Emma McGrattan, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Ingres, recently wrote an amusing blog post that, well, made a certain database story more interesting than it was. Here’s a snippet:

Once upon a time a small village of developers decided to create a database. This database would be different from anything the world had seen before. It would be built for web developers and wouldn’t be encumbered with all of the baggage that other fully fledged relational databases carry.

The village elders mapped out the architecture for the revolutionary new database. They encouraged everyone in the village, from the smallest child to the most experienced hunter, to contribute to the best of their abilities for the greater good. Word of the project leaked across the land and soon people from other villages joined in the project. The initial releases of the databases were a little shaky, but the villagers worked together to plug the holes.

The relational database giants mocked the little database. But the giants missed a very key thing – the village of database developers was connected to lots of other villages who were working in collaboration, all across the land. The network of villages was able to quickly add many of the features that the giants had, and even offer some new innovation.

Read the rest of the post at Emma’s blog, The View From 25B, and see if you can figure out upon whom this is based.

Forrester Research has released the results of a survey that offer a different perspective from those mentioned in my previous post. In a nutshell, 1017 IT decision-makers in North America and Europe were questioned about their perspective and current use of open source software. The results were surprising given leading analyst opinion on the growing use of OSS.

Apparently a whopping seventy percent of those surveyed had no plans or interest in adopting open source software, citing security as the number one issue prohibiting them from doing so. However, it needs to be noted that of those surveyed, many of the decision-makers didn’t realize that some of their software is indeed open source.

Savio Rodrigues over at InfoWorld sums it up nicely in his latest article, “Forrester Finds Lack of Interest in OSS?,” by saying, “OSS vendors face an uphill battle to sell anything … if the top decision maker doesn’t believe that his/her company is using OSS. It’s not an insurmountable battle, but it is uphill.” Savio provides some pie charts and further investigation in his article, which is absolutely worth a read.

The actual report is restricted to those with a Forrester subscription.

Kingpin Intelligence, an IT-focused marketing firm, recently completed a study among IT professionals in the UK on developers and the use of open source. Unsurprisingly, a whopping 62% of those polled who do not use open source in their place of work actually use it outside of work. These developers would prefer to work in an environment that favors open source over one that does not, the study said.

“The cost and flexibility benefits of using open source technologies are appealing for developers and organizations in the current financial climate,” said Claire Roy, head of research at Kingpin. However, it was also discovered that a lack of faith in the quality of open source software is still an issue, with less than a third of those polled believing open source software to be of high quality.

Despite this, the use of open source software – specifically open source databases – will continue to grow exponentially, according to analysts. In an April Wall Street Journal issue, Gartner, leaders in the technology analyst sector, determined that sales of open source database software will be in the upper-$200 millions this year, jumping to $400 million by 2009. The article maintains that the comparative low cost of “open source” databases is a huge draw for companies looking to minimize their RDBMS spending.