Hi Dave,
You're absolutely right. If its a question of no-one able to support the Oracle side, the I guess I have to (reluctantly) agree. The laws of natural selection quite rightly have to apply.
Once Oracle is not maintained actively in the core however that is effectively consigning it to 'code heaven'. You would be better off removing it entirely.
(by the way, I meant no disrespect by the term hobbyist, but they must make up some portion of the community and naturally oracle support isn't going to be a major factor for them. Not sure pure democracy is the right way to make these decisions).
Its an unfortunate foible of commerce I'm afraid that work expended needs to be justified by recognisable need. OpenACS is not my hobby. I have little enough spare time as it is.
We only really use OpenACS the core and are rarely in a position where we need to extend/change it. Therefore the natural opportunities for contribution are limited. We aren't a large company by any means, but the people we work for are. We simply can't afford to allocate paid-for time to contributing to stuff we don't need (i.e. packages etc).
The only PG thing we use OACS for is as a test tool/harness (you may recall we created the automated tesing package).. so limited opportunities there.
Our clients are Oracle based, Postgres simply isn't a commerical reality for us. And, it looks like, neither will OpenACS be.
I guess we'll just take a cut and do with it what we will.
