The MySQL petition
Passing on this email. I'd be interested in your opinions of the issues raised. Hi! I am contacting you because you have in the past shown interest in MySQL and from that I assume you are interested in the future well-being of MySQL. Now you have a unique opportunity to make a difference. By signing the petition athttp://www.helpmysql.org you can help affect the future of MySQL as an Open Source database. You can find more information of this on my latest blog post at: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html Help us spread the world about this petition! http://www.helpmysql.org is available in 18 languages and every vote is important, independent of from where in the world it comes! If you know people that are using MySQL, please contact them and ensure they also sign the petition! Regards, Monty Creator of MySQL PS: If you already have signed the petition or know about it, sorry for reminding you about this! Because of the importance of this issue, I am trying to contact every person that I have ever communicated with regarding MySQL. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: The MySQL petition
On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Ted Roche tedro...@tedroche.com wrote: Passing on this email. I'd be interested in your opinions of the issues raised. MySQL is GPL. Oracle can do whatever they want, but the code itself has already been freed (as in freedom). Oracle can't put that genie back in the bottle. The most they can do is force the community to completely fork the project, thereby relinquishing whatever influence they might otherwise have. Turning the cynicism dial up to 11, I'd say what Monty is really afraid of is that if Oracle shuts down what used to be MySQL, Inc., he would be out of a job, and he might lose stature in the community. The community might dethrone him. Right now he's more-or-less in charge, and his company has a wonderful marketing tool, in that the name of the project is also the name of his company. Any corporate fork would need to do much more marketing. And Oracle's marketing department is doubtless much better funded. There are alternative scenarios that don't involve rethinking the Widenius family budget. People who choose MySQL generally are doing so because it's not owned and controlled by a big company who demands big payments -- in other words, because it's not Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc. They're unlikely to start handing Larry Ellison bags of cash just because Oracle now owns the MySQL trademark. Widenius could capitalize on that, open up a new shop selling support, services, and consulting, similar to what he does now. Of course, he wouldn't own the copyrights, so he couldn't sell proprietary licenses on the side, and he's have to compete on his merits only, without the name. Too bad, so sad. But then, it seems to work out okay for Red Hat. Welcome to the Free Software never-going-out-of-business sale, available at an FTP site near you! (origin unclear) -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: The MySQL petition
On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Arc Riley arcri...@gmail.com wrote: We have PostgreSQL, which has a much healthier development community and Py3 support already. Shocking though this may be to some, Python support is not *everyone's* most critical feature. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: The MySQL petition
No, but its a sign of developer interest and activity. Sqlite and postgres have Py3 support, MySQL does not. On Jan 1, 2010 2:43 PM, Ben Scott dragonh...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Arc Riley arcri...@gmail.com wrote: We have PostgreSQL, which h... Shocking though this may be to some, Python support is not *everyone's* most critical feature. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-disc...@mail.gnhl... ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: The MySQL petition
It is a sad situation, but one that happens every once in a while, and particularly when a profit-making company heads up a FOSS project. In 2008 Sun bought MySQL for 1 Billion dollars, 800 million in cash and 200 million in options. Someone got a lot of money, and quite a few people probably continued to pull a good salary working for Sun, so Sun's stockholders made a real investment in MySQL, even though it was a GPLed product and could have been forked at any time. And we should not overlook the effort of forking the code. Yes, the code itself is GPLed (and MySQL did a good job of keeping the GPLed version fairly cheek-to-cheek with the features of the commercial version), but there is a lot of IP in the behind-the-scenes code and set up of testing tools, building tools, etc. that would have to be duplicated. And as Ben pointed out, the name, brand, etc. has a lot of worth. If these were not true, then Sun would not have spent 1 Billion dollars to buy MySQL. Now Sun has been sold to Oracle. The argument is that Oracle might kill off MySQL or simply let it languish. Unfortunately for the MySQL folks Oracle does not have a history of doing this. In 1994 they bought Rdb from Digital, moved the engineering people to another building close by Digital's Spitbrook Rd facility, and as late as 2008 was still updating and improving Rdb. Yes, they dropped support for Rdb on Tru64 Unix, but that is mostly because Tru64 disappeared. AFAIK Oracle is still supporting it on OpenVMS. Berkeley DB was an