Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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. A little too bold.... by AtariAmarok · · Score: 5, Funny

    He'd better watch it before Bill Gates makes him an offer he can't refuse, and he wakes up with a penguin head in his bed.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
    1. Re:A little too bold.... by dcrocha · · Score: 5, Funny

      Bill: Marten, you do not yet realize your importance. You have only begun to discover your power. Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the database world.
      Marten: I'll never join you.
      Bill: I am your father.
      Marten: No. That's not true. That's impossible.
      Bill: Search your feelings you know it to be true.
      Marten: Nooooo. Nooooo.
      Bill: Yes I am.
      Marten: Ok then.

  2. 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?

  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. Re:Geographic Information Systems by kpharmer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    get in line...

    MySQL is still implementing functionality common twenty years ago. And many of their enhancements of the last few years have left major gaps (innodb/replication awkwardness, etc).

    Additionally, they still haven't addressed their problem with silent exceptions (quietly truncating strings that don't fit, quietly converting numbers that don't fit, allowing invalid dates, etc, etc).

    So, yeah, it would be nice for them to pick up some OORDBMS functionality that postgesql has like spatial awareness, ip functions, etc - but I hope that they clean the product up first instead.

  5. 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.

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