> When you say "bystander", are you referring to yourself of me?
Poor grammar, my bad. I am the bystander.
> Indeed Microsoft, Lotus, Word Perfect, Borland, Oracle and every other major
> software manufacturer in the world has missed deadlines, stuff happens.
So we have a software company that is laying it on the line -- _They
didn't know_! Of course, it would have helped if you hadn't missed that
post with the details, as you mentioned. (What you're only human? Well,
that's your problem. You need to learn some superhuman patience!)
Eh, okay, we misunderstood each other.
I suppose that MySQL AB and their customers might benefit if MySQL AB
were to air some of their internal laundry by posting a general summary
of their internal engineering schedules. I'm not sure. This business
model is evolving. Anyway, it would require some additional programming,
in order to keep the bookkeeping burden light enough to allow their
programming staff to keep up the pace.
Would you care to write the app? Or maybe search the web to find
something they can use? (I'm _not_ being facetious, here.)
I'm not going to hammer overly hard at this (i. e., with dozens of
examples), but open-source does not fit the traditional business model.
With a traditional business model, you request features, you imply the
willingness to buy, the request gets bounced around at the vendor, the
features might get implemented.
With open source, if you want the features, you don't offer to pay when
they come out. You grab your hammer and offer to help. In the more
extreme models, you don't even stop to offer, you dig in. The money you
pay the vendor is not for shrink-wrap so much as to keep the people who
are doing the bulk of the work from having to work some other job.
MySQL didn't start out open source, but they have adopted the model, and
they are doing pretty well, so far.
So I am being quite serious when I tell you to dig in.
That's why I suggested the links to a few other open-source mailing
lists. I thought a little browsing those might clear up this little
point.
Anyway, I think my earlier suggestion still stands. If you are willing
to spec MySQL into your future products, I'd think you'd be most
profited by starting to develop with the betas now. Use them internally.
Feed bug reports back to MySQL AB. When you start needing answers on a
timely basis, buy the support.
--
Joel Rees <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
PS: Yes, they are breaking lots of new ground here. The mantra "This is
business software!" has been repeated ad nauseum for longer than you
have been in the business, and it still ain't so.
In this particular case, first, they do not have access to the solutions
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Foxpro, et. al. have come up with. Some of the
general algorithms, yes, but the implementations, no. And it's the
implementation that has always eaten software schedules, business or
otherwise. Should I jog your memory a bit?
Second, they are trying hard to not repeat the solutions that meet 80%
of current business needs but less than 1% of the problems that people
really want to solve. There's little profit in that any more. They are
aiming for a small piece of the really hard stuff, and trying hard to
maintain compatibility with the SQL standards as they go. That's one of
the reasons I'm hanging around.
We are still in the Model-T era as far as software and computers go, if
that far along. I could offer you a pair of introductory references on
that, I suppose:
http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~norman/DNMss/TamingTech.html
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_9/odlyzko/
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