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Sun May Begin Close Sourcing MySQL Features
An anonymous reader writes "From the MySQL User's Conference, Sun has announced, and former CEO Marten Mickos has confirmed, that Sun will be close sourcing sections of the MySQL code base. Sun will begin with close sourcing the backup solutions to MySQL, and will continue with more advanced features. With Oracle owning Innodb, and it being GPL, does this mean that MySQL will be removing it to introduce these features? Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything."
I guess it's time to see if PostgreSQL's documentation and tools have managed to get any less user-hostile over the years.
I've been using PostgreSQL on-and-off for about 7 years now, and I have to say: it's *all* gotten a lot better.
In fact, feel free to check out (I think it's on Safari) how slick things have gotten, try Korry Douglas' book (forgot the title right now). I think it's a stellar example of book writing in general, and does a very good job of explaining a lot of the advanced features (like clustering, failover, etc).
I won't miss MySQL one bit--PG rules!
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
I know it's all over the story on Slashdot's end but the article it self does not say anything will be closed. GPLed code can be open but cost money. Am I missing some other article? Because to me it sounds like they plan on doing things the Red Hat way. Public free version and Enterprise pay version.
Guy n Gals.. Lets just fork the thing.., then we can call it iSQL
Of course open source licenses allow for some code and features to be released from the open source license by paying off the developers who developed the code and having them sign a contract. In that way their open source developments pay off and they can finally earn an income for their hard work.
What the community doesn't seem to get is that this is basically creating two versions of the same product. One open sourced and one closed source. It is basically forking off a closed source version and paying off developers to release it so they are finally paid for their hard work and years dedicated to writing code. Just that the open source version now doesn't have the same code and features as the new closed source version has. But that wouldn't stop open source developers from writing new code to put features back in the open source version. As long as it doesn't use source code from the closed source fork of it. For example this was done to WINE to create Crossover Office, WINEX/Cediga, et all. Also Red Hat Enterprise is different from Red Hat Fedora. Just that one version went commercial and the other went open source.
As an open source developer you actually want this to happen, so that all of your hard work is paid off finally. You want a company to buy out your work and pay you for it eventually. That doesn't make you selfish and it doesn't make you greedy either. I mean you spend years supporting the open source community for free and writing a lot of code without even being paid for it. So they really can't say you haven't given anything to the open source community. While people jokingly call open source developers as communists or hippies, in reality they are capitalists at heart. In the end they want equal pay for equal work. Open source projects are a good way to market their skills and show off their coding abilities and ability to work in a team. Plus it gives back to the community in free software. But the time will come eventually when some company decides the project is good enough to license and use in a commercial project so they sell their rights to it for money. Most of the time that doesn't happen and it continues to be unsupported and open source developers have friends and family members wondering if they are insane, doing all of that hard work for free and it looks like they are throwing away money or flushing it down the toilet.
There will still be an open source version of MySQL, just that parts of it got spun off into a closed source commercial version. I did a lot of research into open source business plans myself in college. You try to earn money via charging for tech support or donations, failing that you try to get some company like Sun to buy your code and pay off your developers to release the code from open source. But some open source companies sell t-shirts and stuffed animals and other stuff. Any way you look at it, it is still capitalism and still a company trying to earn a profit. You still have stock holders who want a return on their investments. You still have employees that expect a paycheck. It may be free software, but people aren't really writing it for free, they expect a payoff sooner or later.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
All the community, documentation, and speed in the world wont make up for lack of features.
I'm no dbms expert but when I first started learning about relation databases, wow, seems like 6+ years ago now, it was obvious from reading the features of mysql versus postgresql that there was no making up for the fact that mysql wasn't a real relational database. Since I was learning about relational databases I never even bothered with mysql and jumped right into postgresql. So I guess I'm biased but I never ran into a problem with tools, libraries, documentation, or community support.
Mysql has made many improvements since then, and I even started to play with it as I've been working on some open source projects which are web based applications and as such may need to support the widely popular mysql. So far its not bad, but it would be nice if their mysql command line tool would do TAB completion as psql does. It always takes me a few tabs before I realize that mysql isn't going to help my lazy ass out.
burnin
Where have you been? Java source code has been available for a long time but after years of people complaining that it wasn't "free enough", Sun fully released Java under a GPL 2 years ago.
