and 4gl...
and office connect...
and se...
and c-isam...
and ...

come on! what is this trend of "giving the technology away"?

open source has some very very positive aspects, but there are so many
different kind of open source that I doubt that opening source code of
something will do any good to the product. how many of you just recompile
the products? how many just want free software with optional maintenance?

now, ibm has to be careful at some aspects of the market and should price
products according to the trend(s). and they are well aware of a lot of
those things. and many other software companies too.

jgp

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-informix-list@iiug.org
> [mailtowner-informix-list@iiug.org] On Behalf Of JUB
> Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 11:13
> To: informix-list@iiug.org
> Subject: Re: Informix in the news! Part Deux...
>
> I don't expect IBM to open source Informix in the near
> future, because they are afraid losing revenue. They still
> earn some money with IDS licences and additionally it would
> make it more difficult to sell DB2 licences. The obvious
> advantages (growing market share, selling more services or
> selling more other IBM products) are more difficult to
> calculate in dollars.
> So I expect IBM to open source Informix in 5 or 10 years
> (when they earned the billion dollars they paid for it to
> Ascential Software). Of course then it's to late to grow any
> market share.
>
> So I would open source the XPS source code now, because the
> lost licence revenue would be marginal. IBM could still sell
> maintenance, services and hardware, etc. for this product.
> It would also generate attention to the IDS product again.
> The concerns about the future of IDS would disappear, because
> customers would get the impression, that the worst thing that
> could happen to IDS is, that it goes open source, too.
sending to informix-list

Jean Georges Perrin wrote:
> and 4gl...
> and office connect...
> and se...
> and c-isam...
> and ...
>
> come on! what is this trend of "giving the technology away"?
>

Who said anything about giving the technology away? An Open Source
license protects the software from anyone 'taking' it. They are
free to use and modify it, but any changes/improvements must go
back into the product if someone produces changes/improvements to
the product. i.e. Oracle can't do anything with it that they can't
share, etc etc etc. as well as any other entity. So what if they
learn how to do it right, ( LOL :-) Oracle applications might run
better on IDS anyway, who knows. But look at the bigger picture, of
just how much market penetration IDS has: less than 5% by any guess.
It's not like IBM is giving anything away, if anything they are
allowing the software a real chance.

The other thing to get your head around is to understand the whole
licensing game, and how it is a constant struggle to have meaningful
licenses for the software. This game is constantly being evaluated,
and re-evaluated. And in some cases it actually hurts sales. For
example, the way IBM works today, the hardware group does not help
the software group. The hardware people push a low number of CPUs, but
under software, they need to produce a lot of CPU-based sales, which
actually drives the software price up, so it hurts the sale of the
software. Sell a power5 system as something that cuts down on the number
of CPUs, but hey, DB2 sales are measured by the CPU--the more the merrier.
So CPU-based licensing actually can gridlock a sale.

> open source has some very very positive aspects, but there are so many
> different kind of open source that I doubt that opening source code of
> something will do any good to the product. how many of you just recompile
> the products? how many just want free software with optional maintenance?
>

Open Source allows no single owner of the software. The current owner
wants to sit on it. If there were a "Open Informix Group" or whatever
people want to call it, this organization would own the software, just
like Apache or Derby or something similar. Developers could participate
in the development just like other open source projects.

Having it as Open Source also means people are free to do with it as
they choose, and being open source means that a huge cache of developers
will suddenly pay attention to it. As it stands there is hardly any
developer market for Informix. Look at the job boards to see this. It
could also mean that the Open Source license allows new opportunities
in applications, especially in markets where the cost has been typically
prohibitive. This means educational institutions, non-profits, etc that
are interested in the product but can't pay big ticket prices will have
access, and can probably either pay for limited support or find a consultant
to help them. The economics of Open Source mean simply the customer is
either using YOUR software or someone elses', and the first one to get
to Open Source will understand the impact and how this works. It will
not take much longer for MySQL to be 'big-league', and as Open Source
the whole way.

> now, ibm has to be careful at some aspects of the market and should price
> products according to the trend(s). and they are well aware of a lot of
> those things. and many other software companies too.
>
> jgp
>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: owner-informix-list@iiug.org
>>[mailtowner-informix-list@iiug.org] On Behalf Of JUB
>>Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 11:13
>>To: informix-list@iiug.org
>>Subject: Re: Informix in the news! Part Deux...
>>
>>I don't expect IBM to open source Informix in the near
>>future, because they are afraid losing revenue. They still
>>earn some money with IDS licences and additionally it would
>>make it more difficult to sell DB2 licences. The obvious
>>advantages (growing market share, selling more services or
>>selling more other IBM products) are more difficult to
>>calculate in dollars.
>>So I expect IBM to open source Informix in 5 or 10 years
>>(when they earned the billion dollars they paid for it to
>>Ascential Software). Of course then it's to late to grow any
>>market share.
>>
>>So I would open source the XPS source code now, because the
>>lost licence revenue would be marginal. IBM could still sell
>>maintenance, services and hardware, etc. for this product.
>>It would also generate attention to the IDS product again.
>>The concerns about the future of IDS would disappear, because
>>customers would get the impression, that the worst thing that
>>could happen to IDS is, that it goes open source, too.
>
> sending to informix-list