On Sunday 22 Mar 2009, Mitul Limbani wrote: > On 22-Mar-09, at 10:54, Raj Mathur <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Saturday 21 Mar 2009, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > >> I will reply to the other points in your mail when I cool down a > >> bit, but have you realised how much of FOSS is developed in the > >> west? Do you not realise that if the govt adopts foss, they are > >> dependant on westerners who have developed it? > > > > The whole point of FOSS is that the source code is available, and > > anyone > > with the requisite skills, regardless of location, colour, caste, > > creed, religion or gender can modify, enhance, customise and > > localise it. > > > > The difference between, say, Oracle and MySQL is that only Oracle > > can modify their database, whereas anyone can modify MySQL. > > > > </FOSS-101> > > Lemme be devils advocate here, you never need to modify source code > of oracle or mysql you just need a DBA or developer to make the data > residing in the database more meaningful... > > And oracle for that matter has more DBAs out in Market ( more > competition ) then mysql so its a more competitive deal for > businesses/ govt to decide on oracle then mysql, they find mysql to > be locking in for maintenance then oracle.
Please don't take one statement and one example in my message out of context and make an argument against that. What I said was in the context of KG's statement ``if the govt adopts foss, they are dependant on westerners who have developed it?'', which is patently incorrect. I wasn't discussing the relative availabilities of Oracle vs MySQL DBAs at all -- that's a completely different kettle of fish. > Second bigger problem is that there are fewer companies who have > great mysql hackers and generally are of small size and this results > in going in-eligible in the tender bidding process. > > Think a bit from buyers perspctive for a minute and suddenly you > realise where are we standing wrt FOSS and market competitiveness? Once again, are we discussing the potential ability to support FOSS or are we discussing FOSS competitiveness? I still maintain that potentially anyone, not just the original developers, can enhance, diminish, localise and customise FOSS, which is not the case with proprietary software. In fact that's such a blatantly obvious characteristic of FOSS that I'm surprised I'm having to iterate that again and again on a mailing list where, supposedly, people who know about FOSS gather. Availability of support, on the other hand, is a factor that varies with time and location, so I'm not making any definitive statements about that. Today Oracle may have more DBAs available, tomorrow DB2, PostgreSQL the day after that and MySQL the next day. That's a function of the market, and not related to FOSS in any way. There are probably just 20 people in the country today who understand and can configure Asterisk as opposed to, say, an Alcatel or Lucent PBX -- does that mean that Asterisk is an invalid solution to any problem today? Regards, -- Raju -- Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
