Hi Roger ----- Original Message -----
So what's the upshot. Is Mysql about to be commercial or be killed? if either/or then alternatives start to look good?
It's been commercial since 1999, there was a company MySQL AB. I used to work there (employee#25), and so did Stewart Smith and several other faces familiar to LUV members. Open Source and commercial are not contradictory, and there are many examples of this. MySQL cannot be killed as the sources are available, and sufficient expertise is concentrated in several companies including Monty Program, Percona, and the database team at Facebook (formerly the MySQL db team at Google). Oracle could cease operating the MySQL brand name or whatever. They could choose to no longer publish sources of future release versions. (there are a few permutations of each option) Neither makes much sense on the business level, as it triggers other actions they cannot control. Right now they have a seat at the open source database table, and a strategic stake in that market. If they "stop", the user base is still there, and so are the active players. It wouldn't be a case of "oh dear we must now all use Oracle RDBMS" or anything like that. As I described in an earlier reply on this thread (must be weeks ago now), my company Open Query tends to deploy MariaDB. Should Oracle no longer deliver anything (or anything useful) from upstream, MariaDB will stop picking up that stuff, but still maintain its own development and fixes. There would be no effective change for either us or our clients. In addition, if Oracle mucked around with either the brand or the OSS nature of future releases, that would be a trigger for Linux distributions to ditch MySQL in favour of (for instance) MariaDB. They'd essentially have no choice, as otherwise there'd be no updates. Given that there are these drop-in replacements, they're natural successors. But... Oracle is not stupid. Whether or not it understand OSS, it understands business and economics. All the above arguments can, as you've seen, be made purely on that basis - specific OSS considerations don't need to come in to it for a decent analysis. Oracle does tend to make business decisions that appear curious to us, as they hurt community or some aspects of the development environment. That's what's currently going on with things like no longer having some bugs public, and more. It is damaging in a way, but more in a "slow annoyance" fashion.
From my perspective, if things are going to proceed in that way (and I have no reason to suspect that it won't, given simple business and process imperatives), I hope that one or more big distros soon get the shits with the situation and make the jump. As someone else noted, having security issues properly dealt with is a big thing for Debian. Just sayin'.
I thought it was rather odd that they (Oracle) bought mysql to begin with...
We don't need to keep recycling this bit - they didn't. MySQL AB choose to be bought by Sun Microsystems, and later Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Cheers, Arjen. -- Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com) MySQL services Sane business strategy explorations at http://upstarta.com.au Personal blog at http://lentz.com.au/blog/