Re: [OT] Re: realplay.el interface with Real Player v. 1879

[Mathias Dahl]

Galen Boyer <address@hidden> writes:

      Someone else pointed out that you can't be sure of that
      conclusion.  In that other world
    
    What other world?  Today, as we speak, in the world we are living
    in right now

You mentioned it yourself in your first post:

    "Its a fairly easy argument to make that if all software were
    free..."

That's the "other world".

    They are not doing so with database software.

In the other world they might.

    What you are saying is hypothetical.

Yes, and so is this other world, which we don't know squat about.

    Just because there are examples of it elsewhere does not mean the
    same motivations exist in the database industry.

We cannot know if that is true or not. However, I would guess that in
that other world there would be enough incentive to do produce a RDBMS
on par with Oracle, or that would be good enough for people's needs.

    If free software could actually support such an undertaking of a
    database to rival Oracle's it would have.

If the incentive existed, why shouldn't it be able to do that?

    Instead, the free software model has failed in the database
    industry and the commercial vendors have won in that arena.

Come on, are you deliberately trolling here? Have you never heard of
programs such as MySQL and PostgreSQL? Before you argue that those
systems cannot compare with Oracle or not (I'm not saying either), let
me say that I have worked with Oracle systems since 1996 (as DBA, and
as developer of Forms, Reports, PL/SQL etc) and know what it can do,
how "rich" it is on features. But that's not the point. The point is
that saying that "the free software model has *failed* in the database
industry" is a bit uninformed, don't you think?

   There are plenty of people who pay for cable service instead of
   funding their own cable lines, yet, your argument could be turned
   on them and be stated, "If you really think media is important, get
   together and fund the directors, producers and actors.  We hear at
   the GNU free media foundation believe free media is ethically
   better than commercial media."

I think you should surf over to fsf.org and read about what FSF and
the GNU-community stands for and what is meant by free software, you
clearly seem to have missed the point, at least considering the
attempted joke above.

Peace,

Mathias