embedded Open Source project maintained by a company called Sleepycat Software and was bought by Oracle. They still maintain it as FOSS and sell support. Granted, Oracle markets and pushes its own database engine, but what would have happened if Sun had simply went bankrupt and the intellectual property just disappeared? It happened to a lot of technologies from DEC when Compaq took over. Yes, Oracle is a dominant database company, but there are other databases out there that are FOSS which people could use: o PostgreSQL o Firebird and some interesting ones coming out: o MongoDB o CouchDB and there are other commercial database companies (Microsoft SQL, IBM's DB2 anyone?) so the government might be loath to intervene under anti-trust laws. The petition is reasonably written, with reasonable alternatives. I just think that forcing Oracle to sell off something that Sun was willing to pay 1 Billion dollars for just a year earlier on the premise that Oracle would not manage it well is probably something that will not fly. On the other hand, I wonder how many government installations are running MySQL at this pointnot that it would or should influence anything. md ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: The MySQL petition
The feelings on the Oracle acquisition seem quite split in the open source community. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center wrote an opinion to the European Commission in favor of the acquisition [1] and Pamela Jones of Groklaw has written a few articles about the merger in support including one specifically addressing Moglen's letter [2]. At work, we were becoming concerned about MySQL as the community was already becoming fragmented prior to Oracle's arrival on the scene. In addition to the official Sun MySQL builds, there are enhanced builds with commercial support from Percona [3] and OurDelta [4]. OurDelta is from former MySQL employees. Monty Widenius himself, has forked MySQL as well as part of the MariaDB project [5]. And there's the cloud geared fork/refactor called Drizzle [6]. Monty also challenged Oracle on stewardship of MySQL and they responded that they would keep MySQL GPLed. [discussion at 7]. maddog has already commented in this thread on some Oracle acquisitions that have been kept in good faith by Oracle. I think another important one to mention is InnoDB, the popular transactional database engine that comes with MySQL. InnoDB is designed and maintained by Innobase Oy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle [8] (acquired in October 2005). I'm no big fan of Oracle, but MySQL has enough issues and community splintering. I think this fight over the Oracle acquisition does nothing but continue to hurt MySQL. I also think Oracle has shown enough good faith in past acquisitions that MySQL will be ok in their ownership. Besides, there's always Postgresql [9]. :) -Shawn [1] http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/04/software-freedom-law-center-submits-opinion-oracle/ [2] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091204095942328 [3] http://www.percona.com/ [4] http://ourdelta.org/ [5] http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB [6] http://drizzle.org/ [7] http://thecommandline.net/2009/12/14/montys-challenge-to-oracle-over-mysql-stewardship-and-their-response/ [8] http://www.innodb.com/ [9] http://www.postgresql.org/ On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Ted Roche tedro...@tedroche.com wrote: Passing on this email. I'd be interested in your opinions of the issues raised. Hi! I am contacting you because you have in the past shown interest in MySQL and from that I assume you are interested in the future well-being of MySQL. Now you have a unique opportunity to make a difference. By signing the petition at http://www.helpmysql.org you can help affect the future of MySQL as an Open Source database. You can find more information of this on my latest blog post at:http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html Help us spread the world about this petition!http://www.helpmysql.org is available in 18 languages and every vote is important, independent of from where in the world it comes! If you know people that are using MySQL, please contact them and ensure they also sign the petition! Regards, Monty Creator of MySQL PS: If you already have signed the petition or know about it, sorry for reminding you about this! Because of the importance of this issue, I am trying to contact every person that I have ever communicated with regarding MySQL. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche Associates, LLChttp://www.tedroche.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: The MySQL petition
On Fri, 2010-01-01 at 11:43 -0500, Arc Riley wrote: We have PostgreSQL, which has a much healthier development community and Py3 support already. The MySQL community is already fractured from the Sun purchase, isn't it a little late to save it? Sun did not do too much harm. MySQL fills a niche between sqlite and postgresql. Administration is very simple. Loosely coupled replication is built in. Some of us may be locked into the last stable release for a while depending upon events. -- Lloyd Kvam Venix Corp DLSLUG/GNHLUG library http://dlslug.org/library.html http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/rsshtml/recent/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/rss/recent/dlslug ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
