Re: What can we learn from MySQL?

Robert Treat wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 00:48, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>  
>
>>On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 01:30:23 -0000,
>>  Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I care. More market share equals more jobs, which equals more people
>>>working on the project. It's all well and good to treat Postgres as
>>>an academic exercise, but at some point the work needs to be applied
>>>to real world stuff. We are competing with real-world, commercial
>>>projects right now, and the success of how well we do will directly
>>>impact this project. Do you think that Red Hat will continue to employ
>>>Tom Lane if Postgres fades away into a footnote and something else
>>>becomes the database of choice for Red Hat? Do you realize that every
>>>time a company chooses us, jobs are created for people who use,
>>>test, and even develop PostgreSQL?
>>>      
>>>
>>And more support questions get asked taking time away from development.
>>For companies the net balance is probably in postgres' favor on average.
>>However, getting individuals to use postgres who have no background
>>in databases may be a net minus. Hopefully that won't happen. It will
>>be interesting to see what happens to the support lists after the
>>windows port is available.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Which is one of the reasons that I think chasing my$ql's market is the
>wrong way to go. We need to be looking for oracle/db2 converts... or at
>the least informix/progress/m$ or other 2nd tier databases that we are
>most likely already superior too. 
>
>  
>

I think the pg grassroots are low end users (ie: people with less 
knowledge and budgets than the established parties). Everything of an 
opensource nature has always gained popularity and strength from these 
people.

MySQL has a constituency that came from here. The grass roots are people 
who are willing to invest the energy needed to adopt to change which is 
what pg represents.

Robert Bernier