On 30 Nov, 16:12, t...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Tom Lane) wrote: > [Quoting a re-telling of the myth of products living happily ever after under the control of big companies] > Anyone who thinks that's a reason to feel good is living on some other > planet than I do. Consider that if the company *does* decide to abandon > the product ... which happens all the time, particularly for products > that aren't market leaders ... you are up the proverbial creek with no > paddle. You've never seen the code and never will. Indeed. I used to work with a database system which had already changed ownership at least once, and through a succession of acquisitions not dissimilar to fish being eaten by successively bigger fish, with each owner slotting the product alongside some very similar existing products in their portfolio, the product eventually ended up being owned by a very large company with a lot of other products on their shelf (or, if you prefer, a very big fish with a lot of smaller fish in its diet). Now, fortunately, I haven't had anything to do with the product concerned for many years, and although the current owner has a reputation for supporting stuff over long periods of time, one has to wonder what kind of support you're actually going to get, whether there's going to be much new development, or whether the cumulative effect of the rationalisation process (which saw the little fish all eaten up) is to milk the existing customers for as long as they can bear sticking with the product and not migrating to anything else. I think I'd rather have the source code and a Free Software licence than an account manager and a corporate roadmap. Paul ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
