MySQL Reverses Decision On Closed Source

krow writes "I am very happy to be announcing that MySQL will be forgoing close sourcing portions of the MySQL Server. Kaj has the official statement in his blog. No portion of the server will be closed source including backup, encryption, or any storage engines we ship. To quote Kaj 'The encryption and compression backup features will be open source.' This is a change from what was previously posted here on Slashdot. I've posted some additional thoughts on my own blog concerning how we keep open source from becoming crippleware. Word has it that we will also have a panel at this year's OSCON discussing this topic. Contrary to the previous Slashdot discussion, this shows Sun's continued commitment to Open Source."

Comments

Lol Slashdot is too much

[njcoder]

When it was announced that MySQL would be releasing some features in MySQL Enterprise and not in the community edition the original Slashdot headline was "Sun to close MySQL" or something similar.

Then Mickos (former CEO of MySQL AB and SVP of Sun Database group) comes here and says that it was MySQL's plan to do this before the acquisition by Sun and that it was in fact Sun who wanted them to release everything to the community. And if Sun had their way it would.

So now that Sun convinces Mickos to change his strategy the headline is "MySQL Reverses Decision On Closed Source"

HAHAHAHAHA

Re:Now change the ZFS license SUN

[njcoder]

ZFS doesn't have anything to do with SYSVR4.

Novell said they have no interest in pursuing Unix copyrights.

Novell is trying to get their 95% portion of the license Sun paid to SCO. By saying the agreement between Sun and SCO was part of the APA between Novell and SCO they are affirming the deal between Sun and SCO. Sun actually helped write SYSVR4 with AT&T before Novell bought it. According to Schwartz, Sun paid AT&T about $100million for rights that basically gave them ownership. What was purchased from SCO were mainly device drivers since SCO's UnixWare had the best x86 support.

What is Novell's position going to be to the public? "We're an open source company but we're going to sue a company for releasing open source?" Nothing good can come to Novell if they challenge Sun.

Re:no onus

[E-Lad]

You're absolutely correct. That's why I have to wonder about all the "$SOLARIS_FEATURE is not GPL'd" whining. Your good statement helps show that this is more-or-less sour grapes from a community (or a large subset of it) that thought they had it all, either politically or technically.

I'm reminded of a rather large company in Redmond, Washington that carried on similarly throughout the 90's and early 00's, eventually being zapped in the ass for their hubris.

Re:Now change the ZFS license SUN

[Daniel Phillips]

Honestly, I hope Sun doesn't change the ZFS licence, because in another couple of years I expect we will have been able to achieve pretty much everything ZFS does without having to roll it all into one jinormous all singing+dancing filesystem that ate the OS. In other words, we think we can do snapshots, flexible raid, allocate from pools etc, efficiently without violating layers. And actually, we were replicating before the ZFS guys and, um, the ZFS algorithm bears a striking resemblance to ours, which we published a few months before they showed up with a prototype. Hmm. Anyway, even if ZFS does go non-evil it certainly won't mean we will stop, because we still do things they don't do like run underneath _any_ filesystem so you can stick with what you know or what works for you. But it would definitely remove some of the incentive for further developing our stuff. Smartest think Sun could do to tell the truth, but personally I think they won't do it, and one day Mr. Schwartz will wake up and find ZFS irrelevant because Ext4 + ddsnap outperforms it plus has millions more installs and ten times as many developers to widen the gap. We shall see.