Slashdot Mirror
Sybase Releases Free Enterprise Database on Linux
Tassach writes "Sybase announced today that they are releasing a free (as in beer) version of their flagship database for Linux. The free version is limited to 1 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 5GB of data, which is more than adequate for all but the most demanding applications. This release provides a very attractive alternative to Microsoft SQL Server, and gives developers and DBAs an extremely powerful argument to use against the adoption of Microsoft-based solutions. For those who are unfamiliar with the product, Microsoft's version of Transact-SQL is nearly identical to Sybases's. This high degree of similarity makes porting applications between the two platforms very easy. Sybase is supported by numerous open-source projects, including sqsh (SQL shell), FreeTDS, and SybPerl."
You might not be reading the source code, but others will and their interests are probably more closely aligned with yours than a for profit institution that is more concerned about customer lock-in. But hey, do what makes you happy.
Your point is a typical specious argument offered by OSS supporters: an for-profit organization doesn't care about customers as much as people who are just interested in developing software. My experience tells me otherwise. If you give engineers a free hand, they will most likely pursue issues of interest to them, like sophisticated algorithms, intricate coding techniques, and large-scale architectures, which are not directly related to what customers want, a solution to their problem. A paralell in another profession is college professors. Since most universities are not for profit and many professors don't have to worry about losing their jobs, a lot of them spend more time on their research work, something of interest to them, instead of on improving teaching skills, something of utter importance to their customer - students. On the other hand, the lifelihood of a for profit organization completely depends on customers. So they, out of necessity, established a set of mechanisms to focus their engineers' attention on their customers' immediate needs. I am not saying they are always successful at pleasing their customers, but they sure try very hard.