Rodent Regatta

Oracle wants to pursue businesses with fewer than 500 employees. That’s what they call ”small business.” Small business means lots of different things depending upon which company or research group you might be reading. In my world, a 300-employee company is a large customer. A small customer is one with six to ten employees. For many research organizations those don’t make the radar screen. Here’s a quote that caught my eye:

Though pricing information has not been made public, Oracle will model the U.S. program after a similar one it introduced in Europe and Asia, where packages start at $35,000 for 10 users, an Oracle spokesman said. By contrast, Oracle’s large customers usually sign multimillion-dollar contracts.

If your hosting service has suddenly dropped you, let me suggest TextDrive as an alternative. As weblogging and CMS make further inroads on the Internet, we’ve seen the migration of some users away from Movable Type. We’ve seen the move of some/all of the hosting for Userland from one coast to another, but it is still unclear what that company is all about, who owns it and what its future might be. Textpattern and WordPress have stepped in with a future for anyone who might be disillusioned with the past.

At Zen, and the Art of Blogging, there’s a list of free software categorized and annotated. Worthwhile.

This most recent request by SCO makes it clear to me that the company has no viable future and should not be allowed to continue with such ridiculous legal wrangling. They serve no one.

SCO should simply go quietly. The business should fail and somebody else should take over the ownership and licensing of Unix. For those of us who are users of the technology, a ”real” unification of the Unix/Linux standards would be best. There is little value in the fragmentation of so many of the open source distributions.

Consulting with many businesses through the years, I’ve learned that many companies are merely expensive hobbies. Always on the brink of folding, these businesses are often run by people who could earn a much nicer income doing something else. Instead, they toil – in some cases under great pressure – at businesses that are simply feeding their interests.

Dane Carlson links us to another examination of whether or not writing a weblog can be (significantly) lucrative. The numbers mentioned say loudly, ”No!” It’s a nice hobby, but it’s not likely to pay its own bills, much less any of the others!