I see this phrase repeated over and over: nobody got fired for chosing Oracle, ibm, or Microsoft.
I wonder: did anyone got fired for chosing Postgres, Linux, or even new and risky stuff like Mongodb or nodejs? And being told at their exit interview "you should've decided to use Oracle"?
I guess tech people are fired for lack of talent in hustling company politics much often than they are for chosing a technology.
From first hand experience, it is much harder to maintain a FOSS environment. It feels like putting more on the line. And I cannot deny that I do it partly out of ideological reasons.
So I can totally imagine people being fired for getting in over their heads and messing something up, maybe repeatedly.
On the other hand, I've seen techs be banned from a client environment while dealing solely with proprietary software too.
I would disagree it's harder. It's trepidatious, but that's not the same.
We're in the middle of taking all our internal apps talking to a single huge Oracle database, and giving each app its own cluster of two PG boxes. Nothing has to play nice with anything else - that alone suddenly makes life ridiculously easier.
We have expensive paid Oracle support, who do PG as a sideline. But we've yet to have occasion to call them about PG.
I've been in a similar situation, a story I love to re-tell because it feels like a victory for open source.
We asked Oracle for a quote for two replicated mysql servers for HA. Because they were VMs we got a quote for 3 years that was 410,000 SEK (almost $50k). So we built our own replication solution with mariadb for free.
If you need support, there's nothing wrong with buying support, even quite expensive support. I'm sure Oracle would have provided the some of best MySQL support available.
But yes, it's good to have the option of doing it yourself :-D
(For our few services that run on MySQL, I'm really hanging out for MariaDB to make it into Debian and hence Ubuntu, which is what we run on live - a mix of 12.04 and 14.04. Oracle runs on our last two remaining Sun Niagara SPARC boxes. We will be killing our last Oracle this year.)
It's not so much that someone will say "you should've used Oracle". It's that when your application is down for two days they'll say "you should've picked a vendor with 24 hour support and good penetration in the job market".
Now, your Oracle-hosted application might go down for two days as well, but then people would shrug and say "sometimes this happens."
To be fair to Oracle, though, it does seem to happen less often.
With our Postgres move, we worried slightly about Postgres support for the trickier bits, but (b) our Oracle support does Postgres as a sideline (a) there are less of them when you can do a PG cluster per app, and nothing actually has to play nice with anything else.
I'd love to read a blog post by someone fired for not using MongoDB; I suspect the justification their employer gave for the firing decision would be quite entertaining.
