Comment by rdsubhas
7 hours ago
20 years ago, I used to consult with Fortune 500 companies that run Oracle and IBM products (web servers and Java frameworks).
These are distributed as enterprise binaries. It's common to face _at least_ one or two weird errors in production. Then you have to raise a ticket to support.
Would you like to know how it is discussing a binary-obfuscated error with Customer support? And then after few weeks being assigned to a newly joined fresher? And so on and on, where every person or layer every week says "you're doing it wrong" and you have to restart your proofing and explanation process from scratch?
Hint: After few weeks/months of this (or after 4 times of restarting your proofing process), you start questioning your sanity and life choices.
In those days, all I wished for is just "source-available", so that I can just debug myself what is going on and provide a concise bug report, instead of talking to support.
The weird part is, I'm pretty sure, on the other side, Oracle/IBM also LOST money in that same process. They had to hire an army of people. It was lose-lose on both sides.
Source-available means customers of that software can perform debugging themselves and file pretty good support tickets.
If you are an enterprise today, you would absolutely consider make it source-available to save on your own costs.
That's a great reason I steer clear of products like that. Oracle is not a DB I've used since 2005. There's no need. The market for closed sourced databases imploded to basically legacy products that predate when open source databases became a sane default choice. I guess some banks/insurers still might talk themselves into believing it's a sane choice for new projects.
I guess source available is better than source unavailable + hand wavy support from a company that's out to milk you for revenue for as long as they can get away with it.
But it's a weak substitute for proper open source that you can just fork and fix if you need to without having to beg some indifferent company to pretty please fix their legacy shit and offering to do free work for them. If it's open source, chances are that there are still some others around also using the same software and sharing your pain that can support you or benefit from your fixes.
I don't see the value of most shared source projects. Usually there are very decent OSS alternatives. And the lack of those usually just means one will pop up shortly and displace whatever it is you are using. Any benefit to these projects tends to be short lived. OSS developers like to copy what is good and add it to their own projects.
E.g. most nosql databases ended up having postgresql absorb whatever it was that made these things interesting. Several shared source things (mongodb) are at this point looking a bit dated and backwards. That's also exactly what happened to MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, and all those other long forgotten databases that people used to use last century. There's very little technical reason to use any of those at this point.