My fiscal responcibility to my company ver. Open Source - advice please

cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org
Wed May 19 01:58:10 UTC 2004


> So like others said, it depends on the nature of the program.

The success of an open source project is _vitally_ dependent on there
being a community being prepared to continue development of the
software.

Adabas-D is an example of a cautionary tale.

-> SAP AG bought the source license from Software AG to provide them an
   alternative to Oracle, which is a useful bargaining chip.

-> The renamed SAP-DB turned out to be something of a "tarbaby;" it's a
   pretty frightening code base that combines:

   - It was written in a combination of C and C++ by Germans, hence
     naming conventions are Germanic.

   - It came from the mainframe world, so it's just rife with modularity
     based on 8 character names that were once somewhat mnemonic, in
     German.

   - It uses mainframey customized build tools in lieu of, oh, say,
     Makefiles.  It proved easier to port the build tools to Linux
     than to move over to Makefiles.

SAP was successful; Oracle backed down.  But they were now left
maintaining this "tarbaby."

They tried "open sourcing" it, but there was only minscule interest
shown in managing the code base.

They gave up on it, passing the "tarbaby" on to MySQL AB.  It is not
totally evident just what the strategy can be there; the code is SO
unusable for integration purposes that I can't see this as being
anything other than a strategy to allow there to be some minimal amount
of maintenance to keep it running on the dwindling numbers of Unixes,
where it'll eventually die when no one that is using it now cares
anymore.

Numerous "open source" projects have failed when no one cared to work on
them anymore.

Tcl is also in this category; while it hasn't yet formally died, the
community is not nearly large enough to support ongoing development of
vital libraries as are found with Perl and Python.
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