Re: PostgreSQL in the press again

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 10:34:57AM -0800, Chris Travers wrote:

> internalize well enough to talk about.  It is, IMO, the fact that these
> other systems (MS SQL, Oracle, etc) have replication systems through the
> same vendor as the software itself.

I have two, inconsistent responses to this line.

1.    Free software just _isn't_ commercial software.  Companies
that are going to approach free software like commercial software are
going to fail in their use of it.  (In my opinion, most cases of
using commercial software according to the commercial
license-and-support model are _also_ failures, but I'll spare y'all
that rant today.)  You simply need to understand how the community
works if you're going to get any sort of reasonable experience with
Postgres, or *BSD, or Linux, or even gnumeric.  If you expect the
sort of experience you have when running Windows or Oracle, then
you're doomed.  This is an advantage, but also a disadvantage.  That
I can ask the developer who wrote a bit of code why it works the way
it does is great, but it also imposes on me a requirement that I have
something approaching a clue when I ask, lest I get a pretty frosty
reception.  The point of customer service in a tech company is, after
all, not only to avoid giving the customer the frosty reception, but
also to protect the actual techies from endless series of
didn't-read-the-fine-manual questions.

2.    If it's that important, then there's money to be made in the
ISV role, and someone should (continue to -- some people already are)
do it.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
In the future this spectacle of the middle classes shocking the avant-
garde will probably become the textbook definition of Postmodernism.
                --Brad Holland