At 19:28 +0300 on 27/7/98, Chris Johnson wrote:
> Um - let me get this straight... you want to go buy Oracle instead of
> kicking in a few bucks to pay someone to add it to PostgreSQL.
>
> OK then a quick call to Oracle would tell you that it's $295 per user, 5
> user minimum. If you want to use it on the web for public use that's 20
> minimum or about $6,000. Plus they suggest getting their application
> server for another $195 / user - pushing your web site up by another
> $4,000.
I'll skip their application server. $6000 for Oracle? Sounds awfully cheap
to me. You get the benefit of all those features for which I'd have to pay
the Postgres creators, who in one year decide they want to take a vacation
in Timbuktu, and their features will go with them...
Won't happen? In the last couple of weeks I've seen a dozen questions
pertaining to Postgres's object capabilities, such as how to cleanly insert
values of a contained type and how to select them back. Up to this minute,
nobody answered. To me, this indicates that the "O" in PostgreSQL's ORDBMS
claim is no longer maintained.
When you rely on an organization to maintain something, you know that even
if someone gets married or dies in a car accident, your application will
continue to be supported. If I pay an individual to do it, can you make the
same claim?
Besides, there's no way I could get away with paying an individual any sum
of money. It's not my money - it's the university's. They will pay
organizations, not individuals - unless the individual would like to sign a
contract or something. And come the next day, I need another feature, I
need to pay yet another individual. And yet another.
Never mind having a Postgres version which nobody else has, meaning I won't
be able to apply patches as they are posted for the main version - or
should I pay *all* the Postgres developers so that they will all finish
development, testing and beta to make everybody's version the same as mine?
--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma
