On 30 Nov, 16:12, t...@sss.pgh.pa.us (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