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

Now change the ZFS license SUN

[ctdownunder]

And we will all love ya bro'

Re:Now change the ZFS license SUN

[E-Lad]

If you want it in Linux, I'd say that the onus is on the Linux community to change to a more permissive license.

Everyone, including Sun, has the freedom to choose their own license. The Linux community, of all people, should respect that ideal. Unless, of course, you support having a Henry Ford mindset - "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

Re:Now change the ZFS license SUN

[cdw38]

Well said. Sun is not doing anything to try and keep OpenSolaris alive by locking up ZFS. Quite the contrary, BSD is picking up ZFS. Too many people want to sit around and cry about Sun "not allowing" ZFS to make its way into Linux, but at the end of the day its Linux that wants to force its terms upon everyone else.

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:Now change the ZFS license SUN

[larry bagina]

Sun doesn't want the GPL anywhere near ZFS -- and for good reason. The GPL ought to be called the "Me Me Me PL". Let's say Sun did release ZFS under the GPL and it's adopted into Linux. Sun is shut out from any changes unless they release SunOS under the GPL as well. With the CDDL, anyone can use the code (without giving up rights to their own code) and Sun gets back any improvements (without affecting their other code). It's like the LGPL, but with much better granularity.

We see this attitude a lot with BSD/GPL conflicts. When BSD code is relicensed as GPL, the original code is denied access to any changes. Think about that for a minute. "We want you to share your code. So we won't share our changes to your code with you." Free as in "free room and board at gitmo".

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.

Re:Now change the ZFS license SUN

[Wiseman1024]

Easy to fix: licence your original code under the licence that guarantees yours and everybody else's freedom. That is, the GPL.

Re:ZFS next to be open sourced?

[brunascle]

ZFS is open source, using Sun's CDDL license. the problem is that the CDDL isnt compatible with the GPL.

The whole thing was pointless anyway

[Mark Atwood]

The MySQL software that was originally proposed to be closed source are portions of the online backup drivers. Each such driver has to be written in close cooperation with the developers of each storage engine. Well...

InnoDB already has an online backup tool, and even if/when they revise their tool to use this new API, it's still going to be theirs, open or closed, not the property of the MySQL Group.

Online backup of the engines for CSV, Blackhole, and Memcached doesn't even make sense. Archive already has a publicly available open source online backup tool.

Online backup makes sense for Maria, I don't see MontyW writing crippleware into his work.

How about MyISAM? I think that work is already done, but, the horse is already out of the barn, in that the online backup drivers for it are already publically available..

Looking even closer, the part that was going to be closed was not even the entire online backup driver set, but just compression and encryption. Any halfway competent developer would be able to hook in the necessary calls to azio, zlib, and openssl, and replicate the work.

So this is a big tempest over something that doesn't matter, and couldnt have happened anyway.

Plus, best practices for backup dont even use or want online backup. The Right Way to backup a real production MySQL instances is via filesystem snapshot, using something like LVM or ZFS.

As a small aside, the Slashdot headline of the original article was not entirely accurate. It wasn't the Sun executives who decided this. It was the MySQL executives. What that means, especially in light of the keynote speeches given by CEO Jonathan Schwartz and VP Rich Green, is interesting, and remains to be publically seen.

Re:The whole thing was pointless anyway

[Rary]

As a small aside, the Slashdot headline of the original article was not entirely accurate.

Actually, that headline and this headline are completely inaccurate, because both mentioned a decision where none had been made.

MySQL had not decided to use a closed source license. They were considering many different licenses, including a closed source license -- but also including the GPL and other open source licenses. No decision had been made. This announcement is the first actual decision on the subject.

Re:The whole thing was pointless anyway

[Jherek Carnelian]

No decision had been made. This announcement is the first actual decision on the subject. Baloney. The former CEO of MySQL even posted otherwise right here on slashdot:

The business decision on this was made by MySQL AB (by me as the then CEO)...

