Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> I'm with Josh: we have plenty of scroll space, and I think we want to
> make this tent as big as possible. In fact, I'm even inclined to
> include closed software as a kind of contribution, although as a
> lesser one. By way of analogy, I think it makes a very big
> contribution to Linux that Oracle will run on it; it's not the same
> thing as paying for Alan Cox, but it's still a significant
> participation in the community of users.
I have to agree. Had it not been for Oracle running on Linux, I'd have
had a *much* harder time getting it into our datacenter in the first
place. Now that it is there and proven, adding new Linux apps (as
compared to proprietary Unix or Windows) is easy to justify internally.
This past year while preparing for our first foray into data
warehousing, I found the lack of native support (compared to ODBC) for
Postgres in the commercial tools (e.g. ETL, BI reporting and analysis,
etc) a deal killer when it came to using Postgres as our data warehouse.
No one but me was willing to try to make it work, and instead we opted
for a commercial database.
The bottom line is that for PostgreSQL to truly flourish in the world of
corporate datacenters, there needs to be a large body of supporting and
supported applications, both open source and commercial. We should
welcome all of them, because they serve our purpose as much as we serve
theirs.
Joe
