Chris,
> If people were to decide that, based on the badinage, both the MySQL
> people and the PostgreSQL people were a bunch of jerks, Firebird might
> very well come out the "winner."
>
> Both 'sides' have been known to point to Firebird as a 'second choice'
> if their respective system was somehow unacceptable...
Jan wasn't serious about Firebird.
The "third parties" in this whole issue are Oracle, Microsoft & IBM (DB2).
Particulary Oracle; in the last year Larry has devoted a lot of ink to the
idea that "Open Source projects can make a good operating system, but an
enterprise database is far too complex for any real OSS implementation."
(see the Linux Magazine interview with him) It's FUD he's been spreading as
part of the Oracle+RedHat campaign to protect Oracle's market share from us
and MySQL at the same time as Oracle migrates its customers to Linux.
If we grab a bunch of headlines through flamewars with MySQL, that just
enforces Larry's propaganda that OSS databases aren't serious.
--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco