Re: troll

Serge Rielau wrote:

> The question for commercial vendors is: Does the market share as defined
> in revenue shrink or grow. So far it has been growing. And that is what
> is counting for teh commercial vendors.
> As long as the pie for commercial vendors grows there is no threat.
>

By marketshare, is this the share divided over commercial products? Because OS products cannot be calculated in this pie. no one can measure the number of OS products in use, number of downloads is no good, because the OS databases are mirrored and distributed among different Linux/Unix flavors. To illustrate, no one on the face of this earth (except the ones who work here) could know we use postgreSQL and Mysql in our company, since the medium where it's installed from is a copied slackware distro, and the databases are installed on several servers. But for registered figures, we only use DB2, because we are a registered customer with db2.
If you mean that the total amount of customers is growing, then you're right, that's a good thing.
Considering tech aspect, most OS products tend to surpass their commercial counterparts quite fast. Only take a look at desktops. I know it's a dark unknown area and you need a good amount of knowledge and time to customise a X desktop, but atm I have a desktop on my Laptop which outperforms (and at least out-eycandies windows) both windows and MacOS-X and which uses techniques which are to be introduced in the upcoming Longhorn/Vista. But most people just don't know about it, or think it's just a collection of toys or beta libs, there's no marketing behind those products, but still they exist. Take a look at the progress on the linux kernel, quite impressive. Other examples; Openoffice, Mozilla, Apache, Samba (yes... samba 3 is technological superiour to the SMB implem in both win 2003 & XP), where windows CE was a nice mobile solution, more and more companies are using linux for embedded and mobile solutions, DVD players, sattelite decoders, pda's, mobile phones, navigational systems. But nobody knows... No one tells the public: we're using OS software in our products.
Why do I take those Microsoft products as an example? Microsoft is a major competitor in the general computer market, they have an enormous amount of marketshare, but that does not mean their products are good. Back ontopic: anyone noticed MonetDB? A new (registered @ sf.net in 2002) OS DB product built by the Dutch CWI institute. It uses some new storage techniques and a transparent interface which enables the database to use any type of language to access data. Both SQL and XQuery are default supported. The database is lightspeed compared to both Mysql and PostgresDB and already it has an UnixODBC interface, and new features are added every day.

-R- Received on Thu Aug 04 2005 - 06:42:33 CDT