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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely worried now. I'll have to thumb through the Book of Revelation again, but I'm pretty sure MSSQL on Linux and Donald Trump possibly becoming the next President are two of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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Though this news is pretty shocking, I don't think that the horsemen are nigh until MS releases SQL server under GPL.

If that happens then I'm packing up and heading for the hills, this world is done for.

It will never happen. Somebody needs to pay those engineers who build SQL Server. Maybe when relational databases are a commodity and everything is NoSQL?

Plenty of successful businesses are built around providing support, services or premium features for an otherwise open-source project.

Yeah, but the economics of those businesses do not scale as well as software.

Name one (other than RedHat) that is consistently profitable.

2ndQuadrant

Novell (now Micro Focus)

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllow...

Yes. Does it create a situation where any appreciable number of people will pay money for copies of the program? No. See CentOS. (Though they may pay money for related consulting or hosting services).

> No. See CentOS.

I'd argue otherwise[1].

Also, as of ~2 years ago, CentOS is just another Red Hat supported project.

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=RHT

RedHat doesn't make that money on software, but on support and consulting services. Nothing wrong with that. But it is still not true that you can reasonably well open source software. People who just want the software will get it for free.

> It will never happen.

Some people probably said that about the .NET framework. Now almost all of it (the new stuff anyway, and minus Visual Studio) is fully open source.

That happened when they realized that dev mind share is (far) more valuable than tooling revenues.

Not just any Dev mindshare, but that mindshare that translates into hard dollars (monetized through some other means like Azure).

Making something open source != making something GPL. .Net is licensed under MIT/X11 I think.

If someone is licensing something under GNU GPL, they are also giving away their intellectual property/patent rights (or what ever they call that) to any software developed in GPL, which Microsoft is never ever going to do.

MIT/X11 license is not giving other developers and users such a patent protection from its original developers.

The framework was not an independently monetized piece of work for Microsoft. One the .Net / J2EE battles were settled, there was no need to keep it closed source.

Not this again. .NET is still primarily useful for developing GUI applications. None of that is available on Linux; only the language and the web stack. And, while most devs think C# is a perfectly usable language, quite frankly, IMHO, ASP.NET and EF aren't even in the running compared to other toolchains for web development on Linux. If MS would make the GUI libraries available, then and only then would it be a game changer.

A) From my equally anecdotal experience, non-HTML GUIs are going the way of the dodo as a business investment. So, "primarily useful for developing GUI applications" citation needed.

B) Modern MS-RSL "reference source license" is now OSS compliant. The remaining difference between .NET Full Framework's Reference Source and what's happening with .NET Core is .NET Core has moved development to the open and Github as primary development platform. .NET Core is the future and .NET Full is "stable".

C) One example: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#PresentationFramework/...

There's nothing stopping you from using the Reference Source today to build your own WPF fork (or, let's face it, you probably mean SWF). You can even start with Mono's existing mostly-there cross-platform SWF or Moonlight codebases and save a bit of time.

You know why you don't hear about lots of people doing that? I'm fairly certain it is because no one is building cross-platform GUIs in anything but HTML(5) these days.

...or Xamarin.Forms, which is its own beast and a rather different direction.

They still do consultancy as well as certify developers and IT professionals, don't forget the books they publish, and other things. I think Microsoft is aiming more towards developers than anything, if you can get developers on Azure even better, it wont matter if they use all available FOSS from you, you're making good income as a result!

With the unseasonable March temperatures, I actually thought April fools day had crept up on me...

Are you in Australia or it like this the world over?

It is the world over: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/enso...

Seems like March has been quite warm in the eastern half of North America and Europe - not sure about other places.

Same ... I genuinely looked at the calendar, while thinking to myself "It's still March isn't it??"

Until Microsoft changes its licensing model so that it's not ridiculously expensive, I'll still keep preferring free software over their stuff. But that's something they'll never do.

I'm all for paying for great software (whether it's open source or not) I prefer open source however. I love how fast development is moving on Postgres lately.

Could have said the same thing about releasing on Linux as well :D

It's all about finding the right tool for the job. For most, this audience especially, open source relational databases are the way to go. For a lot of big business and government jobs, Oracle and Microsoft are the way to go and having your preferred ops environment makes a big difference. At my first job we had to maintain an Oracle DB connection to pull data directly from the City of Los Angeles. At the end of the day we were out of business without that so we didn't really debate the merits of using it. That job happened to be a Windows shop anyway (most of the company were CAD artists using Architecture software) so it didn't phase the IT ops team.

On the other hand, at my current job I've been in charge of some search tech that's Windows only and being the lone Windows user has been a bit painful. We liked the results it gave us but recently developed our own algorithms on top of ElasticSearch so we didn't have to deal with Windows anymore. The Dev work to switch was more than the cost saved on the license for the old software, so this wasn't a case of open source saving is money on the solution implementation. We really just didn't want to focus on Windows Dev ops. I think this is the concern the SQL Server team had and why they're supporting Linux, especially in Microsoft's increasingly Azure focused world.

Paying for a tool that does the job is one thing. But SQL Server's licensing scheme is so fucked up that I see companies building custom servers for the sole purpose of gaming it (extremely low core count and high clock rates). That shouldn't be the goal of software licensing

I don't think that's really gaming the license. If a fast two core system fits your needs then you only need the two core license. MS is happy to sell those to you all day long. If you have a serious load and SQL Server is key to your business you're likely to have better things to do than try to micromanage your server architecture to save a few dollars. If you're in a position where SQL Server, Oracle, or any other specialized commercial DB is a major cost and you're not seeing a positive ROI, messing with core counts v.s. clock speed is probably a poorer use of time than switching to Postgres or MySQL.

In this niche Oracle occupies the "ridiculously expensive" position.

And somehow simultaneously occupies the "I wouldn't use it if it was free" position.

I wonder if you believe people send Larry Ellison money because of his likeability.

No, it's because the people who pay for it aren't the people who have to use it.

I used oracle a lot a few years ago... When I was getting used to it I would compare it to a neighbor that is usually really helpful, but on occasion when you asked to borrow something would hit you with a bat first...

Enterprise software shares this in common with Duplo. The purchaser is often more excited than the user.

Good plan. Luckily MOST software, even advanced stuff, can run easily on free database engines. They really are CRUD for the most part.

My income depends on SS but it saddens me when I think of how much is spent on it by applications which could so easily run on something that is free.

Yeah I'm still reeling from reading this headline. My reaction is kind of like that scene in Super Troopers where the kid eats a bag full of mushrooms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb-cAJRZrlA

Waking up in the morning looking my shitty code is Apocalypse.

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