[Info-vax] MariaDB (Re: OT: what is old is new again?)

[Craig A. Berry]

On 11/23/16 2:05 PM, David Froble wrote:

> Now, this is where people like me, third party vendors, get confused.
> Whether it's Mark, or someone else, or VSI, what's the difference?  If a
> third party agreed to provide support and such, they why do you insist
> on only the developer of VMS?

As has been said, numerous times I think, no such third party exists.
There are multiple vendors who offer commercial support for MariaDB and
even more for MySQL. But not on VMS. There are free community edition
downloads of binary installation packages and/or instructions for
installing from source for all major platforms. But not for VMS.

Anyone wanting to sell VMS to people who don't already have it (or are
struggling to keep it) will need an answer for the question "Where can I
get X for VMS?" where X may be MariaDB, NodeJS, MongoDB, or hundreds of
other packages that can be dabbled with for free and high quality
commercial support obtained from multiple vendors. "We hope someone else
will do it" might not always be considered an adequate answer.

Yes, VSI has injected some hope into the equation. But this problem has
been around for a decade or two during which the free stuff has become
vastly more important than it used to be.