs) for about three years now, I think. In the meantime we maintain a separate environment for the old product because it won't work on a more recent OS version or database client version. It's turned into a pretty expensive decision. Now, I don't know what alternatives there are in this particular case; maybe the same decision would still have been made even if we'd known in advance how much pain it would cause, but you can't just ignore the real-world costs of the "vendor pulls the plug" scenario. It is a real thing.How would the product being FOSS make any difference? I guess, in theory, you could continue developing it yourself, but in reality that's probably not ever going to happen. Seems like you'd be in the same boat.
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@morbiuswilters said:
How would the product being FOSS make any difference? I guess, in theory, you could continue developing it yourself, but in reality that's probably not ever going to happen. Seems like you'd be in the same boat.
Uh, that's exactly what a lot of people who advocate for FOSS want. The ability to continue to develop code without fear of being sued if the original developer decides to drop it.
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@Snooder said:
@morbiuswilters said:
How would the product being FOSS make any difference? I guess, in theory, you could continue developing it yourself, but in reality that's probably not ever going to happen. Seems like you'd be in the same boat.
Uh, that's exactly what a lot of people who advocate for FOSS want. The ability to continue to develop code without fear of being sued if the original developer decides to drop it.Yeah, FOSStards are concerned with whether their text-mode mail reader continues to be open source, I get that.
What difference does that make for Scarlet's company? By the sound of it, it's a fairly complex business product. I'll even grant you that this is FairyTaleLand™ and that FOSS would even be capable of producing an actual enterprise product. So Scarlet's company is happily using their well-built, easy-to-use, full-featured FOSS product until one day the lead developer dies; say he his arteries exploded at age 32 or maybe he got a gentital wound from his Aibo that got infected. Or maybe he just ate a bad piece of foot. Regardless, he's dead.
So is Scarlet's company now going to take on maintaining and building this product? I mean, it sounds like they're having trouble even migrating to a different product; I can only imagine actually trying to continue development would be a massive endeavour and well outside the core competencies of the company.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Snooder said:
@morbiuswilters said:
How would the product being FOSS make any difference? I guess, in theory, you could continue developing it yourself, but in reality that's probably not ever going to happen. Seems like you'd be in the same boat.
Uh, that's exactly what a lot of people who advocate for FOSS want. The ability to continue to develop code without fear of being sued if the original developer decides to drop it.Yeah, FOSStards are concerned with whether their text-mode mail reader continues to be open source, I get that.
What difference does that make for Scarlet's company? By the sound of it, it's a fairly complex business product. I'll even grant you that this is FairyTaleLand™ and that FOSS would even be capable of producing an actual enterprise product. So Scarlet's company is happily using their well-built, easy-to-use, full-featured FOSS product until one day the lead developer dies; say he his arteries exploded at age 32 or maybe he got a gentital wound from his Aibo that got infected. Or maybe he just ate a bad piece of foot. Regardless, he's dead.
So is Scarlet's company now going to take on maintaining and building this product? I mean, it sounds like they're having trouble even migrating to a different product; I can only imagine actually trying to continue development would be a massive endeavour and well outside the core competencies of the company.
Sure, but if it's a choice between spending $150,000 on a consultant to take over for the lead dev who died, and having to wait six months for him to get up to speed before new development comes in and spending $1,000,000 on a new product that doesn't quite fit their needs, paying someone to take over the old codebase is definitely the way to go.
Look, where I work right now, we have code that's been purchased from a vendor. It's this wierd and fucked up COBOL rules engine, in which most of our business logic is written. And for the most part the internal developers do most of the maintenance and new development. But every so often we run into what's called "core" code that we can't touch. If the vendor went bankrupt tomorrow, we'd be fucked. If the code was open source, we'd just rewrite and recompile it to give ourselves access.
You seem to be thinking about tools like SQL Server or something that have large customer bases. Scarlet and I are talking about the sort of line-of-business application with very few customers (possibly even a single customer) where the base code has been heavily modified by employees at the customer but still needs the core product, and upgrades to the core product, to come from the vendor.
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@Snooder said:
It's this wierd and fucked up COBOL rules engine
I take it you've never used a FOSS rules engine, then..
@Snooder said:
You seem to be thinking about tools like SQL Server or something that have large customer bases. Scarlet and I are talking about the sort of line-of-business application with very few customers (possibly even a single customer) where the base code has been heavily modified by employees at the customer but still needs the core product, and upgrades to the core product, to come from the vendor.
No, that's exactly what I'm talking about. That's why I said it was a fantasy to think FOSS is going to develop it for you. You're just arguing nonsense: sure, a flying unicorn would be a faster ride to work than your Honda, but where are you going to get Magic Oats when the Elves are on holiday??
Anyway, you're just saying you want the source to a dead commercial product. That's not the same thing as a FOSS-developed product, bro.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Anyway, you're just saying you want the source to a dead commercial product. That's not the same thing as a FOSS-developed product, bro.
Considering that Firefox is a thing that exists, then yes, it is.
Sarcasm aside, my point is that if the company purchased an Open Source solution (and yes, there are Open Source rules engines out there) then vendor lockin wouldn't be a problem. Maintenance and support might be, but that's a tradeoff that needs to evaluated and considered, not an argument that always favors closed source.
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@Snooder said:
Considering that Firefox is a thing that exists, then yes, it is.
Mozilla has been open source for 16 years now. Your point only serves to make you look silly.
@Snooder said:
and yes, there are Open Source rules engines out there
Yes, and I take it you've never used one or else you wouldn't suggest it.
@Snooder said:
Maintenance and support might be, but that's a tradeoff that needs to evaluated and considered, not an argument that always favors closed source.
So far nobody has come up with an example which would favor open sores.
