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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)."
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?
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.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.