The decision was made and then was reversed.

Re:The whole thing was pointless anyway

[njcoder]

No decision had been made. This announcement is the first actual decision on the subject. Baloney. The former CEO of MySQL even posted otherwise right here on slashdot:

The business decision on this was made by MySQL AB (by me as the then CEO)...

The decision was made and then was reversed. Read your own link:

Additionally we will develop high-end add-ons (such as encryption, native storage engine-specific drivers) that we will deliver to customers in the MySQL Enterprise product only. We have not yet decided under what licence we will release those add-ons (GPL, some other FOSS licence, and/or commercial)

Re:The whole thing was pointless anyway

[Alex Belits]

Plus, best practices for backup dont even use or want online backup. The Right Way to backup a real production MySQL instances is via filesystem snapshot, using something like LVM or ZFS. (owl goes here)

Databases backups over filesystem snapshots? With the assumption that all database commits are automatically filesystems commits, and there is no buffering between those layers? And with no incremental backups through transaction logs?

Good day for all

[Uncle Focker]

Good. I'm glad that Sun was able to convince the MySQL staff to not close source any of the codebase. And yes, as was pointed out in the other thread, Sun wasn't the one pushing the close source move they were actually trying to convince them to go the opposite.

Re:Good day for all

[Jherek Carnelian]

I'm glad that Sun was able to convince the MySQL staff to not close source any of the codebase. Totally! Don't you hate it when you buy a company and they won't do what you tell them?
Good thing Sun was able to convince Sun to stick to Sun's official policy.

Re:Good day for all

[Uncle Focker]

MySQL was considering the close sourcing of the enterprise stuff before they were acquired by Sun. After being acquired Sun was pushing that they don't go with the close source route as was confirmed in the previous thread. http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=525246&cid=23098626

The business decision on this was made by MySQL AB (by me as the then CEO) prior to the acquisition by Sun, so this has nothing to do with Sun. On the contrary, Sun is more likely to influence this decision the other way. Troll harder next time.

Re:Good day for all

[njcoder]

"Pushing" against whom? MySQL ceased to exist as a separate entity once it was acquired. You know that companies are run by people right? Their not some big robot or computer program. People need time to adjust and get familiar with the new vision of their new company. You don't right click on MySQL AB, select Refactor and expect everything to just change.

Certain initiatives that were started pre buyout continued. When it was detected that those initiatives weren't inline with Sun's plans, it was corrected.

All the 400 or so employees that were with MySQL are now with Sun and they need to get used to how being part of Sun frees them from increasing direct revenues from MySQL.

Sun buys an open source company and doesn't force them to change their business practices. Doesn't sound so bad. And when it does get them to change their business practices, it results in being more open.

Re:Good day for all

[njcoder]

Are you for real?

An open source company wants to close some of its new features. The "proprietary" software company that bought them wants them to keep everything open.

Somehow, everyone wants to paint the proprietary company in a bad light. The original blog post from the first story never even mentioned Sun but the title on Slashdot was about Sun closing MySQL.

Sun's management has MySQL change that decision and the headline is about MySQL reverting.

There's an obvious bias here that's laughable.

Mickos is the one that needs to adapt here. Though I personally don't think it's fair to give him a hard time about it. I mean the guy just closed a big deal, got a ton of money and needs to do a different job than he was doing for the last 7 or so years. If he does the same stuff in a couple more months, that's a different story.

And this wasn't a "public announcement" it was at a partner meeting. Which is a bit different. And nothing was actually released or finalized, it was just a roadmap to let partners know what to expect. Sometimes these things change but people made a big deal over it.

Most large acquisitions have their hiccups. That shouldn't come as any suprise.

Alternate interpretation of events...

[Edgewize]

"Company forced to give up revenue stream due to open-source fanatics who refuse to acknowledge any boundary between open-source MySQL server APIs and closed-source enterprise utilities which call those APIs"

Despite the outcome, this is not a victory for the open-source movement. The original Slashdot story was inflammatory and designed to mislead, and now it has had the desired effect.

