Speaking of DSpace
So, yes, DSpace 1.4 went gold yesterday—with a caveat. If you’re using proprietary Oracle instead of free PostgreSQL, you’ll have to wait. (No problem for me; I’m PostgreSQL all the way.)
It’s not that the DSpace folks didn’t want to accommodate their big-iron users. It’s that they couldn’t. As they explain in the release announcement:
DSpace is an open source, community-developed and maintained project; none of the committers have access to an Oracle platform with which to test Oracle support, and so we have to rely on wider community participation to maintain that functionality.
Isn’t that interesting. Arguably, Oracle is losing potential business because developers couldn’t build on top of it because they don’t have access to it. I grant you it’s not much potential business, but it’s something… and I can’t imagine DSpace is the only software project, open-source or proprietary, to face a similar dilemma and make a similar decision.
Appropriate analogies to the research literature and access to it are left as an exercise for the student.