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> I wonder why so many companies are happily paying Oracle [...] instead of sponsoring an open source project like PostgreSQL. Corporate world is ruled by liab

by slykar 7y ago

> I wonder why so many companies are happily paying Oracle [...] instead of sponsoring an open source project like PostgreSQL. Corporate world is ruled by liability. When you are working on a multi-million dollar project and the database breaks, you want to be able to put as much responsibility on the 3-rd party as much as possible. Open Source projects come with no guarantee. If someone hacks into a system because of a flaw in the Open Source project you are screwed. If it's a software delivered by Oracle, then Oracle is responsible and needs to pay your million dollar fine. Of course I'm simplifying, because there's probably still a lot of legal process behind it depending on the country, but it's essentially that.

geoka9 7y ago
> then Oracle is responsible and needs to pay your million dollar fine Has it ever happened though? Genuinely curious.
qpiox 7y ago
> * is responsible and needs to pay your million dollar fine. This is not really true. AFAIK there is no commercial software that has a license clause making the manufacturer liable if you loose your data due to faults in their product. We lost a couple of TB due to bad OS/firmware in a NAS. The manufacturer did everything they knew trying to fix it, but in the end failed and we lost the data. Once we lost a crucial virtual machine and backups due to human error. It was not the manufacturer of the virtualization solution that helped us get it back, because they did not have such tools and did not provide such services. Hackers who were reverse engineering the software and publishing their reversed code on the net helped us get the VM image back. After these two and some other situations I am even stronger proponent for open source, because with open source you have the option to try help yourself if the manufacturer won't or can't help you. I am not just proponent, in fact if I was to be involved in decision making, it would be open-source solution throughout. Of course with support. If possible I'd pay for support services to the original developers.

by slykar 7y ago

geoka9 7y ago

> then Oracle is responsible and needs to pay your million dollar fine Has it ever happened though? Genuinely curious.

qpiox 7y ago

> * is responsible and needs to pay your million dollar fine. This is not really true. AFAIK there is no commercial software that has a license clause making the manufacturer liable if you loose your data due to faults in their product. We lost a couple of TB due to bad OS/firmware in a NAS. The manufacturer did everything they knew trying to fix it, but in the end failed and we lost the data. Once we lost a crucial virtual machine and backups due to human error. It was not the manufacturer of the virtualization solution that helped us get it back, because they did not have such tools and did not provide such services. Hackers who were reverse engineering the software and publishing their reversed code on the net helped us get the VM image back. After these two and some other situations I am even stronger proponent for open source, because with open source you have the option to try help yourself if the manufacturer won't or can't help you. I am not just proponent, in fact if I was to be involved in decision making, it would be open-source solution throughout. Of course with support. If possible I'd pay for support services to the original developers.