MySQL CEO Insists He's Not Supping With The Devil

jg21 writes "In the continuing saga of the decision by MySQL previously discussed here on Slashdot to make a deal with SCO Group, the company's CEO Marten Mickos has now granted an interview in which he addresses the inevitable criticism that the deal has provoked in the F/OSS community. His main defense seems to be that other companies have ported to SCO too. He admits money too played a part." From the article: "We believe that porting a GPL version of MySQL for the SCO OpenServer platform gives thousands of users more options when it comes to choosing a database -- which is a good thing. The deal produces revenue for us and this allows us to hire more open source developers. We didn't make the decision lightly; we knew SCO was a sensitive subject with the free software and open source communities."

Comments

Wrong

[einhverfr]

There is no "dual licencing crap" for companies that only use and do not intend to distribute proprietary versions of MySQL themselves.

Wrong. The client libraries are licensed such that any non-Free *client application* can only be run on MySQL if it is properly licensed aside from the GPL. I.e. if you only want to run Joomla, then you are OK, but if you run Jamroom, then you need the license.

This is because the client libs were changed from LGPL to GPL sometime ago. Perhaps you missed all the fuss under which PHP threatened to drop support for MySQL?

The whole "dual licencing crap" starts when a company chooses PostgreSQL for its licence only, because it intents to distribute it under another, proprietary licence, and give neither code nor money back to encourage its further free development. Its then another dead end and a code sink for Postgres' development.

You'd think that wouldn't you. And yet every company I can think of that has tried this has either: 1) died or 2) contributed back large parts (though not necessarily all) of their contributions back to the community. In at least one case, a large part of the work for the Win32 port was contributed by a company which provided a forked proprietary version on Windows.

Indeed PostgreSQL is progressing fast enough that I have doubts as to whether a proprietary version with non-trivial extensions could be effectively maintained without giving away all generally applicable aspects of one's code.

The main proprietary versions of PostgreSQL that exist at the moment are by the following companies:
1) Command Prompt. They include a replication technology (the only async replication to work on Windows to my knowledge), but have contributed back many other enhancements to the community.
2) EnterpriseDB. They include an Oracle compatibility layer but employ at least one PostgreSQL developer who works nearly full-time on contributions to the community. They are sponsors or co-sponsors for major enhancements such as two-phase commit, SQL-99 PSM support, etc.
3) Pervasive. They have made a number of major contributions to the community.
4) Fujitsu offers a customized version (at least in Australia) and they have made major contributions to the community as well.