Why no SAP nor DB2 on FreeBSD ?

[Ivan Voras]

2009/9/28 Saifi Khan <saifi.khan at datasynergy.org>:
> On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Ivan Voras wrote:
>
>> Saifi Khan wrote:
>> > Hi all:
>> >
>> > In continuation of my investigation of Oracle, i also noticed
>> > that there is:
>> >  . no SAP for FreeBSD
>> >  . no DB2 for FreeBSD
>> >  . no Sybase ASE for FreeBSD
>> >  . no Informix for FreeBSD
>> >
>> > Discouing PostgreSql installations, effectively enterprise
>> > database setups have given FreeBSD a miss.
>> > What could be reason for this ?
>>
>> An obvious guess would be that the userbase is too small and that makes
>> it unprofitable to support the products on FreeBSD.
>>
>
> Thanks for providing the perspective on the issue.
>
> Here is a rather straight query, "how do we grow the userbase" ?

Something like that is very tedious and hard, mostly because it's a
chicken-and-the-end problem. Vendors will not develop products (and
device drivers) for platforms with few users because it's
unprofitable, and users will not use new platforms that have low
vendor support. For a very pertinent example, see Linux - it has a
vastly bigger user base and it's still largely unsupported by sw & hw
vendors.

There is no completely right "solution" for this - you can't even
create a global survey of users that would possibly use a new platform
if it were supported and submit it to vendors because the users  are
not well enough informed about it.

One angle that would be interesting to play with vendors would be the
BSD license - enabling them to create proprietary solutions  - but
apparently vendors are not that scared of the GPL.