Hi,

Why do you estimate 200-500 users? Pulling a number out of your ass doesn't make it true, by any stretch. I would be surprised if there are 20-50 users of solidDB, let alone 10x that many. Point me to a single lone user of it in production?

Regards,

Jeremy

I expect little to happen with the SolidDB codebase. The code was too immature and didn't offer any significant advantages over the actively developed alternatives for MySQL (InnoDB, Falcon, Maria).

Since as Jeremy already pointed out they had no users, it's hard to say what potential vendor lock-in would be expected. Instead let's think of a real test -- say Oracle discontinued InnoDB, that would be a real test of your question. Would the community and/or Sun pick up development where InnoBase left off?

I think someone would, because they have a wide userbase (meaning community has incentive) and a corporate base (meaning a new company has incentive). That is where you'd see the power of reducing vendor lock-in with open source.

SolidDB for MySQL is a better example of yet another half-baked open source project sitting on sourceforge.

Jeremy, if you take the 2145 downloads and divide by the 15 releases of the package, you get 143 'users'. But this assumes that each and every one of the 143 were users from day 1 in 2006 and upgraded to every release. I doubt that was the case, and based on the growth in monthly downloads, I would guess that more users joined the ranks in 2007 and hence didn't upgrade 15x, but more like 5x.

In any case, I have no idea if 200-500 is correct. Also, I didn't say customers. Projects like MySQL or Apache Geronimo have significantly more users than they do customers.