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How Real Is The Open Source Database Fever?
J. Misael G. points out a NewsForge article on recent moves by some database vendors to loudly release (some of) their products as open source, asking the vital question "How much open source beer are these newcomers bringing to the database bash, or are they simply coming in and asking where the cups are?" (Slashdot and NewsForge are both part of OSTG.)
It's to make it clear that the relationship exists, and allows you to consider if there may be some sort of conflict of interest. For example, when MSNBC does a story on Microsoft or NBC, they always point out that they're operated as a joint venture between the two.
Other than the obvious mySQL and PostgreSQL, I have tried two others... CA's Ingres and IBM's Cloudscape (which is an embedded DB).
Ingres was originally intended to compete with the likes of Oracle and MS SQL Server, but never had the power or client base. OpenSourcing Ingres looks like CA's attempt to beef up both in one shot. It's not a GPL license, just a chance to peek at the source and maybe help out. The interface that ships is very much like Oracle's.
Cloudscape is nice, but not even as powerful as PostgreSQL.
I think there is a huge market still untapped for open source DB's... especially RDBMS, but alas, large companies are (of course) slow to adopt.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
The late-1990s media buyouts created so much cross-ownership that every article can contain some hidden corporate bias, stemming from competition/cooperation between parent corporations publishing the story, and the subject of them. When the same corporation is reporting on itself, the story is extremely suspect. The media response has been to favor "full disclosure": mentioning the corporate connection in the story as a disclaimer of "objectivity".
It's not good enough. People are increasing our acceptance of this conflict of interest the more we see it, rather than rejecting it more as it grows more pervasive and therefore more dangerous. Actual competitive conflicts are necessary to get critical interpretations, not just acknowledgement that interpretations might be selfserving propaganda. At least Slashdot has these discussions of stories, in which dissent can be communicated. My favorite system was the P2P "Third Voice", a browser plugin which let the user attach popup sticky notes to any web page, stored in a DB the plugin checked against the "background" page's URL. That way, P2P commentary could effortlessly appear right in the context being presented, without requiring cooperation from the provider of the target content. The project folded, but I welcome its return. Only the flexibility, complexity and scale of the public is enough to compensate for the advantages that centralized corporate media has in lying to us.
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make install -not war
From the article:
> PostgreSQL has a much richer feature set but
> has scalability problems and doesn't have
> a company behind it providing
> enterprise-level support;
Bah. What about this? Lots of companies there, and many of the folks involved are core PostgreSQL developers...
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