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Microsoft Plays Up Open Source

Posted by kdawson on from the coopetition dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Recently Microsoft's open source software lab posted PostgreSQL on Windows: A Primer. Postgres is one of the longest running open source databases — it has been around for nearly 11 years. The powerful object-relational database is a direct competitor to other OSS databases, as well as Microsoft's SQL Server 2005. So why is Microsoft promoting it? I get Redmond's interest in boosting anything that runs on Windows as a platform. Is this simply a case of left-hand, right-hand, or is something deeper going on?"

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Postgres is much more than 10 years old by stox · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Version 1 of Postgres was released in 1989. It later evolved into Postgres95 and then PostgreSQL. And it keeps getting better every year!

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    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
  2. Microsoft has always supported BSD license by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nobody has mentioned it yet, so I'll throw in my two cents. Microsoft is not against open source at all, they actively encourage and even use it on occasion (the TCP stack in windows is famously known to be from BSD Unix). They are happy when people write code that they can use.

    Where they have the biggest problem is with GPL'd stuff, which they can't use at all. Of course in this particular situation there are other factors involved, but since they have been addressed by others, I will not repeat them here.

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    Qxe4
  3. Re:If they don't buy MS, they might buy Oracle or by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    MS is boosting Postgre [PG] because they don't want people buying Oracle or IBM's database offerings.

    I tend to agree. Oracle is a huge company, and if lots of people used PG instead of Oracle, then it may mean more Windows sales over Unix/Linux sales. Even if they lose a bit of SQL-Server sales, the migration over to Windows may offset that. Perhaps the MS bean-counters calculated that gained Windows sales would offset lost SQL-Server sales. They maybe figure that OSS DB's will eat into *all* commercial DB's anyhow. MS may rather be in the OS biz than the DB biz because of this. I hear PG's SQL syntax is closer to Oracle's than SQL-Server anyhow.

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    Table-ized A.I.