“…Open source database developers have a reason to be
optimistic. At a time when projects such as Apache and the Linux
kernel are losing their media luster, aging database projects such
as MySQL and PostgreSQL have suddenly been recast as the
fresh-faced ingenues of the open source community.“
“This is the last big frontier,” said Monty Widenius, Finnish
leader of MySQL, a 15-year old project that became one of the
community’s hottest during the summer months after two companies,
NuSphere and AbriaSoft, decided to build support offerings for the
database. “There’s more money in [the database sector] than in any
other software field,” Widenius said.”
“The fact that most of that money is currently flowing into the
coffers of the software industry’s two biggest powerhouses, Oracle
(ORCL) and Microsoft (MSFT ), might have explained the dearth of
suits in the room. Most marketers and venture capital-types have
yet to sign up for this particular kamikaze mission. With no suits
in the room, however, engineers were free to talk dirty. Provided
you could sit through stories of “table locks,” “tuple visibility”
and stateless client systems, you got a glimpse of what makes the
developers and CTOs so optimistic in the first place.”