paulruizendaal wrote:

>>Paul, by that reasoning, Firebird is a 22 year effort with zero
>>customers.
>>
>>
>
>Zero?
>
>

Yup, zero paying customers. You were only counting MySQL customers that
licensed the commercial version, so that's only fair.

>Oh, here we agree completely. It is just that factually incorrect
>claims of FB not being a succesful O/S project make me very irate.
>The numbers show that we are very successful. Could we do a lot of
>things better? Absolutely.
>
>

That's all I'm saying. You're the one arguing that Firebird is so
perfect it can't be improved.

>>About half of MySQL developers are from the US. And most were
>>recruited from the community.
>>
>>
>
>If you say so. You will also know that MySQL was a european affair
>till about 2000. Only after LAMP became wildly successful in Germany
>did folks like Tim O'Reilly start to push the concept in the US.
>
>

MySQL is headquartered in Cupertino, California. Last I looked, that
was in the United States.

><speculation>
>It might have to do with culture. [1] In the US many things are mono-
>culture. Did it ever strike you as strange that light switches in
>California are identical to those in Virginia? In the US folks tend
>to go with stuff that is perceived as the standard. In Europe,
>whatever is standard changes every 100 miles or so, and people are
>much more comfortable working with a local (minority) standard. [2]
>In the US it is not so easy to get legal clearance from your employer
>for community contributions.
></speculation>
>
>
>

Don't think so. The database world has always suffered with a bogus
standard that allows a hundred incompatible systems to be all standard
conforming, so that's not it.

Also, except for California girls, women are about the same world wide.
Closed source companies have lots of women engineers, open source
companies almost none. MySQL has exactly one half of a woman engineer.
Firebird, interestingly enough, also has one half of a woman engineer.
And guess what? Put them together and you get one full Ann. Gosh --
what are the odds against that?

--

Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect
MySQL AB, www.mysql.com
978 526-1376