[threeseed]

> Commercial products have support from people who support it because they are paid to. They do the minimum amount necessary to satisfy the terms of the SLA.

This is pretty ridiculous and quite a bit insulting to the many people who do work for vendors. I work in a team that has a number of engineers supplied by vendors and they are generally fantastic. Highly qualified, more than happy to assist with tasks that aren't to do with their product and they really care about the overall project outcomes.

Open source has forced vendors to make sure that every project that uses their products are a success.

> On the other hand, commercial software is often designed by committee, written in cube farms and developed without proper guidance or inspiration

Again more nonsense. Not every open source project is some beacon of perfection and neither is every commercial product some poorly designed piece of junk. Anyone that believes otherwise is just being disingenuous.

Someone really needs to explain to me why PostgreSQL users in particular seem to always want to bash the competition in order to justify their technology choice. It's been going on for years against MySQL/Oracle first, then MongoDB/NoSQL and now SQL Server. It's odd.

[mgkimsal]

Agreed. One could just as easily write something like

"Open source products have support from people who've been told they need to 'contribute' to open source, and since they can't code, they just try to look at code and answer questions on a mailing list until they get an interview at Facebook".

[cpks]

> Someone really needs to explain to me why PostgreSQL users in particular seem to always want to bash the competition in order to justify their technology choice. It's been going on for years against MySQL/Oracle first, then MongoDB/NoSQL and now SQL Server. It's odd.

I think it's less about PostgreSQL, and more about the particular products:

1. Oracle has always been a piece of crap from a technology standpoint. There are good reasons businesses use it, but they don't have to do with a robust, core product.

2. Early versions of MySQL were a joke. It's pretty good now, but for a long time, it was the butt of many jokes for good reason. It was very easy-to-use, and fast if you didn't need data consistency, but it didn't quite work right.

3. Stonebraker aside, I haven't heard much bashing of NoSQL. It's used in many places where it's the wrong tool for the job (JOINs are useful), but it's great where it is the right fit. It's just that MongoDB, in particular, isn't great if you have data integrity or performance requirements you care about.

4. I don't even know where to start on SQL Server. Seriously. The only reason to use that dog is if you're tied to a Microsoft-only shop.

There are lots of great technologies out there -- Cassendra, Google's Bigtable, memcached, modern versions MySQL, etc. -- which I've never heard people mocking. Conversely, users of most of those tend to make fun of the broken databases just as much as PostgreSQL users do. It's just that you see the PostgreSQL users doing more mocking simply because there are more of them out there.

Footnote: I'm developing on a MySQL+MongoDB stack right now. MySQL is great, but MongoDB is a bad joke.

[mauricemir]

So Oracle backport fixes now do they I remember having trouble getting my Oracle based system through y2k back in 98/99

[threeseed]

Not sure what you're point is.

(a) Not all vendors are the same, (b) Not all situations are the same, (c) Open source isn't exactly world renowned for porting back fixes to older releases.

Making broad generalisations is never helpful.

[mauricemir]

I used to work for a MAJOR MAJOR Oracle customer and they would not back port y2k fixes to relatively recent oracle products ie the version before.

This caused a lot of BT employes a lot of pain you had to get a very senior manager to sign off on missing your y2k deadline which was the year before y2k - and you probably got dinged on your apr for it