Re: Bad news for Open Source databases, acording to survey

Marco Colombo <marco@esi.it> writes:
> "Open source database companies will not be able to compete with the price,
>  performance, maturity, and functionality of the commercial vendors"

> price?  A *free* product not being able to compete with the *price* of
> a commercial one?

I suppose he's talking about the open-source support companies, like
RedHat, Great Bridge, PostgreSQL Inc, etc, who are hoping to sell you
support and consulting services at a very definitely nonzero price.
(Still a lot less than an Oracle license, though.)

The long-term viability of that business model remains to be proven.
But what this argument fails to realize is that the open-source project
will still go on, even if all those companies go broke.  Postgres has
never depended for its existence on any particular company, and I
certainly hope that it never will.

I concur with the general opinion that this article is mostly hot air...

            regards, tom lane