On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 10:56 -0400, Martin Gainty wrote: > IF MySQL returns to opensource..(presumably under Monty's benevolent > leadership) > then packages that utilise MySQL could be "for paying clients only" > > from your perspective what is the future of MySQL?
Interesting question. I think MySQL will live on in various incarnations but I do think its glory days are over. It will be a supported but second class citizen from Oracle. I was at Innotech yesterday speaking on the open source panel (http://vimeo.com/4307197) and one of the participants stated that they were nervous about the fact that MySQL had been bought twice in the last two years. I did mention that I didn't think MySQL was going away and that Oracle is a smart company and there is a lot of mind share with MySQL. However, Oracle is not interested in the 1000/yr business. For the most part that is where MySQL revenue is. It is estimated that MySQL AB was only doing 50M a year when they were bought by Sun. 50M a year is petty cash for Oracle. So Oracle has two choices, completely change MySQL to make it more profitable and thus alienate its main user base (small websites) or maintain it long enough to allow MySQL to kill itself. MySQL is already killing itself through the various forks that have permeated through the last 9 months. Another issue I see is the potential for mass migration from MySQL by non web applications. Yes there are a lot of them. Why? Because one way Oracle can make money from MySQL is to continue to charge for "linked" software against MySQL. If you are building a web app as long as your web language is open source, you are good with the GPL. However if you are building a monolithic app in say C++ you have a serious problem because the nature of the GPL guarantees that your C++ app will have to be open source. As much as a lot of us are pro Open Source the majority (by far) of the world still isn't. MySQL does have a strong following in the appliance state in this way. I would expect that MySQL in two years likely won't exist except on the most tertiary level. Most new projects will be developed in either PostgreSQL, Interbase or one of the forks (MariaDB, Drizzle). Sincerely, Joshua D. Drake -- PostgreSQL - XMPP: jdr...@jabber.postgresql.org Consulting, Development, Support, Training 503-667-4564 - http://www.commandprompt.com/ The PostgreSQL Company, serving since 1997 -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=arch...@jab.org
