Re: [HACKERS] Inprise/Borland releasing Interbase as Open source

Jan Wieck wrote:

>      I haven't seen that many. And what kind of a project leader must it be,
>      that a simple announcement causes the work of several programmers over
>      months (sounds at least like a man-year) to be thrown away? IMHO the
>      kind of PL, companies like M$ are targeting with their huge amount of
>      announcements.
>

Ouch - that hurt.

Let me address the kind of project manager we are talking about here by looking
back at the decision to move from MS to Linux:

In fact, the move to Linux meant throwing away about 10  man years worth of
work on WIN32.  However, the cost savings to my employer were substantial as
customer support issues disappeared overnight once the port was done.  However,
the 10 MY were not discarded over a single announcement, we watched Linux and
experimented with it for about 3 years before starting the port.

To see why we would abort development on a PostgreSQL port of our servers
because of the IB announcement, you must understand why we financed the port to
PG in the first place.  When GNU changed the C run time library to 2.1 (again),
it broke our IB 4.0 based software and prevented us from moving forward to the
current SuSE 6.2 (at the time) release.  We knew the IB problem could be fixed
in an hour or two by recompiling the IB code - but we did not have the source
and Borland considered 4.0 dead.

In itself, this problem did not justify authorizing the PG development - but we
felt it was indicative of future problems with IB.  Hence we started to
research PG to see if it was a suitable replacement.  Investing in PG made me
damn nervous because I failed to locate example sites trusting it with mission
critical work.  In fact, I was convinced by reading the discussion groups and
noting the extremely high caliber of people working on PG and also the
incredible integrity these guys have.  Evenb though they don't make a dime from
PostgreSQL, they really, really care about the software and its users.

We now have PG based servers under test in the lab and are still solving PG
issues before releasing alpha code.  Of course, the IB announcement forces us
to rethink the issue.

As for me being influenced by marketing literature, especially from MS - you
are way off mark.

By the way, I was the idiot that specified NT to our customer base in the first
place - I consider that to be the single worst decision of my successful 20
year computing career.

One final point, I live in a 100% commercial world.  In the capacity of my
work, I am not concerned about the free software ethos, nor do I care if
software is free or not (as in beer) - I just need to deploy solutions that
work.

Steve


{{{{{{{{ {{{{{ 1 hour of real time passed here }}}}}}}}}

Since writing the above, I was called to attend a telecon with my manager and
the ITS managers from our two biggest customers to discuss exactly this issue.
The decision has been made to deploy the PostgreSQL based server.  We all
agreed that whatever happens to Interbase, the personal commitment by the
PostgreSQL folks is not likely to dry up.  Hence the code will continue to
improve over time.  I believe that they clearly understand how important
reliability is to a database server.

There is a good chance that the Borland decision will have a benificial ripple
effect on PG as other engineers turn their attention to Open Source
alternatives.

Wish us luck, we will load the new software on our customers' servers for a FOT
(field operational test) next week.

Steve