From: pagesflames@... (Dusan Bolek) Date: 2004-05-25T01:53:48+09:00 Subject: Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS? quirk@syntac.net (Quirk) wrote in message news:<4e20d3f.0405240218.6eedf26e@posting.google.com>... > Noons wrote in message news:<40af7768$0$3038$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>... > However, there is clear zealotry in your post, for example: > > You said: "It's with freeware that you need a STACK of wrappers to > protect you from sudden underlying code changes! Not with commercial > software!" > > See: no other reasoning is given why underlying code may suddenly > change other than in one case it is _free_, in the other case it is > _commercial_. This is not a reasoned argument, but rather the faith of > a zealot. > > Since neither freeness nor commercialness has a direct impact on code > stability, but rather the release management practices of the > development group has. > > There are badly managed free software projects, and badly managed > nonfree ones, your argument is therefore a fallacy, although your > english, like Volker's is great! Sorry for interrupting your flame, but I must step in. This statement is simply not true. In fact a problematic release management is probably the biggest single problem of free software projects in general. Even a big projects like Squid, Apache or even Linux itself have serious problems in this area and the behaviour of smaller ones is just unacceptable from a point of view of real production implementations. Typical for this is a lack of backward compatibility, a huge (and often unnecessary) changes in config files (thus the need to rewrite all configs after upgrade) and releasing unfinished code (too many hacks used, no documentation ...). I'm using a lot of both commercial and free softs, but I must admit that these problems are much more frequent on the free ones. -- Dusan Bolek