[CLUE-Tech] [Fwd: MySQL]

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, grant wrote:

> Only one bad thing about Greatbridge, they are a little slow to QA new
> stuff.  They are still on 7.0.3, but I am on 7.1.2.  7.1 is SO MUCH cooler
> than 7.0...  They should have it sometime this summer, though.  They also
> only support their QA'ed version of the OSS stuff.  This is OK,
> though.  You can get their version for free, then decide if you want to
> pay for support, or get the pure open one like I did, and run the newest
> stuff, but you have to support it yourself.

Yeah, but that's going to be true of any company that produces a commercial
version of a Open Source or Free Software product. With any luck it
means they're actually debugging it beyond what you'd download anyway.
There's always a trade-off, but I think that for most companies that will
use GreatBridge that's the best option - companies too small to afford a
fulltime programmer/database guru that will install and debug "pure" 
releases, and companies who don't need all the features of Oracle or
DB2 - or the horrendous licensing fees associated with them.

Postgres 7.1.2 was only released three weeks ago or so... no company is
going to be able to track it that quickly. It's really unreasonable to 
expect -- or want -- that. (I would die happy if people would realize that
they don't HAVE to track the bleeding edge or upgrade every new release
unless it contains features they truly need or security fixes...) 

The "pure" releases are great, though, for anyone who's going to use
it for non-commercial purposes, people who just like to "play" with
stuff and larger companies who do have gurus on staff - hopefully gurus
who will contribute fixes back to the main branch. 

Take care,

Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier -=- jbrockmeier at earthlink.net
http://www.DissociatedPress.net/
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