The following observations (September 2010) from a large US university library with a strong commitment to open and community source may be of interest to jiscLMS colleagues …
We, and several other academic sites, tried to get Evergreen to run under RHEL (Red Hat Linux). We managed but it broke with every upgrade and we had concluded that we would have to pay for someone to modify the open source software to run under RHEL before we could put it into production.
We were considering Postgre but … we could not have run it without finding a support vendor. Think about it, if the RDBMS broke because of an operating system or other upgrade we don't have the programmers to go into the code, even if it is open source, to fix that so we could keep running. Since we have a campus license for Oracle it would not necessarily be cheaper for the library to run an open source RDBMS.
[Therefore] based on our preliminary evaluation of Evergreen, it was a problem for us that it was not developed under RHEL and Oracle. Practically speaking it may sound like a good approach to go with all "open source" software but it is not always. For mission critical systems you need to be sure the software is supported since you do not have programming staff to be writing security and other types of patches that are essential. This is not to say you absolutely can't use Postgre or MY SQL, but it does need investigation and justification to make the correct choice.
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