On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 05:23:36PM +0100, Robert Cleary wrote:
> Just wondering what the general concencus is about enterpriseDB from the
> pgsql community? good or bad?
I don't know what the consensus is -- I am not a WG chair, and this
is not the IETF -- but my own opinion is that more users can't be
bad, no matter how they come to use the system.
It seems to me that part of the point of the BSD license is precisely
that it encourages people to use the code, no matter what the model
for use is.
The EnterpriseDB folks said to me, at least, while at OSCON that they
intend to contribute back general-purpose stuff. Their Oracle
compatibility layer is not part of that, I think. For my part, I
don't think that the point of PostgreSQL is to provide a free Oracle
anyway; the name of the software isn't PNO, after all.
As for the risks inherent in such an actor in the community, well, as
near as I can tell, the people who try to fork-and-close
community-derived software quickly find themselves outpaced by the
community software. So if that _were_ their strategy (and for the
record, I don't think it is), what good would it do them?
A
--
Andrew Sullivan | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
--George Orwell