From the article:

"That means that at some point in the future the market will consolidate
and a number of these products will disappear."

Clearly, the author doesn't know what he's talking about. Open source
databases don't rely on traditional market economics to survive. An
important benefit of open source is that projects can be supported by
their user community; there is rarely reliance on the vendor for
survivability.

Thus, open source projects can and most often prosper well beyond any
vendor's life.

My take: If you're going to pick an open-source database, the project
community is a critical factor -- more important than vendor support.
That's why I would not chose Ingres (CA). Contrary to all other
databases mentioned, Ingres has not yet shown a sustainable user and
developer community outside of CA itself.

alex


marius popa wrote:

> Questionable if my first open source database to use would be Ingres or
> Cloudscape , Maybe if they bundle Eclipse with Cloudscape ... who knows
> I put myself as first time user of open source products (to choose from)
>
> "But who are the vendors that are most likely to be accepted as
> strategic partners by users? If you think about databases it is going to
> be IBM (Cloudscape) and CA (Ingres) at the top of the list. And the same
> will happen in the development (Eclipse) space. That's not to say that a
> few of the pure players wouldn't make good, but it won't be the
> free-for-all that some advocates of open source might like."
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/04/open_source_databases_strategy/
> Lot's of ms ads
> http://www.it-analysis.com/article.php?articleid=12646&SESSID=27889bc4c62003ba38fa3a1e85af2a87
>