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

Not So Free Software

[cowboy76Spain]

I wonder why this is an issue. If someone wants to port its own software on a new platform, who should argue against it?

Re:Not So Free Software

[Arker]

The only reason it's an issue is because web sites like this one are heavily infiltrated by astro-turfers that will try to make it an issue so their masters can then squeal about 'linux zealots.'

MySQL made a deal, they got paid money to support a platform. That the client, in this case, happens to be the litigiousbastards was sure to raise a few eyebrows, and did, but not much more than that. Business is business. I hope Mårten made sure their check cleared before he let anyone put in any hours on that project... *shrug*

Re:Not So Free Software

[Red Alastor]

The value of the SCO platform can hardly increase to a point where it is a good idea to buy it. MySQL or not, they are dying. The only people that can benefit from the deal (beside MySQL making a buck on it) are SCO's actual customers who might need MySQL. Once SCO dies, they will have to migrate. Probably to Linux. Guess what they'll use there ?

So they got a contract and potential new users.

Re:Not So Free Software

[einhverfr]

Paranoid? Yes, but this is SCO and all the people they sued so far were Openserver customers switching to Linux.

My favorite claim they made was when they claimed that Daimler Crysler did not adequately provide a list of systems running their software, and that the response of "we haven't used your software in seven years" did not qualify as a list.

Fortunately the judge was not amused by the level of creativity in this interpretation and promptly threw out most of the SCO v. DCC suit (she left the possibility that SCO could sue DCC for not responding in a timely fashion to their inquiry, but the rest was thrown out).

Go PostgreSQL

[GiorgioG]

In the long-run I think Postgres will eat MySQL's lunch because now, there's a native Windows version *and* the whole dual licensing crap will make most small commercial software developers move away from MySQL (I know I won't be developing any applications (all non-PHP work) using MySQL)

And how is this different from...

[MosesJones]

Yahoo handing in a demonstrator....

Google agreeing to censor....

And a massive amount of US companies doing extremely dodgy deals with disreputable regimes, you know like Dick Cheney meeting Saddam Hussein.

So MySql (a relatively poor database before SapDB came in) have agreed to work with SCO to get a bit of cash. Not the most moral decisions but certainly against what those who dealt with Saddam Hussein or the Chinese Goverment its pretty small fry.

His software's free, and that's good enough

[fuzzy12345]

First, I've never been a fan of mySQL for the simple reason that I was a 'REAL' (ACID) database guy and felt that mySQL gave database a bad name. Nonetheless, it sure beat hell out of flat files and, just as PHP might be inferior to 'industrial' computer languages, if people (who otherwise wouldn't have gotten a database at all) used PHP+mySQL to create stuff that otherwise wouldn't have gotten built, kudos to them.

Then came the debate as to whether mySQL was pure enough in Licensing. Once again, I didn't care, but thought "how can you criticize a man for giving you something for free?"

Now comes the flap about what else this company does to pay the rent. They still allow free use of mySQL, there's still other alternatives if you don't like his terms, I'm still using more industrial/ACID solutions, and others are still throwing rocks at the mySQL people.

The undisputably weird thing is that the good folks giving away mySQL are taking more abuse from the community than if they'd never given it away at all. How's that for incentive for everyone else???

Re:His software's free, and that's good enough

[einhverfr]

Free != inferior. Similarly, just because someone attaches a price tag to something doesn't mean it's automatically 'bad ass'. After all, you can put a price tag on anything, even a steaming pile of shit.

Which is technically more advanced? PostgreSQL or MySQL? Which is more Free? Which costs less? In every case the answer is PostgreSQL. So I agree with you.

And I suggest you take a better look at PHP, how widely used it is, and the heavyweights that are using it, before calling it 'inferior'.

As someone who regularly programs in Perl, Python, and PHP, I would say that PHP is incredibly advanced for niche applications (preprocessing text/html/xml files) and not advanced at all for anything else. It always feels extremely kludgy in areas like GUI programming or general purpose scripting (both Perl and Python are better fits here), but if you want a program that generates, say a config file, PHP is not a bad fit.

