On 18 Oct 2005, at 15:59, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
On Sat, Oct 15, 2005 at 05:58:20PM -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
<snip>
And in the market we're talking about "cheaper" is not the main consideration for "better than". I think other arguments are useful -- access to source (and therefore auditability) is an obvious one -- but one needs to establish a well-known set of practices around these things if one wishes to be taken seriously for this kind of application.
The current market thinks like that, but I suspect that a lot of small to medium sized companies which don't want to get sucked into the Oracle consultancy / £16,000 per CPU licensing vacuum are currently prepared to simply choose a less good solution that just happens to kinda get the job done. The current market for these solutions is made up of high paying customers with very expensive data precisely because nobody has released a cheaper alternative. There is no serious variation in price in the market, and hence the client base doesn't change because there isn't any real innovation.
Release a cheaper / free alternative and people will use it because they will have almost no reason not to. This means that cheaper and as good as does have a place in the market even if it's not a conventional solution. It just needs evidence and evangelism. The current market should not be the principal target.
I do agree that there being a single solution under PostgreSQL to this problem is the best path though, it is attractive to everyone for there to by one way to do it, not just the current users of similar systems.
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