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No. I've always called this plausible deniability in corporate culture. "It's not my fault the DB is down. I'm on the phone with Oracle right now, they'll have
by arohner 17y ago
No.
I've always called this plausible deniability in corporate culture. "It's not my fault the DB is down. I'm on the phone with Oracle right now, they'll have a fix soon". The OSS solution is much riskier. "I chose this free DB, and now it's broken." In large corporations, the first is much safer for the employee, but much more expensive for the corporation.
As a half-serious idea for a company, I thought of IT insurance. Rather than paying support to Oracle, we will audit your solution and charge premiums based on the riskiness of your setup. In case your OSS DB goes down, the insurance company would pay the downtime.
The company would provide two services. 1) I expect our "plausible deniability" would be cheaper than paying Oracle, and 2) we put a pricetag on the reliability of your setup.
- mixmax 17y agoThat's actually an excellent idea. It solves a clear problem that everyone sees, but noone can do amything about due to company politics, plausible deniability, and career moves. If you're not working on it you should :-)
- Herring 17y agoIs it really possible to audit complex systems in a reasonable amount of time, & would they have to call whenever they make any small changes? I can't wait for the day when such systems become plug & play
- antiismist 17y agoIsn't this the angle that Redhat, IBM, and now Oracle are taking? I.E. the software is free, but the support contract is gonna cost you.
- jedc 17y agoYes. My instinct is that for companies that need that "warm fuzzy" of support their contracts make sense.
- ShabbyDoo 17y agoI recently started working with a Fortune 1000 that has a support agreement with RedHat for, among other things, JBoss. The developers and admins rave about the support provided but disparage other vendors to whom much more was paid.
- astrec 17y agoIBM used to market in exactly this way: "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM".
- gaius 17y agoThe difference being that Oracle getting itself into an unrecoverable state is really really rare whereas MySQL corrupts data at the drop of a hat. Seriously, even Monty himself has blogged about it. Supporting your own database effectively means writing your own database. Once you start hacking at it to fix a problem it's a fork and you're on your own. Any organization that puts its eggs in one person like this is bonkers.
- arohner 17y agoThere are tens of thousands of organizations that disagree with you. I bet that most of them don't fork MySQL when they hit bugs (assuming they do hit bugs). I'm not claiming that MySQL is perfect (or even good), only that many organizations think it's good enough, and are willing to take that risk.
- gaius 17y agoNo, they buy support from MySQL AB, which isn't cheap.