In response to "John D. Burger" <john@mitre.org>:
> > The good thing is that there are several companies supporting
> > Postgres,
> > so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.
>
> Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
> for MySqueal in some similar sense?
Couple of years ago when I was part owner of a company, we tried to
become an "official" MySQL support provider.
Now, this is a three man operation, we had about 10 clients and were
looking to expand into the MySQL space.
We found the money MySQL wanted to become "official" to be excessive.
Additionally, for that money, we didn't get promised anything -- we
couldn't even get an estimate of how many potential clients there
would be in our area. After much discussion with the MySQL people,
we finally decided it was too much money to take the risk.
I wonder how many other potential support companies felt the same
way? Perhaps that was a bad business decision on our part, but we'll
never know now -- we shut the company down a year ago.
Anyway, I guess my point is that it was a whole lot easier to get
listed as a company supporting PostgreSQL than it was MySQL. We were
listed on the commercial support part of the site the entire time we
were in business -- got at least one client from it. I don't think
we did any MySQL support the whole time we were in business.
Perhaps big companies with lotsa money wouldn't find MySQL's offerings
to be a bad deal, but we couldn't justify it and I suspect a lot of
small companies can't.
Anyway, now I do PostgreSQL work for Collaborative Fusion and I'm
much happier because it's not my job to worry about those kind of
business relationship decisions -- there are competent people handling
that.
--
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.
wmoran@collaborativefusion.com
Phone: 412-422-3463x4023