Josh Berkus wrote:
> I'm a bit more cynical than that ... I've noticed that our popularity
on
> Slashdot has increased directly with MySQL's profitability.
Slashdot
> favors the underdog, no matter what ....
I'll take a slightly more optimistic view. I personally (and I imagine
most of the tech community would agree) have no problem with people
trying to make a buck or two. It was their business decisions that are
hurting (and continue to hurt them), most especially their threatening
to get rid of the lgpl license for the non-static libs. That was a
total PHB maneuver. This hurt their credibility with the php community,
whose members are their core supporters. (PHB thinks: they don't pay,
so who cares?)
This is in stark contrast to the PostgreSQL developers, whose
egalitarian methods and decentralized development style reflect the very
spirit about what is 'open source'. This is reflected in slashdot,
which is the mouthpiece of the liberal spirit of the OSS movement.
Also, while not as widely deployed, postgres has a better educated, more
thoughtful, and generally better paid user base and therefore is not
exactly the 'underdog' of oss databases despite lacking repeated the
bleating in the increasingly useless technical press that mysql enjoys.
Er, I'm preaching to the choir again, when will I learn? :)
Merlin
