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 missed my 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 Linux under GPL (after they
had severe problems with IRQ and DMA handling at least in the SMP
environment). One month later, the driver totally fit's my needs. Well,
they're a hardware vendor, primarily selling their cards to make money.

OTOH, I'm an SAP R/3 base consultant for years now. And all these DB
runtime license discussions are annoying. SAP needs 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 internal quality 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 UNIX world (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 open source database too at some
point in the future. And something like that might be the intention of
Inprise. As we 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 their intranet-, 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

--

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