It sounded to me like an analyst defending a long position in ORCL. ;-)
Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com
Tom Lane wrote:
>
> Marco Colombo <marco@esi.it> writes:
> > "Open source database companies will not be able to compete with the price,
> > performance, maturity, and functionality of the commercial vendors"
>
> > price? A *free* product not being able to compete with the *price* of
> > a commercial one?
>
> I suppose he's talking about the open-source support companies, like
> RedHat, Great Bridge, PostgreSQL Inc, etc, who are hoping to sell you
> support and consulting services at a very definitely nonzero price.
> (Still a lot less than an Oracle license, though.)
>
> The long-term viability of that business model remains to be proven.
> But what this argument fails to realize is that the open-source project
> will still go on, even if all those companies go broke. Postgres has
> never depended for its existence on any particular company, and I
> certainly hope that it never will.
>
> I concur with the general opinion that this article is mostly hot air...
>
> regards, tom lane