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Is Rekall the next Access?
By: bilbrey on 2002-12-31 06:57:15
Section 1 - Comparing Oranges and Pomegranates

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So Peter wants to know about Databases, GUI tools and more under Linux, eh? The "standard" of comparison is Microsoft's Access product. Access is a part of the MS Office family, and can be purchased as part of the Office Professional Package ($579 US) or as a standalone package for $339 US. You can tell they're encouraging suite purchases, can't you? When I picked up the product literature from the Microsoft site (in DOC format, thank goodness for OpenOffice.org), I was amused to read, "this format seamlessly handles future changes"... I'm sorry, aren't they promising to work with new versions that they haven't designed yet? Riiiight. Oh, sorry. This really isn't a mocking session for me, but really, letting freshly graduated B-school kids write promo's has got to stop.

Let me also repeat for the record. There's a lot to like in software from Microsoft. However, their business practices and intrusive licensing make their software less than palatable. When it comes down to the bottom line, I approve of tools that get the job done. If there's a free, or freely licensed tool I can use in place of MS software, I will. But I have to get the job done, and for that, sometimes there's only Windows, and software that works only on that platform.

Back to Access... Until recently, Access came only with the Jet Database, a small scale tool. There have been hooks built in to connect to SQL Server for many moons now, but that's a not-inexpensive server product with some interesting licensing issues of it's own. Now Access comes with a "desktop" version of SQL Server as a lead-in product. Visual basic is the scripting language behind Access. One of my gripes about this is that it's ALL proprietary. The data formats and scripting are subject to change at any time.

By way of comparison, Rekall is available for $80 US (plus shipping) for a packaged version. It costs ten dollars less for the downloadable version. It is only a frontend, forms, reports and queries tool. It currently works with several different backend databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, XBase, IBM's DB2 and ODBC (in beta). The scripting language is Python. It is licensed in such a way that users do get the source code, but no rights of redistribution. Upgrades are going to be free, new plugin architectures will probably cost money. And finally, they promise that if The Kompany goes under, the code will revert to GPL after a year (but that's not in the actual license document).

You've gotta love lawyers, though... "Although the source code for the Software Product is included you may not share, use, reuse the knowledge or technologies in other applications without explicit approval from theKompany.com Inc." You're screwed if you've never seen a printf statement before, and you look at the sources, eh? I know, I know, that's not the intent of the document, but later lawyers are really usually quite good at ignoring intent in their hunt for fees.

OK, enough fun with licences and other such stuff. I wrote to Shawn Gordon, President of The Kompany, and inquired about their licensing of Rekall, first as a (L)GPL product, then under more restrictive terms.. He wrote me back some 20 minutes later (WOW) and explained some of the pieces of the business model that drives their wagon. And of course, they do actively support and code for a number of GPL'd products in the KDE codebase. The decision to do what you enjoy while making enough money for the rent and food is an easy choice. Not many of us can actually be (or want to be?) RMS? Hah!

Now, what can we DO with Rekall? Will it meet any specific needs? Jump feet first into the next section and we'll find out together.

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