OpenOffice not really GPLO.K. so it's LGPL So what, so is Gtk, most of GNOME and probably 80% of what you and joe-sixpack considers to be "opensource" in "Linux". GPL is just one license. GPL was never fully tested in court and doesn't provide patent indemnity as CDDL does. I'd be happier if Java, OpenOffice and MySQL were CDDL but there would be too much gnashing of teeth from the Linux creationists.
OpenSolaris i dont know enough aboutOpenSolaris is licensed under CDDL. Look here for an FAQ which explains in simple terms why CDDL is superior to GPL.
Yes, this is what Oracle does with Berkeley DB. On one project, we started out with using Berkeley DB. It wasn't meeting the needs, so we started looking at other options. Oracle had us hooked, and started reeling us in. Up until we got to the price tag. They wouldn't offer the support that we needed for their commercial version of Berkely DB, and instead wanted to push us towards their full Oracle DB. It sounded fine until we got to the price. They wanted, get this, 5% of the gross revenues of the product we were designing!!! Not a per-license fee, not a large finite sum for the product, but a full 5% of the revenues.
Needless to say, we told them to take a hike.
This is different than from a few years ago. Then they were willing to do a per license fee. But, of course, at an astronomical amount. Plus, this amount would literally change each time we talked to a different salesperson. There was a lot of confusion at the time. Now they've eliminated the confusion, but their greed knows no bounds.
Sun is welcome in this space, IMHO. More competition is good, because frankly, all of the vendors have serious drawbacks in one way or another.
The moral of the story is be real careful about the database you select, and your design. If you choose foolishly, you'll end up spending lots of money, when a better design could have saved you from this pain.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
But this is pretty much the end.
You need to get a grip and possibly read for yourself what this is.
Sun is saying that they may (not yet decided) offer some add on components to mySQL backup that may (not yet decided) use a license other than GPL. The add on in question will be integrated through a backup API mySQL has for exactly this purpose (to enable 3rd party extended backup solutions).
What exactly do see wrong with that? First, nothing precludes building open source backup solutions for this API and nothing precludes other 3rd parties from building other solutions. Why should Sun not have the same right?
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Thx. We have considered Red Hat's model carefully, and it may indeed be one that we and others could also adopt to 100%. If we reach that conclusion, we will align our model with theirs.
But we are not absolutely certain that this is the case, and so we are experimenting with other models. We believe that a DBMS behaves somewhat differently in the market compared to an operating system. We believe that Red Hat's competitive situation is different from ours. And we are not fully convinced that Red Hat gets a fair compensation in the market for their enormous (and great) investments and contributions.
So for these reasons we continue to test out new models.
Marten
Alternatively, here's what I do in phpPgAdmin: click Table, click Triggers. There's a list. I can edit it by clicking on a specific trigger. phpMySql has no such interface to triggers, and every view, creation and edit must be done by manually typing in the SQL (but, based on the tone of your reply, I'm sure you knew that). Maybe you have time for that, and it's not a big concern (on what terms do you get paid?). For any serious database development, it strikes me as a grotesque waste of time. I mean, seriously, the CREATE TRIGGER statement is not rocket science. Nobody implied that it was. However, complex trigger statements are what beget the necessity of being able to edit them handily- something that I would imagine you couldn't do with a WYSIWYG (exactly what would a WYSIWYG TRIGGER editor do, anyway?). Wasting 15-20 minutes typing the SELECT/CREATE/ALTER TRIGGERS statement in another editor and then running a blanket update over the whole SQL database strikes me as fundamentally wrong, especially where there is a trivial and effective interface in phpPgAdmin. Besides, creating them programatically is just better business. I can keep a db_setup_triggers.sql in source control and make it part of automatic builds. Who ever suggested or implied that you wouldn't create them programatically? Please, feel free to describe how else you would do it. MySQL is far from perfect. But to criticize it for THIS? I think you're fundamentally confused about what I was criticizing, meaning you either did not take the time to read my comments, are ignorant of MySql/phpMySql, and/or didn't take the time to think about either before you started ranting. If that be the case and you are fundamentally confused, you've contributed little if anything to the discussion, sounded condescending, acted presumptuously, and been indignant about something that does not even exist (a criticism about the lack of a TRIGGER WYSIWYG, the very suggestion of which reeks of ignorance). If indeed that is the case, next time you consider writing something, perhaps you could do us all a favour and not.