Slashdot Mirror
MySQL Ends Enterprise Server Source Tarballs
vboulytchev writes "The folks at MySQL has quietly announced that it will
no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball. It's been about a year since the split between the paid and free versions of the database project. The Enterprise Server code is still under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and as a result MySQL appears to be making it harder for non-customers to access the source code. 'One of the things that many users worry about is whether they're getting an inferior version of MySQL by using the Community version. Urlocker says that MySQL "wants to make sure the Community version is rock solid," but admitted that the company has introduced features into the Community edition of the software that "[weren't] as robust as we thought, and created some instabilities." Because of that, the company is revising its policies about when features go into the Community releases.'" Update: 08/10 04:56 GMT by CN :While it is slightly harder to get, the source isn't closed by any means, so I updated the title to reflect that.
MySQL announced plans for a new BitTorrent based distributed backend.
Look at ME! I'm MySQL! I'm a "real database!"
I don't suppose this is an attempt to get more money?
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Can we all just switch to Postgres now?
Cheap web hosting, I'm looking at you...
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
http://mysql.bkbits.net/ is still there, and AFAIK it isn't going away anytime soon.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
... company is obviously designed to move people to buy the product that gives them more income.
This sounds just like the FUD that microsoft guy made by "admitting" that XP has problems in the hopes that people will move to vista.
I think it's best to simply ignore the marketing people. There are no "instabilities" in the stable community version above and beyond the normal cycle of bugs and bugfixes you see in any software.
MySQL versions 5.0.38 to 5.0.45 have had such major bugs that they have rendered themselves useless for a huge range of applications. Applications that use dates, or ones that expect the database to *NOT* insert random NULL values in a group by query.
I mean, even the most basic test suite would have easily caught these.
Here are just a few of the major ones:
Bug #28336
Bug #28936
Let me be the first to suggest UseToBeMySQL or NowItsNotYourSQL. Or better yet SoldOutMySQL. SQLMoneyWhore might not fly but then again offensive names don't seem to be a problem with open source (I'm thinking of GIMP).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
My take: while MySQL has improved technically in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years, stuff like this (or having its transactional backends bought out from under it by Oracle) makes it increasingly difficult for me to recommend it as a business proposition to my clients. Meanwhile PostgreSQL continues to get the job done for the majority of my projects; I have a network of professionals who support it competently; and having followed the project since 2001 or so, I'm confident it's not going anywhere but forwards.
Before anyone bitches about it, this is perfectly legal. The GPL only requires you to provide source code to people who you also provide the compiled software to. You just can't restrict what they in turn do with the source code, which is why most GPL developers make the source code available to everyone and their dog.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
It says that the source will no longer be shipped as a tarball. You now have to take it out of bitkeeper. IOW, you still get the source.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's right in keeping with the GPL. The GPL doesn't say "you have to give the source to all and sundry." No, they just have to give the source code to those they gave the binaries to, i.e., their paying customers.
The work-around for the community is hinted at here:
"Though MySQL AB will not be distributing the source tarball, Urlocker says that MySQL isn't going to try to stop distribution of Enterprise Server source by others. "If somebody wants to, that's fine. People can distribute it.... "
Getting the source code as a tarball on a public server for everyone is an intellectual exercize for the reader.
I read this as a "We're not going to be hosting for leeches. You want a public server, set your own up"
--
BMO
They have to distribute the "Enterprise" source along with the "Enterprise" binaries. They do not have to ship the "Enterprise" source with the "Community" stuff. On I side note they say they will not stand between one of the "Enterprise" customers hosting the source. :)
AxXium
If they provide the source code along with the binaries, the GPL considers that to have satisfied their obligations. After that, they're not obliged to give the source code to anybody else. Not even customers.
Now, if they don't provide the source code with the binaries, if customers are obliged to get it separately from the binary package, then the obligation is to provide the source to anybody who asks for it, customer or not, and that obligation lasts for 3 years after the last binary was distributed. Note that if the binaries are available via download, offering the source for download at the same time and from the same page satisfies the GPL's requirement to provide source along with the binaries even if the customer doesn't actually download the source code at the time.
