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MySQL CEO Interview

Posted by Hemos on

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)."

6 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Software patents by stratjakt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!!!!
    1. Re:Software patents by kpharmer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      MySQL certainly has a lot to fear from software patents: it's a commercial company that could be easily sued.

      And it's just now implementing functionality that other vendors put into their products 10-20 years ago. Many of these vendors have patents that cover some of the better approaches.

      Any idea which dbms patents mysql is stepping on most blatently? Does oracle have multi-version-consistency patented?

    2. Re:Software patents by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think you're missing the point: he's saying (and I agree) that software patents harm the industry as a whole. Anything that benefits a few monolithic closed-source software providers like Oracle over many open-source providers like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. -- and please no "my DB can beat up your DB" flames, okay? -- is bad for the industry in general, no matter how many MiGs they enable Larry Ellison to buy.

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      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  2. Ignore legal issues? by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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..

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    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  3. Wait, wait, you're joking... by rhaas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Valid points by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Why must any application that uses MySQL be GPL unless a commercial license is obtained from MySQL AB?

    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.

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    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?