There's a reliable test for predicting the success of failure of open source software: "Does it directly interact with users?"
If the answer is yes, OSS has mostly been an alternative option but not the first choice. (With all due respect and deference to the work put in by OSS GUI teams!)
If the answer is no, and especially if it's a shared need but not the primary product (e.g. kernel, web server, intermediate processing step), then OSS has taken over the world.
Fair! Although I've never worked with a shop that was not-Oracle and migrating to Oracle. Sadly, there's the long tail of places with existing, business critical Oracle use.
Anyone that wants top tier RDMS, it nice graphical debuggers for stored procedures, integration of Java and .NET into the database, distributed transactions, raw file system accesses, web services on the DB layer, among several other features, besides Oracle, there is only MS SQL Server and the RDMS owned by IBM like DB 2 and Informix.
MySQL and Postgres are kind of nice, but not really the same league at tooling level.
This is completely in line with the premise above.
If the database is primarily a data store, unseen by the end user, then Postgress, Firebird etc are fine. If however the database is an active part of the development stack, being used by lots of "users", writing new code etc, then commercial offerings with better tooling win.
Yes you’re right. But OSS opens up a free market of vendors. Consider how Wordpress powers 40% of all websites in the world. The website owners pay hosts etc. to have full control and they arent locked into a monopoly vendor, but end users just use the stuff.
For making a good GUI, the tech guys need to be ordered around by non-tech guys who think like, or talk to, regular users and know what is needed. Tech guys don't like this, so someone needs to pay for their suffering.
I suspect Dijkstra made the relevant distinction in a different context: the open source process is geared to providing correct software, not pleasant software.
> The pleasantness problem deals with the question how satisfactory a system meeting a given functional specification would be; the correctness problem deals with the question whether a given system meets that functional specification. The correctness problem being an entirely technical one, the functional specification can provide strong heuristic guidance for the system designer.
If the answer is yes, OSS has mostly been an alternative option but not the first choice. (With all due respect and deference to the work put in by OSS GUI teams!)
If the answer is no, and especially if it's a shared need but not the primary product (e.g. kernel, web server, intermediate processing step), then OSS has taken over the world.