Part of the problem with MySQL though is that it achieved earlier popularity for two reasons:
1) Its main FOSS competitor, PostgreSQL was a bear to use in the 6.5 days and
2) MySQL being a for-profit company was able to leverage centralized marketing.

However, many key features were missing from MySQL early on including any semblence of ACID compliance (still not really there in 4.x in that the consistancy and integrity factors are still not nearly complete). Secondly Date's Central Rule still does not apply to 5.0 in that strict mode can always be turned off (even by a client app), so data integrity constraints can be circumvented by applications. For those of us who understand what an RDBMS is supposed to do both mathematically and business-wise, MySQL is a case of asking for trouble.

At the same time, PostgreSQL has solved nearly every usability issue it had in the 6.5 days. Right now debate seems to center around what the standard says about padding and collating sequences, case folding, and handling space padding of char variables in concatenation. No more wishing you could drop a column from a table (you could not prior to 7.3, I think). As of 8.1 the last major usability issues will be *gone* from PostgreSQL. I refer of course to the requirement to vacuum. autovacuum is now part of the backend process. And xid wraparound is solved too. A warning is automatically generated when xid's start to run out, and the rdbms is now smart enough to shut down rather than let it roll over and cause data loss (this almost never happened, because on nearly any production database, performance would dictate vacuuming long before this would become an issue). At the same time, I am not aware of anything that MySQL can do that PostgreSQL can't do as well. For example:
1) 8.1 will have TPC, and the JDBC driver will support XA
2) Replication/clustering possible using add-ons like Slony and PgPool or PgCluster.
3) If you need access to external servers/table types/etc. there is DBI-Link which is a subset of the SQL/MED standard.
4) Daisy chaining triggers :-)

Bullshit.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

MySQL signed a full-scale deal with SCO (including a joint marketing deal )... it wasn't just "porting the software". MySQL jumped into bed with them and snuggled up.

Oh, bullshit. SCO and the OpenServer platform are dieing. This was a quick cash grab and nothing more.

mysql or postgres

[ajdlinux]

MySQL only became popular because it's faster than postgresql for less complex database work. Postgresql is a better database. I just wonder why SCO went for a deal with MySQL instead of just taking the BSD-licensed Postgres. (I would use postgres myself if my webhost and CMS supported it)

Also, mySQL has a totally wrong view of the GPL: see this discussion on debian-legal.


-- Get free domain names

Re:Cash up front, thanks.

[tomhudson]

If you had bothered to read the Groklaw interview almost 2 weeks ago
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510112 11450706
you would have found out that SCO paid mySQL.

Money taken from SCO is less money for their FUD machine.

It also gives people stuck on SCO a chance to migrate their stuff slowly to other platforms.

1. Move existing services to mySQl on SCO platform
2. replace SCO platform with *BSD or *Linux

So how is that a bad thing again?

Okay, how about these?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Gaim has been ported to Windows for some time now, yet I haven't seen one diatribe against the Gaim developers. Shameful!

Dolby Labs? They should have revoked Apple's right to use AAC the moment Fairplay came to exist. What a sham!

And Cygwin? We should all boycott Red Hat for that deal with the devil. How dare they!

Slashdot? They refuse to auto-detect Internet Explorer, and then serve up a blank page in those instances. How two-faced of them!

Re:Stupidity

[venicebeach]

It seems that Forbes has been drumming this conflict up a bit.

Interesting Groklaw article about some fishy reporting on the issue by Forbes.

Because SCO will sue us for using MySQL!

[backslashdot]

How do we know SCO won't turn around and claim that the code in MySQL is tainted??? This is EXACTLY what they did to IBM.

It's in the SCO press release that the money is to be used to produce a COMMERCIAL version of the database.

That's right looks like they duped the MySQL CEO who didnt read the contract before signing.

http://ir.sco.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1720 37 [sco.com]

From the SCO press release:

"The SCO Group, Inc. ("SCO") (Nasdaq: SCOX), a leading provider of UNIX(R) software technology for distributed, embedded and network-based systems, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with MySQL AB to jointly deliver a certified, commercial version of the popular MySQL database"

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.