R: R: [Zope-DB] ZODBCDA for Python 2.3.3

Charlie Clark charlie at egenix.com
Fri Apr 2 07:09:01 EST 2004


Hi Phil and the rest,

thanks for raising some sensible issues which I'll try and answer in the 
knowledge that Marc-André is currently very busy with other things at the 
moment; repairing his Lear jet!
 
On 2004-04-02 at 09:08:03 [+0200], Philip Kilner wrote:
> True, although the eGenix fees are not high and anyone in the commercial
> world would probably not find it an obstacle to progress - that's the
> position I find myself in right now, and I'll depend on the RDBMS enough
> to be happy to pay the current license fees. Needless to say, that might
> not apply to not-for-profit enterprises.

In exceptional circumstances we do not charge for licences.
 
> *However*, I would not have found Zope an approachable product without
> the free ODBC driver - IOW, if there had /never/ been a free/bundled
> ODBC driver, I would not be using Zope in the first place.

We are aware of this through the enquiries we receive about mxODBC. The 
reason behind things being the was they are is historical.
 
> I think this problem needs solving not so much for us as for those who
> may follow us. I'd hate to think that Zope's uptake could be slowed down
> by this omission, but I'm pretty sure that's what will happen - although
> I have no basis for judging the scale of the problem.

We disagree here. Anyone can get an evaluation licence for mxODBC for free. 
Anyone who's serious about development on this basis is usually able to 
justify the licence. mxODBC opens doors to developers and not just on the MS 
Windows front.
 
> Questions that come to mind are: -
> 
> - What level of functionality would be required to address this issue?
> I would have been put off by "crippleware", but not by a solution which
> would have been hard to scale.
> 
> - Would eGenix consider releasing a free driver without the qualities
> that made the eGenix product superior to the ZC product in the first place?
> It doesn't seem like the best route, simply because the eGenix driver
> wasn't written to have such deficiencies!

In answer to both of these it's important to note that it's not really the 
mxODBCZopeDA that is the issue but the mxODBC python driver which is 
included. This requires a lot of work to maintain and support; we have to do 
implement workarounds to deal with known problems with the various RDBMS 
ODBC drivers out there. Unfortunately there seems to be a 100% correlation 
between users who are prepared to pay for a licence and those who are 
prepared to pay for support and with the converse being the case (if licence 
== free: support = free) is a real disincentive for providing a free 
version. At the end of the day it is customer satisfaction that is the most 
important thing for our strategy and we get far more "well done, thanks for 
a great product" than "I wish I'd never bought this lousy thing" comments. 
We are going to continue to try and keep these people happy.

It should be noted that commercial parts or implementations have always been 
part of Zope. DC/ZC has always kept some inhouse developments to themselves; 
there is a commercial version of Plone; there are other commercial products. 
We think that this is indicative of a healthy market in the Zope world. 
Everyone benefits from this dual approach and it should be noted that the 
*free* libraries such as mxDateTime are used in lots of products including 
many ZopeDA's

Charlie 
-- 
Charlie Clark
eGenix.com

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