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Comment by njharman | Hacker News Reader

>DB2 Express-C has some limitations when it comes to los tipos of resources that it can use (up to 2GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores). Fear not though, it’s still plenty useful for many startups or small businesses

That is called vendor lock in. Start with this, build with this, once you're dependent and need to grow then we'll extort our share of your profit.

Avoiding vendor lock in is a major reason Open Software exists.

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I would argue that avoiding vendor lock out is a major reason Open Software exists: with an OS database, nobody can tell you that you can no longer use the DB software unless you pay the proper licensing and maintenance fees.

You'll be locked into a particular database vendor anyway: it's no harder to migrate away from MySQL that it would be to migrate away from DB2. It just so happens that the open source "vendors" don't charge licensing fees, and if things go way off the rails (community implosion, commercial "takeover" of the primary contributors, etc), at least you'll have access to the source so you can run your app on it for as long as it makes sense to do so.

You get vendor lock in whether or not is Open Source, unless there is an Open Source project that will instantly convert all my code to use another vendor, including my tests.

While Stallman's desire is not financial profit (which I really think should be the core of your argument, not the lock-in), the lock-in of a GPL-based product chain is just as hard to get out of than one built from IBM (actually quite possibly even harder).

There is, it's called DBIx::Class and if you want to learn about it go to http://mibbit.com/chat/#dbix-class@irc.perl.org

IRC chat? I did look it up, and from a 30s perusal it looks like it targets the lowest common denominator for SQL DB, much less cubes and ETLs. Did I miss something?

The alternative to vendor lock-in isn't the ability to do a drop-in replacement of every single component, it's to think carefully and pick the set of lock-ins that has the lowest possibility of ending up hurting you.

For another "great" example of this, see Microsoft BizSpark: http://www.bizspark.com/Pages/home.aspx

Nothing a couple of classes can't abstract away - then you are only stuck if no other vender has the features that you need, not just because you lack the correct apis.

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