Re: Sourceforge moving to DB2

I'm redirecting this to -advocacy, because I guess it belongs there
mostly.

On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 11:36:39AM -0700, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>
> > There is, however, the "open secret" problem still: not everyone in
> > the company, including some very senior people, like talking very much
> > about our use of PostgreSQL (although I believe that is changing).
>
> I am running into a similar situation. Commercial verses OpenSource.
> When I suggested an OpenSource solution (in this case it wasn't a
> database) I heard that no one knows it whereas they know about xxx. I had
> never heard of xxx, oh well.

One has heard this argument from time to time, but it always strikes
me as bizarre. It relies essentially on an appeal to popularity.
This is a well-known fallacy: you should do _x_ because some large
percentage of the population does _x_. Aside from the fallaciousness
(it's really a fallacy of relevance), in technology even more than in
most areas with network effects, it is a really lousy argument: it
entails both that you should adopt _exactly_ whatever everyone else
is using (and then hope that the features you want get added), and
that you should never innovate (because. for instance, a massive
percentage of currently running programs are written in FORTRAN and
COBOL).

Indeed, the "nobody knows your product" is really just the old
schoolyard taunt: "nobody likes you, y'know." Finding a way of
dimplomatically saying, "Well, I and all my friends know xxx" is the
only answer here.

(Note that there is a slightly different argument for PostgreSQL to
get around: "PostgreSQL isn't that popular, so it will be hard to
find DBAs." This one happens to be true at the moment, although it
is getting better.)

> In another situation the client wanted bragging rights. At $1500 a pop
> for extra licenses (5 i believe) they can brag all they want. Me, I'd
> spend the money on infrastruture.

I should think that in the period where big profits suddenly tun into
US$6 billion losses, being able to brag that you're using "the most
expensive machine in the hospital" will wear out your welcome at the
bank pretty fast. I know that being able to replace $100,000 license
fees with zeros is the sort of thing that makes _my_ CEO happy.

A

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