Suprised we aren't seeing more of this

Suprised we aren't seeing more of this

Posted May 4, 2025 13:41 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Suprised we aren't seeing more of this by Wol
Parent article: Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license (Redis blog)

> Because you can train up USERS very easily to be developers - as an alleged end-user I'm expected to program as part of my job.

And pay $5000 or $1000 for each user each year? To retain people with rare and valuable skills? Seriously?

In what world would that make any sense?

> I'm expecting my colleagues to find Pick *much* easier than what they do at the moment ...

It doesn't matter whether it's easier or not. It only matter if people with these skills are lining up outside of your business or whether you have to train then and then retain them in your business, somehow.

> Because jobs come in ON TIME and UNDER BUDGET?

That's serious proposition, but you would have to prove that perpetual Pick tax would offset these one-time problems.

This may work, in some cases, but it's very far from the “no-brainer” deal that you imagine.

One may imagine an alternate world, where Pick won, but it would have other problems, namely:

> Our current "big project" - finally going live this year - has been "two years away" for the last five years - which seems to be the norm for big relational projects?

It's the norm for all projects and is not related to Pick in any way, shape or form.

All successful projects come out late and over budget, be it bridge building, relational projects or moon rocker launching.

Pick project only have the luxury to “come in on time and under budget” because they are rare.

Managers have absolutely no idea how much Pick projects may cost thus you may say you would need 100k and 1 year for project that would take 100k and 1 year – and get away with that. Because you have no competitors.

Once competitors would be there competitor who would ask for 40k and 4 month would win. And management would pay 100k for 1 year of work to them and not to you.

> We've been told we'll have to wait 18 months before IT will even look at our little project - I've been threatening to write the whole system single-handed in 6 months

That, again, have nothing to do with Pick and is typical dynamics of how project works in largish companies.

> Because it'll halve the cost of your IT department?

No. It wouldn't. In imaginary world where Pick is popular instead of incompetent relational developers you would get incompetent Pick developers.

Salary spending would stay the same and hardware costs are not a big problem for most companies, these days.

> What little information there is says that a Pick shop pays roughly half the percentage of gross turnover on IT than other shops do.

Of course. But that because Pick is only driven by people with passion. Technology have nothing to do with that, only one characteristic is important: whether it's popular or not.

> It's "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" all over again.

Welcome to the real world. That's how businesses almost always work. Only in rare cases, where a paradigm shift is happening and where change of technology may change how you interact with your customers may ever change that dynamic.

Otherwise, for most businesses, “doing what everyone else is doing” is the right and proper strategy.

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