Yeah, those damn MySQL idiots are acting just like this crazy Emacs hippie back in the 80s... what was his name... Richard Stallman I think. Anyway, the greedy bugger only distributed the source to people who bought the software! Even though it was GPL'd! And the FSF did nothing!
IANAL however to my knowledge, The GNU doesn't say you can't make a profit, only that the source code has to be available to your customers and all contributers to the project thus far have a say in any re-licensing and/or distribution.
AFAIK the IP holder retains the rights to whom it considers "customers" therefor decides whom may access the source based on who has legal rights to the product. Transgaming, RedHat, MySQL, et al.
My backup chemistry thesis stored on Data Storing Bacteria mutated; granting me a degree in forensic anthropology. v4sw7
Lots of OSS projects use Mysql. If they want to take their ball and go home, so bet it. we can take a tarball and create OurSQL.
Come on people this is what OSS is all about. forking and starting a new project because the current project leaders became poopwads.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They can not release their own code under the GPL and not release the source because the GPL itself is protected under copyright and trademark laws. By not releasing the source, then they are releasing under a different license but calling it GPL which dilutes the GPL trademark. They are free to distribute under the license of their choice, but they cannot change an existing license and call it the same thing. This would also be considered fraud, because the person receiving the binary would have a reasonable expectation that since it was advertised as GPL and GPL requires source that they advertised they would also provide the source code. If they want to make a new "MySQL" license that has 99% of the same things as the GPL with one or two restrictions, they are also free to do that, just don't try and call the new license GPL.
To answer the parent's parent, people distributing GPL code can charge whatever they want for the binary, the requirement is that they must also provide the source code with it, and cannot limit the distribution of the source except as provided by the GPL, so the first person buys it for $insane_dollars and then distributes the source to all his friends, family, and bittorrent. There is no requirement to make GPL code with no cost, it just has an inherent driving force that leads to that end
A MySQL fork: "OurSQL" or something like that
or
A general shift to PostgreSQL... seems a lot of people are favoring that route.
I don't care which way it goes, the community will respond and MySQL will become irrelevant.
As the copyright holder, they are completely above board in terms of the GPL. It doesn't apply to them.
how to invest, a novice's guide
You are spot on with one problem....
Code that was "contributed" doesn't belong to MySQL but to the individual authors. Unless they have something assigning the rights to MySQL (always a possibility since I don't use MySQL I wouldn't know) those copyrights still belong to the authors of that code. In short, they would still need the "official" OK in some form from the authors (ALL of them) of the code. That is why a license change is always something to be avoided where GPL is concerned.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
no, I've had enough of your bullshit! take this goddamn article down right fucking now and change the title you worthless fucking excuse for a yellow journalist! For fucksake you READ the goddamn article before you post it, I HOPE.
Fucking immune from moderation troll-assed motherfucker, I will sacrifice my "excellent" karma to bring you down! Anyone want to clue me in on what's going on there? And what all the yelling is about?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
By discouraging people from getting and using the Enterprise version, I feel less and less safe deploying it myself. Less users = less chances to catch problems. Less code = less review = less security.
I'm about to deploy 4 MySQL servers for some serious volume and was strongly considering buying into an enterprise package, largely on the strength of their monitoring tool, but now I'm seriously thinking it's time to try Postgres.
"One of the things that many users worry about is whether they're getting an
2 5
inferior version of MySQL by using the Community version."
They already have SCO, how much more inferior can they get.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/04/17302
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I dont think anyone is really suprised.
PostgreSQL is still free and more powerful anyway so no great loss.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is actually the tendence that worries me. These days many people (thankfully not everybody) think they have the RIGHT to get everything for free. One bitches because product X is not Open Source (Ohh what a crime!!!). The other bitches because X (which VERY GENEROUSLY was giving many years of hard work to people who don't even write a line of code) is taking their hard work back for Y reasons (yes, making a buck for many years of hard work is not a bad thing , you know)
Another funny thing: I was talking to a man here at work. The man is a a rabious defender of OS. He wouldn't touch a non- OS program, he almost cried when MS made a deal with Novell, he screams how much he hates Photoshop and how great Gimp is (just because is OS)... And guess what? He develops a very good backup solution for databases and he takes good money for it. He was having some difficulties adding features. Knowing how good of an OS supporter he was I had the nerve to suggest to him to open the source of his program. ARE YOU FUCKING MAD?- he said. DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD I WORK FOR THIS SHIT? AND I WOULD GIVE IT TO THE DOGS?....
