Lost jobs due to open source

[John]

Senectus . wrote:

>>Jeff is right of course and most programmers are paid to do very
>>custom work that never makes it inside a box. This doesn't change
>>anything I've said above but it does demonstrate that that the
>>transition to that world without licensing is hardly going to be a
>>rough or traumatic one for the vast majority of hackers.
> 
> 
> Well said.
> IBM is mega corporation of whom I have a lot of respect for, they too
> have seen the future and decided that _services_ is where the money
> and future is.

Price a zBox with z/VM, z/OS, current incarnations of DB2, CICS, TSO/E, 
SMP/E (so you can apply fixes), PL/1, COBOL etc etc.

IBM gets trainloads of money from licence fees.

_I_ don't have a problem with that; those software products are 
enormously expensive to produce, and without those licence fees the 
products would not be written or maintained.

MySQL and Postgresql are fine for lots of applications, but you'll not 
find people running banks or airlines on them. For some things, nothing 
can beat a decent zBox with z/OS and all the stuff that goes with it.

IBM supports Linux, yes, and it makes a lot of money out of it. However, 
Linux is only a small (but growing) part of its business.

I saw a report, I think at OSDL (who does the performance testing?) 
where Postgresql was used as the RDBMS. Quite a deal of the background 
detailed areas where Postgresql could be changed to enhance performance: 
enhancements that are mostly in DB2 (and presumably Oracle).

It would be very interesting seeing a benchmark comparing Postgresql and 
Ingres. And Firebird and MaxDB.