On 9 Feb 2002, at 0:45, Claudio Valderrama C. wrote:

> Go to Ford and tell them to replace their systems with FB. Let's
> assume Ford bites and looks for the options. They learn that IB and FB
> are based on the same base architecture but who's behind IB and behind
> FB? Where's the relatively big company supporting the product? Does
> the financial report look good?
>
> So, one of the issues is where do you go to peddle an open source
> database. A database is such a critical beast that I'm horrorified
> when I remember that Mike Nordel found things like this in the code,
> for the C people:
>
> if (!bitfield & mask) ...
> => bitfield is an integer used to hold a bunch of flags, each one
> represented by a bit that's set at one or zero and mask is obviously a
> predefined set of bits that serves to check only for the activation of
> the desired flags in bitfield.
>
> Who wrote that? A newbie? A careless professional engineer? Certainly
> this comes really from if (bitfield & mask == 0) ... but some person
> says, okay "something == 0" is like writing "!something" and the code
> has changed meaning, because it should have been instead if
> (!(bitfield & mask)) ... At this time, I prefer the explicit
> comparison with zero for readability.

So, what kind of coding horrors are hidden in the Oracle, Sybase or
MS-SQL code, nobody knows except people who would get sued if
they told anyone.

Okay, say you picked Sybase, they are a big company, the
financial reports look good, so sink $5,000,000 into the project,
then a week after your finished Microsoft buys out Sybase, and
kills the product, you find that Sybase and MS-SQL are just
different enough that you need to rewrite a huge hunk of the code,
and it costs you another $3,000,000. No intent to pick on Sybase
or Microsoft here, I just picked those two companies out of the air.

Now instead you pick Firebird, and sink the same $5,000,000 into
the same project, Firebird is abandoned because Ibphoenix dies,
so you grab a copy of the code, and hire a C programmer to
maintain your copy of the code. Even at $50,000 a year it's 60
years before you have paid the same $3,000,000 again.

Paul
Paul Schmidt
Tricat Technologies
paul@...
www.tricattechnologies.com