On Friday 04 February 2005 01:15, Philip Tellis wrote:

Sometime Today, EP cobbled together some glyphs to say:

Umm, sometimes software is technically superior simply because some company put millions of dollars and research into it. Case in point is the Oracle database. It is way way way superior to any Free Software equivalent in terms of performance, scalability (both vertically and horizontally), robustness and features.

That is a bit oversimplified. The superiority is not neccessarily cause the Company spent millions. M$ spends more and comes up with worse trash everytime. So did SAP, IBM and CA all have gpld their database code. Imho Oracle is superior because of good developers (i know that costs money) provided with good direction (amongst many other factors not directly related to software development). And AFAIK it is built on code developed by a university (i may be offtrack tho), to reinforce the point abt freedom. If Oracle should ever gpl their stuff i am sure it will become a lot better a lot quicker for much less money. Further creativity is a very diffuse phenomena. It rarely allows itself to be constrained by being managed for any reasonable length of time. If creative forces of many individuals is harnessed then there will be continuos progress. Harnessing this creativity neccessarily requires freedom to build upon the shoulders of those before you. And it isn't software only, every individual endevour requires freedom to succeed. Constrain creativity with patents, copyrights and other creativity restricting laws for more than a few yrs and u will have zero progress very quickly.

Large organisations often end up choosing MySQL or PostgreSQL over Oracle primarily because of the cost. Small guys choose MySQL or PostgreSQL simply because they don't need anything more. Sure, you can push it to huge limits, but it's when you do that that you start to notice its weaknesses.

All the more reason to allow many players to fill all niches in the environment.

rgds jtd