Synergies and Opportunities: Open Source and Commercial Vendors - a Study of the Relational Database Market.

Overview

This paper analyzes the influence of open source in the market for relational databases (RDBMS). It examines primarily the economic but also in parts the legal and social dimensions. In order to do so, it first gives an introduction to the theory of informations goods and open source. Following is an overview of the RDBMS market and the SQL standards. The core of this paper is a series of case studies which illustrate how both individual developers but also companies are influenced in their abilities by open source. The paper also features a number of email interviews with members of several open source database projects. In this process it was discovered that open source can assist developer in their career development. Companies on the other hand profit from lowered transaction and development costs. Open source also assists in building markets for complimentary products or even to undermine core markets of competitors.