> If you go to a major corporation and say... Dude use my community-owned
> database, you will be shown the door. Which is exactly one of the more
> precise reasons that MySQL was kicking our butt in low end installations
> for so long. Because it was an open source "Product" not "Project"
Er, no. There's a tremendous tendency in this community to misattribute
MySQL's relative commercial success to some aspect of marketing
strategy. This could not be further from the truth, and it's important
that people in this community realize that so that we don't waste our
energies in the wrong place.
MySQL became more widely adopted than PostgreSQL for 3 reasons:
1) it was "ready to use" in 1997 and we were not,
2) it adapted to and catered to web developers rather than demanding
that they learn things or change habits,
3) it focused on strategic features in a timely fashion, at least up
until 2004.
MySQL didn't even begin to have serious professional marketing until
2004, which was already the peak of MySQL open source adoption, and that
marketing was almost entirely focussed on converting OSS adoption to
commercial customers.
--Josh Berkus