Just a thought on the Free-IB thing - giving away free LOCAL interbase
would be an excellent idea - you get the benafits of a C/S db for single
user projects, and the ability to scale if needed.
With the imminent movement in MIDAS licence costs, having localIB
available does fullfill the runtime performance limitation that someone
else mentioned - if you are limited to, say, 6 connections (ie, 2 users)
to the DB from the middle tier, your connection pooling is going to be
waiting a LOT - hence a performance drop. Buy more licences, and bingo,
performanace goes up, and almost everyone wins - Inprise gets paid for a
good product, the developer can keep the small users happy, and keep
themselves afloat. The person who loses out is the end user who wants 5
users, for eg. But they would have lost out anyway, so it is really no
different for them.
A free DB would be nice, but if you look at the free DB's out there (I
dont consider the copy of Oracle 8 that Oracle sent me to be free),
their quality is generally fairly low. MS can prevent that in MSSQL 'cos
they bring in revenue from other streams (eg, windows). Inprise and
others can't, really.
Development tools are another area - look at Linux, you are pretty much
stuck with command line development and vi/emacs/whatever. I say pretty
much 'cos there are a few, just not of the quality of
Delphi/C++B/JB/VB/VC++. I think thats about to change, and with the
changes on the desktop, Linux is VERY much going to be a force to be
reckoned with - hell, I'd use it just so I dont have to reboot every
day!!!
N
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Zealand Delphi Users group - Delphi List - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website: http://www.delphi.org.nz
