Slashdot Mirror
MySQL Quietly Drops Support For Debian Linux [UPDATED]
volts writes "MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16, when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.' MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not support for Linux in general." Update: 12/13 20:52 GMT by J : MySQL AB's Director of Architecture (and former Slash programmer) Brian Aker corrects an apparent miscommunication in a blog post: "we are just starting to roll out [Enterprise] binaries... We don't build binaries for Debian in part because the Debian community does a good job themselves... If you call MySQL and you have support we support you if you are running Debian (the same with Suse, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and others)... someone in Sales was left with the wrong information"
Is it really a problem? If you worried about support wouldn't you be using a distro that also offers support contracts?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I guess that's fair - my company migrated to supporting only "generic Red Hat Database", aka PostgreSQL.
Seriously, except in cases where you have no choice about database availability, I can't see a single reason to use MySQL these days. All of their cool features are owned by their competitors, and they're starting to pull desperate financing tricks like whittling away tech support and partnering with SCO. Are people still using it for new deployments, and if so, why?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I see there's already a few comments that the code should be forked. The thing is, what is forking going to do for it? They are dropping support for Linux distros, but that's not saying it won't run on other distros, just that it's not supported. The only way a fork would do anything is if the forked version had it's own support as well.
MySQL just said, 'We don't think that your business is profitable to us,' for whatever reason they might have. Well, I'm willing to bet that MySQL support for Debian in the enterprise setting is plenty profitable for some other people.
The only thing that really happened is that MySQL cleaved off a part of their business and gave it away for free to anyone who wants it. And I'll bet plenty of people do.
> I don't know that you would make any money, but at least you'd be offering something that isn't currently offered.
I doubt it. And more important than my opinion, MySQL doubts it and has the sales figures to show it. Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.
Democrat delenda est
Why is this such a sore spot for so many people? Just because MySql no longer supports the flavor of the month distro of Linux, you all throw up your hands crying 'I never liked you anyway'.
The vast majority of mysql users will never buy a support contract, and those few who do, will probably be RedHat or Suse. (When was the last time a Debian user admitted he needed help for anything?)
Instead of having to support dozens of distros, Mysql is supporting the main two. It may be Open Source, but it's still a business.
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
...or switch to the excellent Postgres which is more open and a more complete SQL implementation than MySQL anyway.
Expect to see more things like this happening as the IT landscape undergoes it's coming changes.
For medium and large companies (which are the only entities that would buy support to begin with), that difference is purely academic. If it isn't supported, it isn't worth running.
Chances are that if you need the support they offer, then you are not just running some little fan site using MySQL to store what avatar's people choose. Most likely if you have support for the db, chances are you probably have some sort of support contract in place for the OS as well and the rest of your critical infrastructure. You are probably already playing by their rules using certain OS releases, etc...
That would be my guess at least.
> While I don't currently have or need a support contract from MySQL
I think this says it all for most Debian users. They are either in-house experts, testing the water for their app or don't have a culture of procurement (read: lower budget or just plain cheap). This is not a criticism, it's just a business reality.
MySQL is a business, unless we want them to go out of business and drop support for everything there's not much to complain about.
29 mpg. YMMV.
I doubt that's the point. I'm sure they just decided that rom a cost/benefit perspective, money spent training their support staff on Debian wasn't worth the amount of business they were getting from Debian customers. Which makes a lot of sense to me - in my experience, people that run Debian servers have a more thorough knowledge of the system and administering it, and consequently have less need/desire for software support (yourself included, it sounds like). And assuming that's true, it's also not much of a stretch to assume that someone that interested in the guts of a system would choose something like Postgres over MySQL anyways if they had a choice, since it's had more advanced features for much longer than MySQL has.
Ahh, the good old "who do you sue" chestnut. How's suing Oracle working out for you whenever you find bugs in their database, or if you got bad advice from their support techs?
