oracle licensing too expensive for oracle community site

from this thread on the orafaq forum:

“There is no way we would be able to raise the money required to buy a commercial Oracle license.”

“I believe the XE edition is a max of 2gig. htmldb would be free for that, but by the time you add htmldb overhead and users, I gotta think this site has way way more data than what is left out of the starting 2gig. … Standard Edition One would be the next option, at 5 grand per proc.”

maybe oracle will toss a free license their way, but this is a great case study on how useless oracle’s free offerings really are. (to contrast, of course, mysql’s free offering is fully-featured, with no artificial limitations. same with other truly free databases like firebird or the open-source versions of postgresql.)

[ED: this is the blog of the day ]