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IBM

IBM Reconsiders making DB2/Linux Free 24

Posted by Hemos from the reconsideration-of-the-choice dept.
WonderClown writes "IBM is getting requests from corporate customers for the Linux version of their DB2 database, and so they reconsidering their decision to make it free. Of course, it never was free in the GNU sense anyway, since they weren't going to release the sources AFAICT. The story is here. " H: The reconsideration comes because of the huge amount of corporate interest-which I suppose is a good sign, in its own way.
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IBM Reconsiders making DB2/Linux Free More

IBM Reconsiders making DB2/Linux Free

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  • Well - that means Linux has really become a
    main stream OS as far as IBM is concerned.
  • CICS sounds pretty cool, but it seems like IBM is hustling Java in a big way. I wonder if there won't be something similar to CICS/Java?

    Anyways, I'm off to grab a free copy of DB2 if I still can. Like someone else said, MySQL is great for some things and unsuitable for others.

    Although if you KNOW you need transactions (rather than just clumsy LOCK requests) what the hell are you doing running the DB on Linux? ;-)

    (i.e. shouldn't you have a big AIX or Solaris box?)


  • Is them do a free for development use and pay for deployment. And of course pay for support. Maybe a 6 month break for startups or something.

    Seems sensable to me.
    --Zachary Kessin
  • I can see a definate downside to having all of this 'free' software (like WordPerfect for Linux for free). There are many people out there that assume that because a piece of softare is free, it is not a good piece of software.
    I agree with having commercial pricing. But, I also believe that if a large company like Corel or IBM would release thier software for free for anyone to use, that that would have to be intimidating to smaller companies that would be considering doing the same, and quite frankly monetarily impossible for the smaller companies.

  • I dont know... I wrestle with CICS on MVS, and it is anything but trivial to use. But maybe what I am seeing is the complexity of a transaction manager - so any such product would be as complex.

  • Today Linux runs against NT.

    Price this product acordingly and ofer similer
    support options. Grow the support as the instaled
    base increases ( we don't like to hold for 30
    Mins. ).

    The free developer version is optional but may be
    needed to seed the market since the competition
    is already doing that.


  • Ok, ok, don't over-react guys ;)
    In fact DB/2 really sucks.
    It really can't cope with Oracle...
    It might be interesting for small applications,
    if the price is ok but then, again, you could
    also use PostgreSQL or maybe MySQL...
    We use DB/2 and Oracle in our applications
    (a huge pool of servers, with Tuxedo and TopEnd -
    we develop payment systems) and, believe me,
    DB/2 is broken and expensive (did you know that
    you have to pay an extra license for *every
    single connect* ? - you want 10 connects at a
    time, you have to buy 10 of these licenses).
    The point is that DB/2 _exists_ for Linux, which
    makes porting applications that use DB/2 from other Unices (or NT) easy (and we are only waiting on Tuxedo for Linux to port our platform - maybe
    we'll wait forever :( )...
    Any application existing on Linux is making
    Linux stronger against NT.
    I think that now that we have office applications
    (StarOffice, Corel), databases (Informix, SyBase,
    Oracle, IBM), we definately need middleware!
  • My votes in for free for noncommercial and paid for commercial.
  • I don't see why the Linux version should be free when they charge for the AIX, NT, and other versions. Whatever the pricing scheme is, it should be the same for all platforms. Otherwise, IBM is implicitly making a statement that Linux isn't used for serious business, at least not when compared to the "real" OS's. Of course, I won't complain about having a robust RDBMS available for free on Linux or any platform, but I don't want Linux to get the image that it's not a commercially viable platform for which to develop.


    That being said, I think that making the software free and charging for support might be a good idea. I mean, large corporate customers will pay for support no matter what. IBM would lose the revenue from a lot of small companies that would try to get by without support, but I don't think that would account for a significant portion of their revenue anyway.

  • I would like to see IBM offer DB2 both for free and for charge. The only difference would be, the free download of DB2 would be unsupported - great for developers and those that could not normally afford DB2, and the purchased DB2 would come with support - any serious enterprise would go with this option. IMO - this would work great for IBM, companies, and Linux. IBM would still get their money by charging for "official" DB2 support and maintinace, companies would have a support contract, and Linux would gain more users/developers. A company could, at very little cost, buy a Linux box, install Linux and DB2 and begin development. Later, when the project gets closer to production, support for DB2 could be purchased, or the application could be migrated to an existing server running DB2.

  • I agree with the above post. Linux offers a level of code compatability on more platforms that any other OS I know of (except for possibly NetBSD or OpenBSD). You can develop code on a i386, and so long as you aren't using any assembly, it will compile on a Alpha (or PPC, or Sparc, or ...) running Linux with little or no effort.

  • ...CICS for Linux. I use DB2/2 and CICS/2 (on OS/2). CICS is nice because it takes care of the transactions for you--it's quite trivial to design a nice site like Slashdot with DB2 and CICS (CICS is a transaction monitor).

    For those of you who don't know what a transaction monitor is, it takes care of making stuff happen. So, you can define a procedure like "post comment". Then you can make your webscript for posting comments call that procedure via CICS, and CICS will make sure it gets executed. CICS takes care of errors occurring and it plugs into DB2.

    Think of CICS as handling code the way DB2 handles data. Microsoft Transaction Server does the same thing but needs a lot more resources. CICS has been in use for 28 years. It's become quite popular as of late for building large websites that run on big iron.

    There, I guess you know what company I like now. grin

    CICS for Linux along with DB2 would almost be nirvana. (For nirvana, IBM would need to port their Java VM as well.)

    My clumsy port of the X TrueType fontserver (xfstt) to OS/2 [ml.org]

  • I'd just like to see a version of DB2 out for linux soon...preferably free, but i don't consider that a necessity at this point. considering that DB2 is an incredible database system, some linux exposure, sometime soon, would be nice.
  • As a commercial strategy IBM has always several products for a simular purpose at a different price in their store. It's the market or some other factor (science, politics) that forces their decision!!! (which can always be changed after a while ...)

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