There are a lot of calls here to fork the code. I'm a bit wary of calls to fork a project by people who lack the reading comprehension to understand the project. These may not be the best people to direct a project :)
Just to clarify the crappy summary, MySQL are not saying that their software won't run on Debian or Ubuntu or whatever... It will still run on most OSs and distros, but if you are using Linux, MySQL AB will only sell you a support contract for MySQL if you are running on Dead Rat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Novhell (SLES?).
Get it? Got it? Good!
The "who do you sue" line's as old as the hills and, largely speaking, irrelevant because you're never
going to get to first base unless it's a screw-up of epic proportions. Even then, it's more likely to
be a colossal waste of your time and merely an exercise of fattening your lawyer's wallet.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I have never in my entire life seen a softare company held financially liable for lost sales as a result of a database failure. Please, feel free to cite one single lawsuit if you can find one.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Deleted
For example, when I was a kid a local pizza delivery chain started delivering breakfast pizzas. They made money hand over fist. But after a few months, the calculated that the additional cost of maintaining a third shift of workers and an expanded breakfast menu would bring in more money if put into opening additiona stores serving the traditional lunch, dinner, late night crowd with the normal pizzaria menu.
Most likely what is happening is that the MySQL corporation finds that if it spends the same number of dollars training a support tech, those dollars bring in more money if the tech is dedicated to Redhat and/or SuSE than if the tech is also trained on Debian. This doesn't mean that there is no market for Debian support. It means only that MySQL has a higher relative profit from supporting just two databases. The calculation may be different for another company that has a different resource pool. For example a company that already supports Debian Linux, may have a very low marginal cost for adding MySQL on Debian support and, consequently, have a far higher ROI for supporting MySQL on Debian.
You know in the software industry that is a bunch of bullshite.
If that were true then MSFT wouldn't have any money at all as they would be responsible for billions in lost sales annually. Just one Virus through one product line(not even windows but MS SQL) a year would be expensive. Yet MSFT doesn't have to pay so why would Mysql, or IBM, or any other software company for lost sales or data?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I've been using Mysql for many years, through several companies, small and large. Never once has mysql support ever been requested / needed -- it's rock solid. What does support conist of anyway, help with sql syntax?
I doubt most Debian users will care.
I tend to avoid Redhat as they gave me the impression that they were the Microsoft of Linux. I loved Suse, then they got bought by Novell. I moved to Debian as they allowed me to install a bare system in 300 mb with text only and install JUST the parts I needed. Now I get to look for something else? (actually, it doesn't look like it as I haven't needed paid support for MySQL yet.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Get one system with Red Hat. Put MySql on it get the suport. If the problem doesn't work on red hat and your own. Then call them up and tinker with the one RedHat box until it works and do the same on your box. Supporing every Linux Distro is disasterious for a company. To many of them all with their own quarks it make offering support near impossible. By sticking to a few Distros they can quickly figure out if it is an OS Problem or a MySQL problem.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you make a statement like this, it's because you have A) no experience in a real company or B) you do but are still naive as to how your company actually works.
+5 Insightful, really!
Yes but it doesn't have what people REALLY want. Replication, clustering, failover, case insensitive where clauses.
If you want high availibility you have to cobble together slony and pgpool (which does not support multi master replication) neither of which is suitable for working over a WAN.
There is a reason why people choose MySql and that's because it delivers the features people really want first. Even the features are not 100% "correct" they are delivered "good enough" to get "real work" done.
Take case insesntive where clauses for example. For the last five years or so that I have been following the pg mailing lists there must have been hundreds of requests from people who want to switch over from mysql, ms-sql, oracle, informix, firebird etc for a case insensitive collation option. They just get ignored and told to change all their queries to use ILIKE or *~ or some other stupid non standard postgres only SQL. Oddly enough their primary excuse for not providing it is that it's not a SQL standard.
So if you using any kind of an ORM and you can not stomach asking your employees or web users to remember the exact capitalization of everything they have ever typed into your database then postgres is not an option.
Sorry.
evil is as evil does