defending the ideals is the best thing one can do in his life. With the pragmatic view, you propose, we would stay till nowadays "on the trees eating bananas".
Radovan
Ludwig Keller a écrit:
Armel: as in the past such debates are mute and go nowhere; these days, fame and fortunes are gained by those who copy the fastest and most efficiently or as one of your most brilliant countrymen, H. Balzac, put it: "behind every fortune there is a crime"; once you accept this you can go on with life... and don't have to waste your time defending ideals which seem to be a thing of the past;L. Keller Armel Le Bail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 07/07/2004 05:23:06 AM Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc:"Your operating model... is a stellar example of how one might integrate with MySQL while still adhering to confines of the GPL or in other words, managing to keep your product open source".Thanks for the confirmation. Exactly what I said : advertisement for extremely good commercial products. "Stellar example", wow. Sure, nothing is comparable, the product has not any competitor. Only one star in the sky. You cannot look elsewhere. The star is the most brilliant one. Impossible to be disappointed. Adding 2 more cents about the possibility for a special treatment in scientific journals of these manuscripts which are totally devoted to the presentation of a commercial software or of a commercial database (any commercial product, including the NIST standard reference materials, diffractometers, etc). If all these papers in scientific journals on commercial software, which you will never be able to afford, were paid as advertisement pages by the software vendors, this would decrease the cost of the journals for all peoples. In a sense, the mass is paying for the advertisements of Acelrys (etc). Just like if your newspaper was full of advertisements for Porsche, Ferrari, BMW and Mercedes cars (not any french car here) and like if the cost of a sample of the newspaper was including the cost of these advertisement pages. We all know that without advertisments, these newspapers would be 3 or 4 times more expensive. Advertisements is the rule for the presentation of diffractometers and so on, why not for any commercial product, including the software and databases ? Including the FIZ-Karlsruhe-NIST-ICSD stellar example ? I just try to help to make a more clear difference between the knowledge traditionally shared between scientists, without restriction, and the money-making knowledge sold by companies having sometimes a "you can't do this for that" language. Armel
-- Radovan Cerny Laboratoire de Cristallographie 24, quai Ernest-Ansermet CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland Phone : [+[41] 22] 37 964 50, FAX : [+[41] 22] 37 961 08 mailto : [EMAIL PROTECTED] URL : http://www.unige.ch/sciences/crystal/cerny/rcerny.htm