I think the key is the meaning of the word "distribute." I believe it is generally accepted that using MySQL in a web based application provided as a service doesn't constitute distribution (though there are some questions about situations when the app is hosted on servers operated by a 3rd party).
In some countries (Germany for example), students have been herded into career tracks at a fairly early age. So, some 13 year old may be sent on a path towards becoming an auto mechanic, while another is guided off to become a surgeon or some other professional. I'm sure there are ways to break out of your track, but there is a big formalized system working against you.
In the US, someone can spend all of high school in auto shop, and still have a chance of changing directions and ending up with a successful career at 33 that some bureaucrat never would never have predicted 20 years earlier. If may take him longer than the kid whose parents and teachers were guiding them towards medicine or business from age 13, but the doors are open.
I think this is a strength of the US, both economically, and with respect to various liberal, democratic, egalitarian ideals. It isn't perfect though. There are certainly people would be happier and better off if they started learning a trade at an earlier age.
As noted, these influences can be very disentangle from any real-world analysis.
There was an interesting study a few years back that looked at the "outcomes" of a cohort of people who had all been admitted to an Ivy League school. Part of the study group attended and graduated from the Ivy League school they were admitted to. The control group ended up matriculating elsewhere for whatever reason.
Past studies showed at a significant improvement in earning potential for Ivy League grads, but they didn't have a distinguished control group. What this recent study found was that for most students of similar qualification (all judged to be Ivy League material by the admissions boards at Ivy Leage schools), attending an Ivy conferred no obvious advantage compared to attending a non-Ivy.
The only difference was for students who came from more challenging backgrounds, those whose families may have flirted with poverty and/or didn't have significant educational attainment. In those cases, attending an Ivy conferred some advantage over going elsewhere.
The government used to have more involvement in the student loan programs. My father started up a non-profit under the state board of regents to service guaranteed student loans in Utah in the late 70s or early 80s after the feds passed some big program. They did quite well for a few years, until the regents made them transfer everything to various banks and shut the thing down because it had the potential to be fabulously profitable.
It's a fair outer bound to place. I just like to be really clear about the fact that people don't necessarily pay sticker price at private schools. I've volunteered for my alma mater at college fairs and there are a lot of people who are interested and then freak when they see the tuition. I have to imagine that there are an equal number who don't even stop by our table because they've done just enough research to think "expensive."
You do know that a lot of people going to private schools aren't paying full-price, right?
Need based financial aid grants are often available (ie not loans) and sometimes they are substantial. I've known people who have paid less for a private school than they would have at a state school.
Concerned why? Are you concerned about someone stealing your proprietary code?
Or are you worried because you have made unreleased proprietary modifications to GPLed code and you are worried that running your modified version on another parties servers might be considered "distribution," and give the host the option of distributing it to other parties?
I don't know about data warehousing with spatial data, but two guys I was taking two a couple of months ago were both working on web apps that worked with geospatial data. Both of them were using postgres for geospatial use and endorsed it over both mySQL and MS-SQL.
How's it been working with the AppleTV? I know Apple stripped out a bunch of stuff that wasn't needed by their apps in a software update, but people are still installing 3rd party stuff on it.
They could have started an arms race with the iPhone hackers with their first update, but they didn't really do anything other than force people with hacks to wipe their phone because the OS wasn't image wasn't in a known state. With any luck, that's all they'll continue to do. We'll have to wait and see. AT&T might be a cranky partner.
Have you had any content up on the domain before this?
Google tries to get news items into the index quickly, but that doesn't mean they are doing it from newly discovered sites. Part of the reason they crawl sites frequently is that the site has new content every time the crawler visits. I'm sure it also doesn't help if the site has something other than a baseline pagerank.
Also keep in mind that at some point in the past year or two, Google appeared to give better pagerank to sites on domains whose registration was paid up more than a year in advance.
Why is the interesting? Some weak marketing speak (oh, but with attitude) and no product I can actually try without giving them my contact info and hoping they pick me (please, oh please, pick me, please)
BTW, I've never used Akismet because I started using Spamkarma2 before Akismet became standard. SK2 has done an excellent job for me. It scores spam using a bunch of different tests, including an encrypted javascript payload.
Why is that the obvious implication, especially whith the two home-run examples he gives?
Starbucks and Microsoft are built on smaller transactions than one would expect from enterprise software. Starbucks does it $3 at a time. Microsoft established itself selling desktop software for for a few hundred a pop, and for quite a while, it was selling a couple of copies at a time until they gained enough momentum to sell their desktop software to whole departments and later even whole enterprises.
Interesting to consider that the average annual revenue Starbucks gets from a regular customer, is probably similar, or even a bit more than the annual revenue Microsoft gets per-seat from its best enterprise customers. A reminder that one should balance the difficulty of acquiring a customer against the lifetime value of that customer.
Getting $1 from a million people might be a tough business, but getting $20/year from 50,000 people one dollar at a time is conceivable.
Flickr might be a good example (though a little on the big side). When they were acquired by Yahoo, just a little over a year from their debut, they already had ~400,000 registered users. Within a few more months, they had a million, and a few months after that a million more. I'd postulate that nearly all of that post-acquisition growth (and much more) came from existing momentum rather than their association with Yahoo.
I don't know if the same ratios held back then, but when I looked a few months back, about 15% of flickr accounts were flickr pro accounts bringing in $24.95 in annual revenue. Thats 300,000 x $24.95, or $7M in annual revenue, just from pro accounts.
Margins were low, or negative, because they were going for growth, but they had various knobs they could twiddle. First off, a little after the Yahoo acquisition they cut the pro subscription price (by half, I believe). In addition, they controlled the amount of storage and upload bandwidth available to both free and pro account holders. Taken together these variables gave them latitude in picking margins. Even a relatively paltry 13% margin would have generated $1M in profit.