Yep, they're a mass-market company, selling millions of units at sub-$50 prices. The bestselling resources will probably sell a few thousand copies, and most will probably only sell hundreds. It may be more cost-effective for them to focus entirely on the mass-market side, where they've proven they're extremely competent (among the best in their industry), and let others figure out the smaller volume stuff. But, maybe a marketplace would be cool/profitable. They have begun to move in that direction for third party game add-ons, though I think they're all free, so far, there's nothing stopping them from adding them to the store.
They already have a lot of experience as a distribution platform. I doubt the majority of Steam games even come close to a million units.
While it's not clear that there's enough market to extend that platform to commercialize their movie maker, it's not that far of a stretch from what they're already doing.
You are wrong about Apple, they have one huge datacenter in the US where people suspect the Siri backend runs. They also have a smaller data center in California. We don't actually know what runs where, and we don't know what they are running in leased space in 3rd party datacenters. And, they are building other datacenters in the US.
In any case, wherever Siri runs, I don't think that Internet latency comes close to explaining the latency, and, I think, Siri can actually hide a lot of latency.
My friend Beth is starting a US company that focuses on thes e kinds of low-cost solutions for the developing world with an eye to doing a disruption from the base of the pyramid.
I'd include a link, but I don't think they have a public face yet. I do know they are looking for hardware and software engineers.
I increacingly question the notion that there are any just wars, but I don't really see how such a clause is practical or enforceable.
Even if it were practical and enforceable at keeping "evil" from co-opting code contributed by "good," it would also reduce opportunities for "good" to co-opt code contributed by "evil."
I'll point out that the technology we are using to have this discussion was underwritten by the military. The military dumped a lot of money into integrated circuits before commercial applications could fund Moore's Law, and the Internet was also the outcome of a military project. You can argue that there should be other means to fund such advancements, and I'd agree, but this is where we are now.
Sure, the GPL allows it, but the GPL doesnt allow Bob to dictate what Alice does with the source once she has it (GPL v2, term #4). If she decides to distribute it, his recourse is to not do further business with Alice. That could be enough, but if Alice sees sufficient short-term benefit, that may be a risk she is willing to take.
You should read the GPL more closely and expose yourself to some of the legal commentary on interpretations of the word "distribution," as used in the GPL.
Your right to keep your changes to yourself end when you distribute your derivative work to a third-third party. The question is: what constitutes distribution? Some have argued that some hosting and outsourced management operations may constitute distribution for the purposes of the GPL.
Your approximation of the implications of the GPL are probably sufficient for most startups, but your understanding is insufficient if you are so eager to insist that your approximation is still applicable for an organization of the scope and complexity of the DoD.
That said, the article doesn't really seem to get it either.
Well, he was a man who had taken female hormones as an alternative to going to prison, and who had indicated that the hormones had given him breasts.
Do you think a dead man with breasts would have gone unnoticed by the coroner? Do you think he might have wondered why Turing had breasts?
It's quite reasonable to think that the coroner would have known that he was homosexual, and it is quite reasonable to think that would have been viewed as a flaw, since, you know, the whole state-sanctioned "choice" between prison and chemical castration thing.
I don't think that this is actually anything new. I recall similar language when I looked at their maps licensing terms ~four years ago.
When I dug deeper, it appeared, at the time, that this only applied to features of the app that required payment. So, we were free to offer maps features on our site as part of our free offering. We could still have premium features without paying for a premier license, so long as those premium features didn't rely on Google maps.
But there are also plenty of applications where Google's higher quality doesn't offer a significant advantage.
At my last job I started to negotiate with Google about their (old) new maps pricing. They kept pointing to features that made no difference for our application. We needed Ok maps and decent forward and reverse geocoding. We were in their free tier, but needeed to find a solution for when we outgrew it, because their pricing was way way too high for our business model.
I left that company, bust if nothing else, this new pricing will further delay the day that they consider replacing Google maps. For new projects though, I'd probably skip google maps altogether, or at least use them in such a way that the client-side code would be totally provider independent.
