Wave of migrations expected

PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus said that his organization
will have the licensing edge over competitors, including Oracle, IBM,
and Sybase, thanks to multi-core software licensing issues.

"Unless those companies change their licensing policies, multi-core is
going to increase the price differential between proprietary and
PostgreSQL-based solutions, making PostgreSQL much more attractive,"
Berkus said. "As a parallel, when Oracle increased licensing fees for
the release of Oracle 10, we got a whole wave of Oracle-to-PostgreSQL
migrations. I'd expect the same with multi-core.

"The same price differential that helps us helps Linux, BSD, Apache,
MySQL, FireBirdDB, and all other OSS competing against proprietary
software that is licensed per-processor," he said. "I expect that once
the proprietary software companies take enough of a beating, they'll
change their licensing policies, but by that point, they'll have lost
a bunch of customers who won't come back."

Berkus said that in addition to licensing issues, software upgrades
will make open source more attractive as the cores keep coming. "Some
of that proprietary software (particularly Windows software) will
require new versions to support multi-core systems. OSS, being
compilable on the target system, doesn't generally suffer this issue.
Completely aside from the license fee, the hassle of upgrading makes a
lot of companies evaluate whether they want to change products as
well."

http://business.newsforge.com/business/05/09/12/1515200.shtml?tid=37
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