Moral of the story. If you work hard for your work and wnat to share , so be it. If you want to get your work back iand this is posible, just do it. You have the right. people will bitch, people will call you a shit, people will hate you... And yet, the majority of them won't share a shit either giving the oportunity.
Making money is not a crime folks....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
The parent's point is exactly true. Richard Stallman was selling copies of Emacs, using his own words "making a living" out of it, and proudly gives it as an example of a business model built around Free Software. Claims that MySQL AB violates the letter or the spirit of GNU GPL by charging money for the Enterprise version of its product are false and ignorant.
MySQL.com have always tacked open source on as an afterthought.
Their contributor agreement is effectively
'thanks, your patch, copyright and patents belong to us now, but here's a free t-shirt for your trouble'.
GNU basically requires the same thing of whatever you contribute to a GNU project.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
MySQL requires code contributions to be re-assigned to MySQL AB, so AFAIK they actually own every last line of code. Which of course means that they are free to do anything they want, including close-source the whole thing.
Not going to happen.
According to the summary anyway, it will still be legal to distribute. So it won't end up as a torrent.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It's interesting to see how the community often openly promotes and vehemently defends an "open" piece of software but if the software starts to "close" then all the problems start coming out and suddenly it's a piece of @#$! The robustness of software doesn't change with a philosophy. It's all the in marketing. I mean if MySql were still open then we'd see posts comparing it against Microsoft's software. Now for "some reason" they're equivalent in the garbage bin. I will remember this indeed.
... meh. SQLite is better for "toy database" problems anyway. It's fast, it's free, it's Free, and it's very compact. For a lot of applications where people use MySQL, it will fit in with just a few little changes.
Sod MySQL, SQLite is the future.
I imagine this is the first of many. The advocates of Open Source for years have been pretending that they are on the side of the angels and immune to normal personal and business pressures. They're wrong.
Yep. Greed's a bitch.
On a related note: great job guys. It looks like you took your cues from XFree86 -- I guess you were inspired by how well that worked out....
The real litigious bastards...
No t-shirt :)
hawk
The issue isn't that they are keeping what they made. They didn't make it all since they used stuff others had contributed under a certain condition. That being Open Source. The open source model is that you let others help you build the software. To close the source they would have to comb back through the contributions of other people over the years and take out all OS code that is what they didn't pay for in-house. Otherwise they would have to rewrite a whole new system from scratch and walk away from the MySQL code base as it stands.
It's like getting divorced and your ex gets only the second floor and the garage.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
It's okay. We've all had a drink or two and then posted.
this is the real utopianfiat. the prior utopianfiat, who hacked the last utopianfiat, has been sacked.
"MYND YOV MOOSE BITES KAN BE PRETTI NASTI"
From what I can tell, the only real differences between Enterprise and Community is support. We run community version for major production databases with no issues whatsoever.
And we're not the only ones doing so. MySQL had really better re-think the whole thing, whats the point of offering Enterprise when 90% of shops are going to go with the free product.
Zonk, Zonk: 3P Plural nouns go with what verb tense? The course gets harder as we go along...
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
The last thing you want to hear about a DBMS is this line from MySQL: "the company has introduced features into the Community edition of the software that "[weren't] as robust as we thought, and created some instabilities"
This, among other reasons, is why we switched to Postgresql some years ago. MySQL was (is?) not even ANSI SQL compliant, at least when we were struggling with it.
Hey, it works for me -- all of it. I started with MySQL 3.23 a bunch of years ago. From nothing, I learned enough to build large simple systems and complex small systems. Now, I build complex large systems; you better believe I'm sticking with MySQL for the long haul -- and I have no problem paying for it. I'm a business making money, I expect to pay suppliers for suppliers -- it's that simple. And for the record, I still dislike transactions and referential integrity being handled at the database level. It's handy, but it's unnecessary and rarely beneficial. It usually amounts to a limitation when everything's great, and then you want that trigger to do something complicated. And then you want that stored procedure to do something that your application does in one line of code, but requires a web-server, and your entire application, to do it.
