Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Right. Though there are attacks, there are no fatal attacks. MySQL has
to make money, so they can have fatal attacks.

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Tom Lane wrote:
> Matthew Terenzio <matt(at)jobsforge(dot)com> writes:
> > As much as I respect Marc and Postgresql.org, I can't see Oracle hiring
> > him away as a "killer" threat to the community. People would set up
> > camp somewhere else, like Command Prompt. It would hurt things for a
> > while but the software is too important to too many to be killed by a
> > domain name or person.
>
> Yeah, I was thinking that myself: even if a hostile group managed to
> obtain control of the trademark and/or domain name, they could not kill
> the project. We'd just regroup under a new name --- it'd slow us down
> for a bit, sure, but no more. The project name has changed once
> already, remember.
>
> The only serious threat I see on the horizon is patent issues. Again,
> I don't think that could kill us over the long term --- we could surely
> write our way out of any noncritical patents (see recent ARC fiasco for
> a fire drill of this nature), and we ourselves are prior art with which
> to defeat any patents on critical algorithms. A patent lawsuit could
> certainly hurt us, if only by soaking up the time and attention of key
> developers, but I don't think it could kill the project.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
> choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
> match
>

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