Samrobb's Journal: Yahoo's Law Of Financial Scalability

I'm departing from my usual criteria for recording a /. "rule" here. While reading an article talking about Key Advantages of Open Source Software, I came across this thread. There was discussion within that thread of a concept which was interesting enough that, even though there was no explict mention of a "law", I felt really should be recorded as one. So, with that, I submit...

The Laws of Slashdot #17: Yahoo's Law of Financial Scalability :

Oracle may scale well technologically, but it doesn't scale financially.

Or, as the original poster put it:

I guess cost does matter as you scale up.

Well sure

[smittyoneeach]

But I'll bet that, if Oracle wants to lock you in, they'll find a way to hide that scalability concern.

Re:Well sure

[Samrobb]

Sure, and I think that most people know that at some level. What impressed me about this statement is that it took something that's a fairly complex idea and wrapped it up in a simple phrase. It's something to jog people's memory about situations like this and remind them that when you're dealing with software, scalability means more than "how many users can you handle?" It's really "How many users can you handle, and what will that cost us?"