Re: Red Hat to support PostgreSQL

On 25 Jun 2001, Trond Eivind [iso-8859-1] Glomsrd wrote:

> "Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos" <thalis(at)cs(dot)pitt(dot)edu> writes:
>
> > Always a first time for everything bad. Anyway, not wanting to be the
> > pessimist of the bunch, I'll hold my horses and hope that none of my
> > "fears" turns into reality. The issue is that none of the other open
> > source projects RH supported was anything major they could make real
> > money out of, at least not compared to what they can make out of the
> > DB arena.
>
> Uh? The database project is small FTTB (moneywise) compared to other
> things like the kernel, gcc and glibc which are core parts of our base
> product.
>
> --
> Trond Eivind Glomsrd
> Red Hat, Inc.
>

But kernel/gcc/glibc don't comprise a market by themselves. They are just components of the OS market as a whole (if there is any such thing left anyway). Whereas PostgreSQL is one product part of one market, the DBMS market. So forking off just this one thing will mean stepping in for a market's share which is indeed big $$$. This couldn't be the case with gnome or gcc.
I'm not comparing sizes. Just strategic importance :^)

--thalis