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Novell to Ship MySQL With NetWare 6
An anonymous reader writes "Coming close on the heels of their announcement that they've ported PostgreSQL to NetWare, Novell announced today that they will begin shipping MySQL with NetWare 6. Owing to customer and partner doubts about the GPL, Novell has chosen the commercial version of MySQL, rather than the GPL'ed version."
It says it'll ship in 2003, but a beta is available.
WHEN will MySQL 4 get out of 'development' and into 'stable'? The infoworld article was already mentioning MySQL 5, but 4 is still alpha/beta, not 'production', and the 3.23 series seems to be progressing still.
creation science book
I loved Netware 4.11 and think that NDS even then is better than the next two iterations of Active Directory could hope to be.
However, Novell has been doing this "Me too!!!!" thing with bundling stuff for years. Perl, the whole Netscape server, some IBM web thing, etc and it means nothing.
I hate to agree with the trolls, but Novell is dying. There was even an article in the WSJ last Friday about companies trading *below* their hard asset valus, and guess who was on it? Novell was! The Wall Street logic apparently was that trading below asset value was the sign that you were a dead duck and that investors not only didn't think you would do well now, but thought you'd likely go bankrupt, too.
MySQL has always published incorrect information about it means for MySQL to be licensed under the GPL. Much of the text was from when it was published under the free-for-non-commercial use license. They keep this incorrect explanation to encourage people and companies to financially support the company's work.
And while I applaud them seeking financial support, and hope companies who profit from MySQL do support the company and the product's development, their having that false explanation of the GPL licensing and what it means should be removed and replaced with a more honest licensing explanation.
As much as I used to agree with those who sound the "better product" drum, as a former Novell sysadmin (primary NDS admin for a state university and developer of a YES approved NLM), Novell has lost it. They have too much development in Bangalore (yes, I have participated in a conference call with Bangalore engineers, and yes, they did speak English well, but didn't quite get some concepts on failover I was trying to explain as required) and too much turnover among developer staff. Couple that with a core kernel that's too small to extend (flaws in the kernel prevented effective multi-CPU work are documented on their developer site -- look for NKS) and you have a lean, mean server OS that rocks on a 486, but looks as out of place today as big hair and belts over large sweaters.
Reading the license term for MySQL it seems pretty clear that Novell has no choice in choosing the license model. According to the terms at the MySQL page, MySQL is only GPL if the whole system is open sourced or GPL:ed. N'est ce pas?
... it only applies if you link against code.
Actually this points to an important weakness in the GPL
It is possible, for instance, to write your own mysql client library, which then communicates with the mysql server over a socket. Separate programs, no license infringements, so your code (with your special client library) can be closed source even if you use the mysql GPL license (and, when you distribute your complete product, be sure to include a copy of the mysql source).
However, most people use (link against) the (GPL'd) mysql client library to talk to the mysql server, and that's what gets them.
It is for this reason that I suspect mysql's protocol and client documentation is nonexistant. Contrast to the extensively documented PostgreSQL protocol and client libraries, which is a BSD license product. There is no incentive for the PostgreSQL guys to create impediments to custom engineered client libraries.
-- p
Yet if you look at their full product range they have products such as;
I could go on but the message is clear, the company is packed with good products which it doesn't know how to sell.
Last year I ran an evaluation of all the Meta Directory software out there and DirXML was the clear winner. We bought it and are very happy with it's performance, it certainly should be looked at by anyone who has looked at the Sun ONE or Siemens "equivelents".
My advice to Novell would be that they need to spin off the Netware business to continue developing this and keeping their many millions of existing users happy. The remainder of the business should then be refocused as a Directory Services company. They already almost give away eDirectory, they should make this more official and then when organisations are hooked sell them all the value add products which integrate so nicely with this.
This would also be welcomed by all the organisations who are concerned about Active Directory's single platform nature and the high cost of the Sun ONE Directory and their on|off support for Linux, which Novell have always been very committed too.