Removing Oracle Support

[Randall S. Becker]

-----Original Message-----
>> I think the technical aspect is important to us. As long as xiaoou, or
>> any new contributor with the required skills to fix the Oracle driver,
>> fixes bugs so that it still works fine with Bugzilla, there is no reason
>> to drop this driver. From the questions I can read on IRC and the bugs
>> filed on bmo, there are clearly some installations using Bugzilla with
>> Oracle. I don't know how much, I don't know if they were already using
>> Bugzilla before we supported it or if they moved to Bugzilla because it
>> now supports Oracle, but the fact is that the Bugzilla + Oracle
>> combination exists.

>And I think that is the key consideration. As despicable as Oracle's 
>behavior is, IMO, the impact of dropping support for from Bugzilla would 
>fall most heavily on Bugzilla users, not on Oracle.

I'm with kip on this one. Dropping Oracle will not hurt Oracle, but will impact the Bugzilla user community. Having run user groups, one of the key areas where intent can be clarified is by going directly to Oracle. Bugzilla is of tremendous value to our organizations. We use it and support it because it's more effective for our organizations than other solutions. Clearly there's a value proposition here. Surely Oracle can't be blind to that. Perhaps we could approach them for formal sponsorship (a.k.a. Oracle licenses to help make the support non-buggy, visibility on web sites). This would make their position clear w.r.t. Bugzilla. Of course, if they choose to toss us into the dumpster, well, that's another story. Perhaps we can give them a chance to participate.

[Yes Max, I was pretty torque by the referenced news article].

(My context: I'm trying to do the same with HP's NonStop group to get Bugzilla supported there - an ongoing interest with its own set of issues relating more to Perl than Bugzilla at this point).

Cheers,

Randy