On Oct 7, 2005, at 11:46 PM, Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote:
Walt Weaver wrote:
Well, forgive me for being a bit skeptical and cynical but this
sounds like
spin to me.
As a 17-year Oracle DBA I have never seen Oracle do anything that can
remotely be called benevolent. Larry Ellison buys companies, guts
them,
chews them up and spits them in the gutter. I doubt he'll ever buy
a company
just because he's caught up in the groovy sunshine world that's
Open Source.
And, as an employee of a company that's very, very heavily
committed to
MySQL (we're just about completely moved off of Oracle and are
using InnoDB)
this whole thing leaves us rather worried.
Remember that InnoDB is open source and GPLed. That means that even
if Oracle were to start doing something evil, there's nothing
stopping you, the MySQL team, or anyone else starting a fork that
remained open source and carried on from the last available open
source version.
Of course that's technically true, but is it realistic? Are there
non-MySQL AB forks of either myisam or innodb? It just doesn't seem
that it's as easy for outsiders to pick up and run with this as it is
with other OSS projects.
Even within MySQL AB, how deep is the InnoDB knowledge? We have paid
support, and when it gets to an InnoDB specific issue the question
goes to an InnoDB OY employee fairly quickly. Before we even discuss
someone forking InnoDB, would MySQL AB be able to support current
InnoDB using customers if Oracle were to make Heikki et. al.
unavailable?
This is very worrisome to people whose business rides on InnoDB/MySQL
and can't be covered with PR and spin. It would be nice to hear that
MySQL has worked out the inclusion of whatever InnoDB becomes beyond
the current contract expiration next year, but at a minimum they have
to explain how they will support current InnoDB use when the people
that largely did it aren't necessarily available.
--Ware
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