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Message Posted: Sat, 22 May 2004 @ 10:06:17 GMT

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Hi,

I think most people on this forum is wondering why Teradata has not offered a version of the RDBMS on Linux.

I think the answer to this might be the GPL (GNU General Public License)

It is my understanding that under MP-RAS, Teradata have modified the kernel extensively, to ensure they get the best parallel performance.

If they was to make use of the Linux operating system, they would have to release these enhancements under the GPL for the rest of the community to make use of.

My question would be, is this a bad thing?

How much of the Teradata IP would need to be released under the GPL?

Other companies have already done this, SGI, IBM, Oracle etc.

Have they lost out, NO. In fact they would agree that they have benefited significantly from doing this.

For instance, now the community looks after the XFS (Silicon Graphics File System), it is the community that has to look after the versioning, patching etc. Not SGI. SGI might still provide fixes for bugs, but that is all. On the other side of the coin, SGI now effectively have thousands more developers contributing to there file system, finding bugs, improving performance etc. Something they just could not afford to do alone.

This should not however stop Teradata from producing a Teradata Demo version for Linux, as this could run in user space, and make no changes to the Kernel. After all, it is only a demo version and not required to be performant.

It's a long topic, and personally I do not think the GPL should stop Teradata from moving to a Linux platform.

I especially think that with the release of the 2.6 kernel, Linux is now at a level that exceeds the MP-RAS Kernel. (no flames please)

I think in general open source will benefit everyone. 80% of what a company does in IT is the same across all companies. If it was not, the likes of SAP would never have grown so big.

Think of a world where all companies concentrated on the 20% of IT that made them unique. This could be achieved with Open Source.

Regards

Matthew Winter

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