Minutes of our last Bugzilla meeting (August 8, 2006)

[Jeffrey Hulten]

 From what I have seen there is a fair amount of pragmatism in this  
group.  If there wasn't why would we approve any change that is not  
needed by the Mozilla projects.

I worked for a large financial institution as a database engineer and  
MySQL was NOT allowed by policy because of (what were in my mind,  
short sighted) interpretations of regulations and the support issue.   
They allowed M$SQL, Oracle and DB@ on the mainframe.  From my  
perspective we are in a great position of being an open source  
'gateway drug' for larger companies.  Some companies made exceptions  
for MySQL or didn't care or the installation happened under the  
radar.  Removing barriers from entry (even if we think they are  
stupid barriers) increases market-share which increases each of our  
personal capital and attracts more new developers (like me!).

And if my pragmatic response means I am not revolutionary enough for  
RMS, so be it.

On Aug 14, 2006, at 1:37 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:

> Joel Peshkin wrote:
>> I would think Oracle would have a very strong motivation to make  
>> it easy
>> for us to support their DB.  It's not so much an issue that Bugzilla
>> will sell Oracle by itself.  If an Oracle shop wants Bugzilla,
>> currently, they get to learn about all of Oracle's competitors.  With
>> Oracle support, they continue to be the only DB in that shop.
>
> Right. If our main aim for Bugzilla is to be popular (pragmatism; an
> "open source" viewpoint) then it absolutely makes sense to support  
> Oracle.
>
> (Free software people tend to care less about popularity; see RMS's
> comments in the latter half of this essay:
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html)
>
> Gerv
>
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