Hello Jay,
> Excuse me, but I'd like to say, "I TOLD YOU SO!!!"
> I like Orion, but while we've been asking, "Any news
> from Orion yet??" (Jan 13, 2001), and
> functioning as free testers, they've been working on
> the version for Oracle.
There has certainly not been any "work on the version
for Oracle" done at any point in time (unless you mean
the minimal process of making it available to them).
Negotiations and other exercises in patience has
obviously been stealing a lot of our time, but
remember, Oracle is a customer. They're obviously a
very important customer, but they're not taking over
the company any more than any other customer.
> Why pay for the cow when you can get the
> milk for free? That's why they rarely answer our
> questions directly anymore.
I don't quite understand what you're getting at here.
We are very happy about all the help we get from our
users. The reason for us not being able to participate
much on orion-interest is not this at all.
There's the reality of what happens when you start
getting a large number of customers. We've never spent
more time communicating to users than we do now, but
still it's much harder now to answer all, or even a
fifth of all questions because we simply get more and
more customers having questions needing our attention.
The purpose of the orion-interest has always been to
promote the exchange of experiences and knowledge
between our users, not as a channel to communicate
with us.
Early on, we had no customers. That meant that we had
a lot of time to be active on this user list, but the
price of actually having people use your product is
that you can no longer always prioritize what you
would be doing if you could choose freely.
> Now, I'm not complaining, because I like Orion and I
> will continue to use
> it. Ironflare has never said they were in it just
> as an academic exercise.
> I admire the way they've managed to build a decent
> product without having
> to hire testers.
You might have noticed that the price we charge is
somewhat lower than the mainstream price. With this
price there has not been any room to employ more
people than we have.
> If Oracle is smart, they'll look
> for those of us who have
> helped find Orion's bugs (Magnus and Karl, are you
> listening?) and have
> experience with it.
I'm listening, and I hope that Oracle will take part
in the user discussions with all the rest of you. And
if Oracle recruits talent from this list, that would
be a very nice thing.
> But, as I said before, they're not just Java guys in
> geek heaven -- they
> are clearly in it for the money, too.
We've never been in it for the money, but that doesn't
mean that you can survive in this society forever
without having any money. For all this time, we've
just gotten enough money to get by and pay our bills
(and for a very long time we made exactly $0 per month
and that's not very easy when you're fresh out of
school without any savings).
If we were in it for the money, what we would have
done, is to sell out the company to some big J2EE
vendor and let them kill off our server.
What we instead chose is to make sure that our product
lives on and is being spread around the world, while
we can still continue to develop the product as we see
fit. I think that's closer to geek-heaven than a smart
decision if you're only after the money. Believe me,
if we wanted to, we could have made lots more money
from Orion.
The reaction I've gotten on this agreement from other
Orion users is that they're very happy about it, and
that they see new opportunities for themselves since
they can now claim to have world leading Oracle
competence. I hope this agreement will bring good
things to everyone of us. I know it will be good for
the product, which is why we're doing this.
Regards,
Karl Avedal
_____________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - skaffa en gratis mailadress på http://mail.yahoo.se
