Re: Informix in the news! Part Deux...

Mark Townsend wrote: > rkusenet wrote: > >> Open Informix will guarantee the death of one RDBMS >> on LUW platform:- DB2. > > > Agreed. IBM's only chance in the software business is to open source DB2 > for LUW (and their other products), and become the lead SI for a > complete OS stack. As always the selfishless in which you point out winning stratgies for your competitors is warming my heart. Cheers Serge -- Serge Rielau DB2 SQL Compiler Development IBM Toronto Lab

I don't expect IBM to open source Informix in the near future, because they are afraid losing revenue. They still earn some money with IDS licences and additionally it would make it more difficult to sell DB2 licences. The obvious advantages (growing market share, selling more services or selling more other IBM products) are more difficult to calculate in dollars. So I expect IBM to open source Informix in 5 or 10 years (when they earned the billion dollars they paid for it to Ascential Software). Of course then it's to late to grow any market share. So I would open source the XPS source code now, because the lost licence revenue would be marginal. IBM could still sell maintenance, services and hardware, etc. for this product. It would also generate attention to the IDS product again. The concerns about the future of IDS would disappear, because customers would get the impression, that the worst thing that could happen to IDS is, that it goes open source, too.