[sNip]
> What will happen in the integration of the product lines is a Really
> Big Question.
>
> - If it succeeds, it shows how impoverished the "old" product was;
>
> - If it fails, it will be a company-killing disaster for them that
> will reflect badly across the whole 'open source' community.
The open source community will survive. If they don't play their
cards right, then MySQL could lose popularity fast and you'll know this is
the case because tools and scripts for converting away from it to other
database engines will become both popular and visible in a very short
period of time.
Aside from that, I don't see how the individual actions of one
organization that has been charging for open source software can possibly
reflect on all those projects which are totally free, such as PostgreSQL,
Druid, Apache, and the countless others -- when people think of open source
they don't think of MySQL first, they think of the real stars such as the
Apache Group and SourceForge.Net as great examples (although I still
haven't been able to locate the source code for SourceForge.Net).
> The latter would injure the credibility of PostgreSQL in the wider
> community, despite the fact you or I might imagine this to be
> irrelevant.
What do you base your conclusion on?
From my perspective MySQL and PostgreSQL are completely different
projects (for starters they even use different licensing schemes -- BSD v.
GPL) that are in competition. Since PostgreSQL stands on its own without
any dependencies on MySQL, I don't see any reason why PostgreSQL would
suffer in any way if MySQL came to an end; if anything, the marketshare for
all database engines will increase as a result of more awareness of other
open source database engines due to users and developers searching for
alternatives.
--
Randolf Richardson - rr@8x.ca
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Please do not eMail me directly when responding
to my postings in the newsgroups.
