Hello,
On 22-Mar-09, at 10:54, Raj Mathur raju@linux-delhi.org wrote:
On Saturday 21 Mar 2009, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
On Saturday 21 March 2009 18:09:50 Debayan Banerjee wrote:
Basically a govt which does not look west ward for every damn purchase is good for FOSS in the long run IMO.
I will reply to the other points in your mail when I cool down a bit, but have you realised how much of FOSS is developed in the west? Do you not realise that if the govt adopts foss, they are dependant on westerners who have developed it?
The whole point of FOSS is that the source code is available, and anyone with the requisite skills, regardless of location, colour, caste, creed, religion or gender can modify, enhance, customise and localise it.
The difference between, say, Oracle and MySQL is that only Oracle can modify their database, whereas anyone can modify MySQL.
</FOSS-101>
Lemme be devils advocate here, you never need to modify source code of oracle or mysql you just need a DBA or developer to make the data residing in the database more meaningful...
And oracle for that matter has more DBAs out in Market ( more competition ) then mysql so its a more competitive deal for businesses/ govt to decide on oracle then mysql, they find mysql to be locking in for maintenance then oracle.
Second bigger problem is that there are fewer companies who have great mysql hackers and generally are of small size and this results in going in-eligible in the tender bidding process.
Think a bit from buyers perspctive for a minute and suddenly you realise where are we standing wrt FOSS and market competitiveness?
Regards, Mitul Limbani.