I haven't heard a cult literally defined as "any group that filters based on their religion". The definition most people have is https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult which implies coercion, manipulation, extremism.
Can you explain your view more? Otherwise, this sounds like a motte-and-bailey game.
A church is commonly expected to filter on religion (somewhat, many welcome respectful outsiders). A software project filtering on religion is very different. One common aspect of cults is pervading every aspect of people's lives, including their work ("company store" style).
Full acknowledgement for the fact that the line between "religion" and "cult" is blurry, but "all developers of this project must share a common religion and agree to these monastic religious tenets" sure ticks some boxes on "extremism".
They are, of course, free to do so; freedom of association is their right. Others are free to judge them for it, and to question whether they should be using the resulting software. The license is open, the community is not. So, seeing a project come along that looks to build something more open (and it's really saying something when "project whose governance is owned by a company, but open to pull requests" is more open) seems like a positive step.
(Also, as a database project, surely they shouldn't be mixing church and state. ;) )
I'd modify this take: modern liberalism was meant as a commitment, not as a truth. Something collectively agreed on as good, valuable and important, as opposed to something true like the "sky is blue".
The issue, as I think history will judge it, is the truth that precedes liberalism has been spent & forgotten. In the absence of the "why", commitment became truth: the perception/prism/the water people see themselves in and others, the world, etc. From there, as you said, the logic proceeds mechanically (fact: kids are blank slates, results: parents, teachers, environment are to be blamed[1]). Because we can't reason our way out of the truth even if our senses and experiences are screaming at us to stop.
It is a consuming, comfortable & reasonable truth, held tightly because the alternatives are seen as unreasonable. In this way, modern liberalism is useful as a defense mechanism.
What you’re describing is basically a people + a covenant + a system of law. That is basically the structure of the Jews, the covenant they have with G-d, and the Torah.
The question is then to what extend that particular system is an accurate reflection of reality, and to answer that question you would have the analyze the delta between them, both in terms of how it was initially conceived vs how it evolved.
In the case of the US, at a very basic level for example the founders did not envision the US as a multiracial society or that everyone, including non-landowners could vote. Also that the US constitution itself looks very different today in terms of its amendments and more importantly the case law and jurisprudence around constitutional law which is de facto the constitution of the US. I don’t mean that these are right or wrong necessarily, just that the initial conception is very different.
Basically I think you are right but that also the basic premise of liberalism and the liberal system even in its initial conception is flawed and therefore doomed to fail.
I do think fundamentally liberalism does assert a view of human psychology and sociology that assumes that properly organizing and orienting the human mind is at least 3 orders of magnitude easier than it really is. If you actually study anthropology, like the anthropological studies that were done in the 19th century and if you study depth psychology which heavily makes use of those anthropological studies, you find a very terrifying and very chaotic and complex picture of the human psyche, as revealed in the religions, mythologies, and rites of pre-civilization peoples which liberalism has virtually absolutely no awareness of.
Sun couldn’t handle the cold. Obviously in terms of the dotcom bubble burst, inobviously in terms of the company’s character. The things people loved about Sun (giving Java and NFS away, treating engineers as the point of the company, McNealy's loyalty to his people) were exactly the things that kept it from doing what it needed to survive. Very warm, very caring.
Oracle expressed the opposite. Within a year or two Larry killed OpenSolaris, let the MySQL, Hudson and OpenOffice communities fork away, sued Google over Java, and watched Gosling and most of the engineers who embodied Sun walk out.
The part that rankles the most, and undermines many a retrospective I think, is that Larry the lawnmower turned out to be a better steward of Java & MySQL than Sun was. Coldbloodedness is a survival trait.
I am not sure if Java would have survived Oracle without OpenJDK being started well before the acquisition, or without IBM.
Since then, companies had to develop policies about installing JVM from anywhere but official java.com address, ban VirtualBox, and so on, because the lawnmower is lawnmowing.
And I do not really think Sun/Java is in anyway major income source for Oracle other than the form of providing integrated database appliances cheaper than previous deal with HP-UX on IA-64
The framing is wrong. Not even Tim Peters says it was a cancellation attempt or anything like that. Bans, especially temporary ones, are not cancellations.
To be honest though, I think cancellation is a buzzword.
It's work of art and a work of science, I'd say. Programming language dev needs both, and I think Java has learned how to do both, at least compared to its messy early years.
On the note of science, I'll credit Java's maintainers for treating their language as a technology and not merely as a product. Many languages respect the real-world physics of computers to stay relevant. Few respect the "metaphysics" until weird bugs keep emerging in the compiler and ecosystem. Bugs that can't be solved with more building, engineering, or even design. Because those bugs are not defects; they come from the concepts & axioms of the language itself, not its implementation.
Yes, feature flags are conflated with remote configs (or its more useful variety: "dynamic configs"). The difference is subtle, hence why people are talking past each other.
Feature flags are gates for whether a piece of code runs; basically, an if-condition. Remote configs are a mechanism for changing runtime values without redeploying[1].
For example:
# Feature flag — variant gate for rollout
flag = sdk.check_gate(user, "checkout_flow")
if flag == 'open':
render_new_checkout()
elif flag == 'warning':
render_warning_checkout()
else:
render_old_checkout()
# Raw remote config pulled — structured values for tuning behavior
config = sdk.get_config(user, "checkout_settings") # if the config changes based on user or context, this "remote" config is considered "dynamic"
timeout_ms = config.get("timeout_ms", 5000)
max_items = config.get("max_items", 50)
allowed_tlds = config.get("allowed_tlds", [".com", ".org"])
In practice, feature flags are implemented on top of dynamic configs[2] to manage the temporary lifecycle of a feature — aka, ship a new block of code, ramp its execution up to 100%, then delete the flag. Whereas dynamic configs are a deeper primitive meant for semi-permanent/safer operations like tuning rate limits or changing text copy on a marketing website.
As I've seen it: the forcing function that separates the concepts are experimentation platforms: when human-control of feature flags is shared (via dynamic configs) with automated & randomized assignments. That's how Statsig built their system and, in part, why they could sell for a billion. Whereas companies that ignored the difference, like LaunchDarkly, struggled outside of feature flags.
I think feature flags, remote configs, and experiments are all the same thing. Semantically they differ in how you're applying the config and interpreting the outcomes.
Can you explain your view more? Otherwise, this sounds like a motte-and-bailey game.