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

Stephen Birch wrote:

> 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.
    Pardon for beeing that harsh, but similar to you (as Marc said you    haven't had your first cup of coffee), I
missedmy required amount of    beer :-)
 

> 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.
    That sounds totally different to your first message. This is definitely    a PUSH BREAK for possible limitation of
loss.

> 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.
    Great news. Be sure, I'll be one of the last rats leaving the ship.

> 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.
    There aleady is a noticeable turn in attention. Creative recently    decided to put their SB-Live! drivers for
Linuxunder GPL (after they    had severe problems with IRQ and DMA handling at least in the SMP    environment). One
monthlater, the driver totally fit's my needs. Well,    they're a hardware vendor, primarily selling their cards to
makemoney.
 
    OTOH, I'm an SAP R/3 base consultant for years now. And all these DB    runtime license discussions are annoying.
SAPneeds about 2-3 months to    port R/3 to a new database. But they need another year or so to ship it    due to their
internalquality assurance policy. And it's a not to    underestimate efford impact to support it in the future. The
same   applies to the OS corner, but they decided to port R/3 to Linux anyway,    because coupling the benefits of the
UNIXworld (WRT administration    issues) with the low cost level of PC hardware, is definitely worth the    above
efford.
    So I wouldn't be surprised if SAP, one of the biggest software vendors    worldwide, would decide to support an
opensource database too at some    point in the future. And something like that might be the intention of    Inprise.
Aswe both know, a customer usually keeps his database world    consistent to be able to share knowledge inside the
company.So if they    can save tenth of thousands of dollars DB-license fee per year (a    usually small fee in the SAP
market)when moving to an open source    database, they will decide to do so. And at that point, they'll need to    port
theirintranet-, internet- and other solutions as well.
 
    If it's not true (as someone rumored) that Inprise lost the key    developers, that'd be the point.

> Wish us luck, we will load the new software on our customers' servers for a FOT
> (field operational test) next week.
    Report any problems ASAP, and we'll help to make it a success-story.

> Steve

Jan

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# It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. #
# Let's break this rule - forgive me.                                  #
#========================================= wieck@debis.com (Jan Wieck) #