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MySQL CEO Interview
someonewhois writes "MySQL's CEO, Marten Mickos, says 'Open source & MySQL will rise, legal foes will fall', in a bold prediction that legal issues will continue to be ignored as a threat towards open source, and that software patents will harm the industry (well, duh)."
Will harm *him*, but they'll help, for instance, Oracle.
Both are in "the industry". So to make blanket statements like harm "the industry" fall on deaf ears.
If you want to bitch about patents in a meaningful way, at least show how they do harm, by preventing competition by giving one company an unfair advantage.
Also, it's in my opinion that it's only the frivolous patents that harm the industry. It's not the patent system itself that's wrong, it's the abuses of it. "Security holes" that need patching.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
But if open source advocates and creators spend all of their time in litigation, doesn't Open source suffer as a result?
Their creativeness is put on hold, and the money for litigation has to come from somewhere. They usually are not in it for the money, so where does it come from?
Corps with their deep pockets have an advantage; they can sit in a court room all day long, every day for years, dragging out the process and basically smothering out the open source comeptition.
On the plus side, I guess there will always be someone to pick up the fight!
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
Thats fine, when you are on the 'right' side of the suit..
Let him get hit with being the defendant on a few IP suits, and i bet he sings a different tune.. One of caution..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Here we have the CEO of a company saying, basically, that his company is going to do well this year.
And just for making that unremarkable statement, he makes the Slashdot homepage?
News flash! It's the CEO's job to promote the company. They all do that. Even Darl.
Actually, MySQL is a lot more like shareware. For a real open source RDBMS, use PostgreSQL.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
"Does he really care about the industry?"
Maybe he does, and maybe he doesn't, but that's not the actual point. Even if he would turn out to be a greedy bastard who wanted to monopolise the entire industry (as MS does), the question remains if sw patents are a good idea or not.
Good isn't good for this or that corporation in the short term, but for society in the long term. After all, a patent is a monopoly given by the state, and the state is (supposed to do) what's good for their citizens. Ultimately, in a democracy, *we* define the state. So the question boils down to: is it a good thing for the populace as a whole?
As we all know, monopolies are never a good thing, and the only reason why it is given, is because it is supposed to stimulate further innovation. at least on sw patents enough studies have been done to indicate they don't do that at all, on the contrary.
Conclusion: it is NOT a good thing. (Even when a particular company might profit from it at a given time).
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
> Have you tried doing bounds-checking in whatever scripting language your frontend application is written in, before passing it to MySQL?
You know, that's the same argument that Mac zealots were using about memory protection before it landed in OSX. "Applications should be smart enough to not access memory that isn't theirs".
The whole point of a database is to secure the data integrity, and not worry about some random application screwing it up. MySQL is nothing but a storage engine if it can't handle that.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
If you're asking "what legal reason is there?", then the answer is because they decided in their infinite wisdom to GPL the client libraries, which is a more restrictive policy than any of the commercial DBs impose as far as I know.
If you meant "why on Earth would they do that?", then I have no answer. They had to invent a stupid "FOSS License Exception" (see the above link for details) to allow popular non-GPL projects like PHP to offer MySQL support, and have basically removed any chance of commercial software support.
In a nutshell, if you want to use a database in your non-GPL project (whether Free or proprietary) then MySQL is a poor choice. They've already added huge client library restrictions by moving from the LGPL to the GPL, and I don't see any reason to believe that they won't drop the "FOSS License Exception" kludge in the future. Note that I like the GPL - it's a good license and I support its goals - but this seems like a wholly inappropriate place to use it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
> Have you tried doing bounds-checking in whatever scripting language your frontend application is
.net client vs etc, etc).
> written in, before passing it to MySQL?
yes, we used to exclusively rely on the application to manage data quality back in the 70s and early 80s (when using hierarchical databases, flat files, and ISAM). Of course, then we discovered that the procedural application code did a *horrible* job of consistently performing these checks, for various reasons like:
1. checks changed over time, but the application programmer failed to revalidate 100% of the historical data.
2. multiple application interfaces implemented checks differently (j2ee client vs
So, as of about 1984, I've been using these capabilities pretty extensively. Not to say that I don't also perform simple constraint-checking in the app - there are some usability benefits there. But the database provides a redundant, declarative, and failure-proof assurance of many constraints.
> MySQL just assumes you're smart enough to deal with stuff like that your own way if you don't
> like the way it's going to.
No, MySQL suffers from quick development focused on marketing rather than engineering. These errors look more like oversights than deliberate engineering, they are misleading & inconsistent. Further, mysql is the *only* product I know of that claims to be a RDBMS that has these issues. How is any of this a good thing?
> Fortunately you do get to see exactly how MySQL deals with exceptions, and you can even change it
> if you don't like it.
Oh sure, you read about these documented bugs - but you still won't get an exception for a numeric or string overflow, or invalid date. So, if you want your app to run on five different databases - you've got to write extra code for mysql - around its bugs.
This isn't good engineering, it's sloppiness. And MySQL shouldn't get a free pass just because they're open source. We'd expect more from oracle, sql server, or postgresql. MySQL will fix these problems - since they're now courting commercial application developers they have no choice. But it's disingenuous to pretend that these bugs are deliberate.
"Have you tried doing bounds-checking in whatever scripting language your frontend application is written in, before passing it to MySQL?"
ummm. I guess that OS's shouldn't have to worry about bounds checking since applications should never do anything stupid????
If an Application can crash an RDMBS or put corrupt data in to a table that is a flaw. Do other RDBMS do the same? If not then they handle exceptions better than MySQL. Trying to make this a plus is just dumb.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Oh, there are many of us in the OS community that know how pathetic MySQL is. The sad fact is that we're a minority. And thus you have the vicious cycle of most people using MySQL because that's usually that's available at web hosting companies, and that most web hosting companies only support MySQL because that's all they see demand for. *sigh*