Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com> writes:
>> Of course, Oracle could tank the market by offering support at
>> un-competitive prices, but I can't think of a reason for them to do that
>> off the top of my head.
>
> They might hope that they could drive the existing support companies
> out of business (assuming they didn't get convicted of antitrust
> violations first --- which would be an open-and-shut case, but with
> the Republicans in office they probably wouldn't get prosecuted
> :-(). Then they raise their rates to make lotsa money, or maybe
> they'd think they could drop support at that point and the project
> would die for lack of commercial support. (They seem to understand
> open-source poorly enough that they might think that would happen.)

It takes a lot more money to keep Oracle running than it does to run
Command Prompt or Red Hat. If Oracle started offering support for
PostgreSQL at rates that were low enough to be competitive with the
current PostgreSQL support companies they would be cutting their own
throats much faster than they would be cutting yours. Oracle requires
much higher profit margins to survive than the PostgreSQL community
does. Every single Oracle customer that shifted to PostgreSQL would
hurt Oracle's bottom line, even if the customer opted for Oracle
support.

> I don't see any of this happening though. As suggested upthread,
> the very *last* thing Oracle wants is to raise the visibility and
> credibility of Postgres by a couple of orders of magnitude --- which
> is exactly what they'd be doing by offering support for it, even if
> the support was only temporary. The effects of getting the word out
> would persist long afterwards.
>
> regards, tom lane

Exactly. If Oracle promoted PostgreSQL, even momentarily, lots of
Oracle customers would at least take a look, and many would like what
they saw. PostgreSQL has suffered quite a bit from being in MySQL's
shadow. I know lots of savvy database developers that simply assumed
that PostgreSQL must be a nightmare because they took a look at MySQL
(the most popular Free Software database) and were horrified.

Jason