[freeside-devel] MSSQL

[Ivan Kohler]

On Fri, Oct 06, 2017 at 11:43:26AM +0000, Nathan Anderson wrote:
> 
> > Without commercial sponsorship, we're probably not interested in 
> > reviewing, merging or carrying the maintenance cost of MSSQL support.  
> > That would be a lot of time, work and risk.  I don't see any useful 
> > benefit for our customers or users.
> 
> [...]
> 
> What would you consider to be "commercial sponsorship"?

Paying us money to pay our senior developers to do things like:

- Review your code and engage with you in technical discussion abou it

- Write or work with you on any necessary tests to ensure the risky parts 
  of your changes did not cause problems for our other customers.  Review
  those tests to make sure they actually test the changed codepath in full.

And so forth.  


>  If all you 
> mean is the time and maintenance of the feature itself, assuming we 
> end up committing to Freeside as an organization, and assuming we are 
> the ones who end up single-handedly bootstrapping MSSQL support from 
> the outset, we would then have a vested interest in carrying on 
> maintenance of this particular feature ourselves for as long as we use 
> the product.  All we would ask in return is that our patches be 
> integrated into the mainline releases,

Sorry, no, we're not interested in engaging in this work 
non-commerically.  Your proposed changes are far too intrusive and 
dangerous, with no benefit to our customers or users.


> As for "benefit for [your] customers or users", I'd argue that 
> anything that helps to make the base Freeside product less dependent 
> on a particular DB platform, the better.

I very much disagree.  We do not have an overriding design goal of 
making Freeside less dependent on a particular database platform, and 
doing so does not help our customers or users.  It introduces a huge 
amount of development and risk for no benefit.

Limiting ourself to the "lowest common denominator" in DB platforms is 
counterproductive to our goals of producing the most full-featured, 
open-source platform we can with the limited development resources 
available to us.

To do that, we leverage more advanced database features over time.  In 
the past, we didn't use transactions or foreign keys, now we do.  In the 
future, we are considering making use of PostGIS.  And so on.


However, in contrast to MSSQL support, MySQL/MariaDB is open-source, was 
supported recently, could probably be supported again without intrusive 
changes, and could increase user/developer/customer interest in the 
platform.

We would be interested in reviewing or patches or pull requests for that 
MySQL/MariaDB support.


-- 
Ivan Kohler
President and Head Geek, Freeside Internet Services, Inc.  http://freeside.biz/
Debian GNU/Linux developer  |  CPAN author  |  cat person  |  ski addict