Bruce,
Hmmm ... lessons of MySQL:
-- Marketing matters more than technical quality
(not news, Microsoft taught us that)
-- You can often get away with pretending to have features
you don't actually have with enough spin
(Microsoft also outshines MySQL in this area)
-- Educated Database Administrators are in short supply,
and as a result nobody cares about the SQL standard or
relational theory anymore
(Fabian Pascal could have told you that; according to him,
the whole DB industry has been in steady decline since 1994)
-- Commerical companies are uncomfortable with Real Open Source,
and prefer the pseudo-open-source offered by dual-licensing
companies
This last lesson was really driven home to me at the Open Source Business
Convention; managers were slavering all over "dual licensing" as the "new
model of open source." When I pointed out that there's another name for
dual licensing -- "shareware" -- I got some real uncomfortable silences.
Seems that a lot of companies want the fruits of Open Source without changing
the way they do business at all. Big surprise, eh?
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco