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From: Josh Berkus <[email protected]>
To: Bruce Momjian <[email protected]>
Cc: PostgreSQL advocacy <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: What can we learn from MySQL?
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 10:03:17 -0700
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>

Bruce,

Hmmm ... lessons of MySQL:

-- Marketing matters more than technical quality
   (not news, Microsoft taught us that)
-- You can often get away with pretending to have features
   you don't actually have with enough spin
   (Microsoft also outshines MySQL in this area)
-- Educated Database Administrators are in short supply,
   and as a result nobody cares about the SQL standard or
   relational theory anymore
   (Fabian Pascal could have told you that; according to him, 
    the whole DB industry has been in steady decline since 1994)
-- Commerical companies are uncomfortable with Real Open Source,
   and prefer the pseudo-open-source offered by dual-licensing
   companies
   
This last lesson was really driven home to me at the Open Source Business 
Convention; managers were slavering all over "dual licensing" as the "new 
model of open source."   When I pointed out that there's another name for 
dual licensing -- "shareware" -- I got some real uncomfortable silences.   
Seems that a lot of companies want the fruits of Open Source without changing 
the way they do business at all.  Big surprise, eh?


-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

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