Over the years, I've loved the simplicity of MySQL; I've loved the ease of installation; I've loved the low price -- sometimes no price; I've loved the upgrade pace. And like any good business, I stay one step behind.
I've built a successful business with MySQL as a backbone. They deserve my loyalty.
The GPL's (v3) own copyright is covered by this statement at the beginning:
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <http://fsf.org/>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Legally speaking, the GPL can't practically restrict what the original copyright holder can do with their own code. What the AC reply implied was correct; the only group the copyright holder could sue is itself.
I haven't seen anything to indicate the FSF holds a registered trademark on the term "GPL". Citation to the contrary is welcome.
Not a typewriter
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Ha Ha you're being apologetic, but behind your browser you're smugly grinning that you plugged both RubyForge and PostgreSQL. :-)
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
For me, as a developer that has used MySQL for some time, this is an action that destroys trust.
They say it is to keep too many versions of MySQL from being used, a lie that is so obvious
it would have been better if they hadn't said anything at all.
This, of course, isn't the first time i have begone to wonder about the ethics of the MySQL team,
the first was when they recreated their website, hiding the 'download' section in the 'comunity' section
and even then only after making you click a 'yes i'm a total über geek, i recompile my kernel every DAY!' button.
To me that means that i can no longer trust MySQL, i can no longer trust them to not sink to even lower tactics
to get us away from using MySQL under the GPL. Now i have to fear that they not only will they withhold features as
they already do, but that they will also intentionally introduce bugs and cripple performance just so they can then state
'well, with our NON-GPL commercial Enterprise license, that wouldn't have happened'
I liked MySQL because it was quick to setup and had reliable and scalable performance, i might be able to get
similar performance etc with PostgreSQL, but it will definitely not be simple to do simple things and
it requires constant tweaking and probably the blood of sacrificially slain goat to work reliable performance wise.
Now i might even consider using the 'light' (free) version of SQL Server and Oracle, even with thier limitations,
for many projects they are enough, and for those that aren't, i now at least don't have to explain
how and why MySQL is a 'real' database engine, i can simply say,
'sure, oracle, i can do that, it will cost lot's more, but yea'
Is there hope that some one will take the source as it's now and create a new GPL branch without the
commercial BS?
MySQL requires code contributions to be re-assigned to MySQL AB
/. yesterday)
Then why on earth are we calling it open source?
Every time a product starts to get good, some greedy fugknuckle on the project decides to close the source. We've seen it again and again. Here are the ones the come to mind:
FICS - Free Internet Chess Server
DD-WRT - Firmware for Linksys router
CDDB - Distrubted CD catalogue system
BitTorrent - File transfer (on
Now MySQL
I'm sure others could add plenty more examples. Anyone who committed to developing or using these products because the were FOSS has been badly burned.
I think this is becoming a bigger threat to open source than any other and it certainly puts me off contributing anything. For goodness sake don't call it open if they have the ability to close it off legally at any moment.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The pressure on mysql to constantly offer new features, instead of focusing on mysql's strengths, which is highspeed, a decent group of features and simplicity to maintain and operate is going to cost mysql in the long run. This is only the start. The new features in mysql 5+ such as stored procedures, triggers, functions etc are very poorly implemented and come nowhere near the full implementations of databases like Oracle and Postgresql. The result is that DBAs and developers who like mysql for its easy maintenance and speed end up being disillusioned when problems start cropping up.
I don't think many places would switch to Postgresql, since the administration side is more complex and therefore more costly, but I can see shops weighing the pros and cons of switching to postgresql, since that DB has an excellent reputation.
While I'm not doing database stuff currently, last time I was a year or two ago, I actually saw this coming and opted for Postgres rather than MySQL.
Postgres is a fantastic project. It's very solid, can handle huge transaction/request loads, has concurrent locking etc, from memory supports a large number of different datatypes, and is also very configurable. Even better, it's under what is my own favourite license, the BSD license...so you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.
MySQL will probably continue to have its' place, with people who need the things they're charging for, (presumably support options etc) and I wish the project well.
However, for people like me who don't have a lot of money, MySQL ceased being an entirely legally safe option a while ago.