Re: IBM Gives Away DB2

Obnoxio The Clown wrote: > > Eric Herber said: >> >> However a real open source IDS, like they already have done with >> cloudscape, would be a great chance for Informix to get some >> market penetration back. > > Why? To a business person, "free" means something, "open source" means > nothing. If IBM offered a free "IDS Express" that competed in the same > space, it would be the thing that would get IDS into the mix. To people > who have a vision about how IT could be, Open Source means something. To > someone running a business, it means nothing. > > The only reason there has been any acceptance of open source in the > business community is the sticker price. And once you factor in the > outrageous support contract prices from people offering commercial > support, it's often cheaper to buy a commercial product. > > TANSTAAFL: the sticker price of commercial software helps subsidise the > support costs. > Obnoxio, you are probably right. However I thought about the presumably positive response from the open source community as it seems to be the case with cloudscape. There are a quite a few very smart people with impressive ideas working in this area and the potential of the Informix datablade technology in the hands of those guys might bring some groundbreaking new possibilities for IDS. A "free" IDS might be a valid alternative to "open source". The key is to inspire those developers to realize the potential of the Informix technology and that they work with it. Extensibility is only one of the key areas, replication is another really important one. Distributing IDS Express for free might not be enough, because some important features are missing: - PDQ - HPL - HDR - ER Some of them are real differentiators to open source databasesystems. So from my point of view a free IDS EE edition or at least a developer version without any time limit including all those nice features would make sense. Give developers the chance to work with this technology and encourage them to build applications on top of it. I'm confident that there is some great potential in the area of grid computing combined with IDS enterprise replication and extensibility features. will build