Re: Survey results from the PostgreSQL portal page

Michael Meskes wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 01:19:03PM -0500, Robert Treat wrote:
> > pretty wide feature set (as good as any other open source rdbms afaik)
> > plus it's open source, so if we don't have a feature that say oracle has,
> > you can pay someone the $10,000+ the oracle license will cost to implement
> > it. I've also not seen much FUD on the other issues either. If you can
>
> Unfortunately it doesn't always work this way. I knew one government
> organization that decided to go for Oracle for 500K Euro instead of
> adding the missing features (actually almost exclusively PITR). One of
> the top arguments I heard was: "I don't believe that free software
> community works. Once the developers get a social life or even kids,
> they stop working on software." Of course I told him that I still do
> work on free software despite having three sons on which he answered:
> "Maybe, but I still don't believe it."
>
> Sad but true.

One issue he is probably right about is that more burden is placed on
the user for testing/support in open source than in closed source. Of
course, open source is usually free, so you can afford to pay for those
extras, but they do exist have have to be managed. I bet some companies
just want to pay the bill and the yearly support and don't want to deal
with the extra burden, even if it saves them money.

--
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