Jared,
While this is a little off topic, it is on topic at the same time. How many
posts have there been on this list ranting about Oracle's license and support
fees? More than I care to think of. But at the same time the author, Frank
Byrum, is a principle at Great Bridge Software. He was at the NorthEast Oracle
Users Group not too many meetings ago. His life blood is supporting PostGres
SQL, so I doubt he is totally unbiased.
On the whole, I like the open software model and the "shareware" model of
acquiring software. Sure it sometimes does not have that nice gui interface,
but it does have a functional way of getting the job done. And sometimes one
will find a much nicer interface than what we get from the commercial world.
What I find upsetting though is that some software, PostGres being one of them,
that does not have an equal functionality to the commercial stuff. In a DBMS
way, PostGres in it's latest from Great Bridge still does not have tablespaces
or partitioning like Oracle so that we can minimize the downtime & repair
required.
Will OSS take the battle field by 2004, well maybe and maybe not. Something
to look forward to.
Dick Goulet
____________________Reply Separator____________________
Author: Jared Still <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 5/21/2001 1:26 PM
This is a very interesting editorial on corporate use of OSS.
http://www.dmreview.com/editorial/dmdirect/dmdirect_article.cfm?EdID=3436&issue=
051801&record=1
Some may consider this off topic for an Oracle mailing list, but I
believe that those folks are in the minority.
Some very good points are made as to the low cost of OSS apps
and the support of them.
I used the low cost aspect several years ago to sell my then boss
on using Perl for our reporting systems rather than purchase SQR.
My reason for wanting it was that SQR was rather limited in many
respects and simply did not have the capabilities of Perl. We were
able to make templates for reports and let our Oracle Forms contractors
use them immediately to start reporting in perl. ( they also knew C which
helped quite a bit. )
I disagree with one statement to the effect that you will not find as many
bells and whistles in OSS as in commercial software. Personally, I often
consider that a feature, and have found many open source tools that
are easily capable of doing most of what I want, which is at least as good
as most commercial software.
Jared
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