well, actually they ARE limiting the free online viewing now, so get out the checkbook. I haven't noticed a real difference yet to be honest, but I've been getting a number of emails from them about a change in their policy.

biggest closed-source, for-pay competitor? They're for vastly different purposes, and if anything they can complement each other, but don't compete. MySQL won't die, even if Oracle decides it's not worth maintaining, it would just change names and continue as a separate fork. More likely, Oracle will continue to put development effort into it to make it play nicely with their own line of products.

MySQL and Oracle have never directly competed, and never will. If Oracle were to shell MySQL, there are plenty of groups willing to jump in and maintain a fork. I don't know why a lot of people seem to be worried about Oracle's commitment to open source anyway. They have a good track record and there's no business reason to stop supporting it.

That's a terrible headline. Not even the "study" authors claim this was in any way scientific, yet slashdot chooses to use a sweeping general statement as the headline. Besides not being newsworthy, the statement is also blatantly false. The actual outcome of this unrepresentative study is that 5 of 16 people liked a song encoded at a lower bitrate and using a completely different codec "better". If that's in any way noteworthy it must be an awfully slow news day.