Using open source to reduce business risk

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What the bottom line?

The bottom line is that with Suns failure the
open source argument is in trouble. As is two
of the products you mention a business should
consider switching to:

OpenOffice is maintained by Sun. It has been
maintained is such a way that it has alienated
other would-be developers from the community.
Sun has insisted on contributors to sign over
every right to Sun.

On top of that the codebase has become bloated,
it is lagging in features, usability,
performance and collaboration. Sun is going
down the drain, and OpenOffice is the product
which has proven seriously difficult to
monetize.

A reconstructed/private company or a buyer of
Sun will seriously consider abandoning
OpenOffice, leaving it to die on the
community graveyard.

Who in their right mind will bet the shop on
that product in the current flux?

MySQL is owned by Sun as well. Sun has the same
difficulties monetizing that product as well.
And now the founders and engineers have left
Sun, at least one citing the sub-standard
quality under the Sun regime as reason.
They have gone out and forked MySQL. Several
forks now exist.

MySQL was always the buggy, low quality
database system. Only recently gained real
transactional support and stored procedures.
Still buggy even according to the former CEO.
The project has had to write around other
components in their stack as they were acquired
by other companies (Oracle).

MySQL developer community is a culture of
cheapskates, who'll never pay for anything, not
even support. They only put up with a buggy
database because it was free and easy to get
running. It was lacking features but that
wasn't a concern for driving simple websites.

Who in their right mind would leave an
industrial strength database and port to
MySQL given: 1) The current VERY
uncertain future 2) The public quality
problems, 3) immaturity in the enterprise
space?

PostgreSQL is nice. It feels a little like
Oracle.

Posted by: honeymonster   Posted on: 04/11/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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