Re: read this and puke

On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

> Not only in open source. Remember Betamax? Technically a better
> standard than VHS, but it died anyway because it couldn't get enough
> market share. We should worry about the prospect that MySQL will
> achieve such complete mindshare dominance that no other open source
> database project remains viable.

I don't think it's likely that PostgreSQL would be become non-viable
just because MySQL might have vastly more market share. There's much
less network effect in this instance for a couple of reasons. One is
that there's much more tendency to generate one's own content (i.e.,
programs that use a database) oneself, in which case you can use any
database you like, and the other is that there are enough databases out
there anyway (Oracal, Sybase, MS SQL Server, etc.) that pretty much
everyone with an application that many sites use finds it worthwhile
to support multiple databases, in which case adding PostgreSQL support
is relatively trivial.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC