If they don't consider the software a good deal, then they simply choose something else. We're not talking about the bad old days of the Microsoft monopoly where you were basically forced to use MS products (eg: getting documents in Word format by default in many industries)
It's weird how much HN has transmogrified. Originally a forum for tech entrepreneurs who filled this space with business-running and tech articles, now we get people asking to be paid for their work in some situations called 'leeches' or described as 'extorting'.
> This won’t scale at all - count your current open source dependencies and imagine paying that sum for each of them.
There are now and historically have been plenty of MS-only shops which pay for all their software. There are plenty of companies out there where every employee gets a licensed copy of MS Office.
This is simplistic libertarian nonsense. Pollution regulations have had obvious good effects. Workplace regulations have made the workplace a much better place for all than previously. Road regulations make transport safer. And deregulation has frequently failed.
As taeric says, reality is more nuanced than polarising libertarian rhetoric would have us believe. Slogans make a poor substitute for thought.
> I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.
The divergence of who gets the money in a business over the past few decades makes it pretty clear what business managers (in general) think of that esprit de corps. With CxOs taking more and more multiples over line employees, it's pretty clear there's an us-vs-them line anyway, regardless of whether unions are involved.
> It is the Free Enterprise system that has made this country an economically wealthy and powerful nation and I enjoy participating in it.
Well, that and killing or enslaving people and taking their stuff. The role of the US military in the US economy is so often ignored. Even today, the US economy sees benefits from the USN being able to project power anywhere on the globe.
You might want to look at the concept of a Standard Operating Environment. The benefits you describe are not docker benefits, but SOE benefits. Docker image layers perform exactly the same function as SOEs for your VMs.
The first rule is that you don't break userspace, not that you don't make mistakes. Commits go through a process before being put into the kernel, and if yours is going to break userspace, it won't get in, so don't expect it to. You can make mistakes, but if they're found, you're expected not to say "well, commit it anyway". It's not the mistake that the violation of the rule, but the cavalier attitude.
You need to work in a wider variety of workplaces, if you genuinely believe that. Perhaps put another way: were Jobs or Ballmer ever escorted out for their obnoxious behaviours?
Mate, you've contributed nothing to this conversation but "nuh-uh!". I've given you references AND pointed you to the parts of those references that you claim you can't find, even when the stuff you claim is missing is right there in the first paragraph. I've even ended up quoting a relevant bit for you so you don't need to even click a link.
So take your claim that I'm the vacuous naysayer here who just blindly declares victory, and shove it up your arse.
Well, here you offer a prime example of the power of religion: you are being wilfully ignorant because you don't want something to be a certain way.
You won't be satisfied unless the actual word 'literal' appears? It appears in the first paragraph of the Stercoranism link, and again in the second paragraph.
"the 9th century Carolingian theologian Paschasius Radbertus... wrote an influential tract around 832 upholding the literal interpretation of Christ in the Eucharist". He supported the literal change, but said that the holy bits dissolved before becoming poo.
... the very first paragraph after the table of contents?
If you check out the Middle Ages section, it shows that the theological debate that it wasn't physical alteration started... at a date that is closer to us than the birth of jesus.
Check out Stercoranism [1] as well (which contributed to the above debate), whose whole basis is that the doctrine of physical change must lead towards normal digestive processes happening, and wondering if this turns the eucharist into, literally, holy shit.
At the end of that article is a bit of modern apologia stating that christ probably leaves as soon as the cracker hits your stomach ('but nobody knows precisely when'[2]). :)
Plenty of people have believed it historically. Scroll down to the Catholic section and you'll see some of the mental gymnastics I talked about to claim it in modern times.
Protestants don't believe in literal transubstantiation; I'd say they probably trust their taste-buds more, but then again, compare Protestant/Anglo-German food against Catholic/Franco-Italo-Spanish food :)
> "questions that have no answer". They have more perhaps retreated to "god of the gaps"
I don't personally see a difference between these terms - they both mean claiming to have an answer for something that is unanswerable. If you have an answer for which the only proof is basically "just trust me", then it's not much of an answer. Russell's Teapot is a pretty clear example of this.
What's always missing from these discussions is that that patronising mockery and outright dismissal is how atheists and agnostics have always been treated by the religious - it wasn't until atheists started really kicking and screaming about the injustice that people started to take note. One the one hand you have folks like this complaining of atheists merely being (gasp) rude!, and on the other hand you have things like some states in the US still not allowing atheists to hold office, by articles in their consitutions[1].
It's exactly the same with women's rights and minority civil rights: "Really, people would listen to them more if they just toned down and spoke politely". We already know that that doesn't work and just gets you ignored.
Given that Catholicism (like other religions) has wholly retreated to and now lives only in the area of "questions that have no answer", yes, it has no basis in reality. Nothing in Catholic dogma is independently verifiable. For example, the justifications around the eucharist literally being the blood and body of christ require some truly incredible mental gymnastics, and this transubstantiation is a core element of the faith. Yet strangely, the bread and doesn't literally change into the flesh and blood for the Protestants...
So where does the 'useful dialogue' start? I think it starts well before we just give moral authority to a bunch of very old men arguing about rules that only they made up. They should give us a better chain of authority than "since time immemorial".
Well, disasters and foreign economic threats aren't due to a politician's policy, and the regulatory environment usually doesn't change straight away (that requires legislation, not just a policy manifesto). War is a rare event as well, and it doesn't necessarily affect the wider economy - the war in Iraq and Afghanistan hasn't affected the US economy much, which quite happily went through a boom time in the early years of the war, then crashed for reasons unrelated to the war. Of course, the economy of Iraq got soundly fucked by war, but that wasn't due to the economic policies of the politician in charge.
The first year of someone's term is very rarely affected by their policies. My particular pet hate is when politicians start bragging about how their policies are responsible for good economic news when they're still in the first three months.
Truth is that economies change slowly, and politicians have much less control over it than we all like to believe.
Think Different.