BusinessWeek: Waving the Open Source Banner Isn’t Enough

“Matt Asay has an interesting posting about the Ingres spin out.
He posits that a serious foray by Ingres finally gives companies a
real, competitive database market again. More interesting were his
comments about the need for multiple vendors providing specifically
open source versions of business software. Really? Is the market
there yet?

“He writes, ‘This is a good thing, regardless of Ingres’
ultimate success. It will grow MySQL’s and EnterpriseDB’s revenues,
because it will increasingly legitimize the open source database,
and it will also drive these open source companies to continuously
improve and differentiate themselves. It won’t be enough to coast
along with the ‘open source’ tagline and expect that, alone, to
bring revenues. (Not that either company had been doing so–I’m not
making that argument…)'”

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