By Sylvia Carr
Published: Monday 20 November 2006
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Name
Hugh Kennedy
Location
UK & Germany
Occupation
Frankfurt & London
Comment
Open Source, essentially just means that you get access to the source code. Invaluable, if you want to shop around for support, after all you can only expect Oracle to be able to amend Oracle Database internals or Microsoft to do the same for Windows.
The "Free" bit is as mentioned in the article, very much a matter for the individual license. Many major organisations can and do rely on Open Source and "Free" toolchains for development. For something like production where you do want an instant fix capability, maybe it is better paying for the supported commercially-licensed version. However, if you want to support it yourself, and with careful compliance with the license conditions, it is possible to use programs such as MySQL legitimately without paying a cent.
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