I'm somewhat taken aback by all of the negative reaction to Gemstone being a closed source product in the wake of the Maglev announcement.
Look at this:
Do you really think that the people that own this ship care about paying for software?
I doubt it, but they probably care about things like development speed. And software reliability. And the ability to get someone on the phone immediately if something goes wrong with the software.
That's the world the Gemstone comes from. I would bet that if the software running the shipping platform for this company falls over, it would lose more money over the course of a few hours then it would cost them to license Gemstone for an entire year.
Here's another example where JP Morgan has a system built on top of Gemstone that they can not afford to shut down or migrate to another language because it would cost them too much money.
How is being exposed to the toolset that powers things like that going to be a bad thing?
Sure, it's closed source, but if enough people use it and benefit from it then the community will just do what we always do:
Some of us will pay for it, some of will find clever ways to subvert the license, and the rest of us will get to work on building an open source clone of it.
That's what always happens, and when it does happen some people will continue buying the closed source supported version (Oracle) and others will move to the free version (MySql).
What makes anyone think that something different is going to happen here?
There is a relationship between development speed, software reliability and the ability to solve problems and a community of users.
There is a relationship between broad experience with a technology and confidence that it can be trusted.
When I want to start a project a depth of available expertise is a good thing. Books and articles about techniques and pitfalls, Software Libraries, and many other things can affect software reliability. When I have a problem with Oracle I can often get an instant answer from google.
We looked at an Object Database for my previous project and the option was rejected by management due to the relative sizes of the RDBMS and OODB communities.
It is not inconcievable that the people who own that ship might end up picking Oracle, even if Gemstone is more productive.
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