Re:Alternate interpretation of events...

[JustinOpinion]

What?

So you not only believe:
1. Sun (a corporation) makes decisions not based on what will bring in the most revenue, but based on what "fanatics" want;
You also apparently believe:
2. The Slashdot crowd has the ability to shape corporate policies to their whims.

I think a reality check is in order.

Sun/MySQL were considering a variety of licenses (including closed source ones). To the extent that comments made on Slashdot (and other online sources) made sense, they were probably taken into account. However, the final decision was undoubtedly what they thought would maximize profits. Yes, maintaining community good-will is probably part of their strategy, since it gives them free advertising (evangelism, etc.) and some free development (patch submissions, etc.).

Frankly I don't see how this isn't a victory for both open-source and MySQL. The community gets open-source code, MySQL gets development and exposure. Win-win.

Re:Alternate interpretation of events...

[njcoder]

"Company forced to give up revenue stream due to open-source fanatics who refuse to acknowledge any boundary between open-source MySQL server APIs and closed-source enterprise utilities which call those APIs"

Despite the outcome, this is not a victory for the open-source movement. The original Slashdot story was inflammatory and designed to mislead, and now it has had the desired effect. MySQL AB needed to generate revenue directly from MySQL as that was pretty much their only product. They were looking for an IPO before Sun bought them so they needed to increase revenues.

Being part of Sun, MySQL doesn't have the same pressure to generate revenues directly from MySQL. Sun/Schwartz's plan is to drive revenue in Sun's other lines from MySQL. Hardware sales, support, etc.

Re:Alternate interpretation of events...

[this great guy]

"Company forced to give up revenue stream due to open-source fanatics [...]"

Actually Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has explained numerous times in his blog that opensourcing your products increases your revenue stream in the long term. I invite you to read in particular this 2-day old post where he answers the FAQ "Why don't you just stop giving your software away?" and gives precisely the example of MySQL.

Re:Alternate interpretation of events...

[shmlco]

"....opensourcing your products increases your revenue stream in the long term."

In some cases. Here, the hope was that they'll buy a license and support package. If they don't, no revenue.

Further, I'd argue that basing a business on support fees and licenses means that it's against your best interests to ever create a powerful easy-to-use product that DOESN'T need support. If you want income, then complexity and bugs are your friends.

Re:ZFS next to be open sourced?

[Enderandrew]

I'm sure you could write a patch to get it in the kernel without FUSE, you just couldn't distribute it.

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:Lol Slashdot is too much

[krow]

Hi!

If anyone in the know had written the original article I doubt they would have put "Sun" in the title. It was pretty much a MySQL decision all along. The original article was not completely wrong, but it certainly was wrong on the Sun part.

Cheers,
      -Brian

Re:Lol Slashdot is too much

[Apotsy]

Old story:
EXTRA!! EXTRA!! SUN DOES SOMETHING BAD!!!!
(actually, it wasn't really sun)

Today's story:
EXTRA!! EXTRA!! MYSQL DOES SOMETHING GOOD!!!!
(actually, sun may have been involved)

Understand now?

Re:Lol Slashdot is too much

[njcoder]

You may have said something that makes sense. All I keep thinking is I'm hungry.

I don't see any problem with close sourcing

[iamacat]

Just because you release one product as open source doesn't mean that you have to release all you works or future versions under the same license. Just as long as you don't mislead anyone about old and new license terms and do not try to harass developers who have forked off your old version and are possibly duplicating your closed source extensions.

Re:Great to see? Want to make a bet?

[njcoder]

Click the link and read more

* MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source,
        * so will the MySQL Connectors, and
        * so will the main storage engines we ship.

In addition:

        * MySQL 6.0â(TM)s pending backup functionality will be open source,
        * the MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
        * the encryption and compression backup features will be open source,

where the last item is a change of direction from what we were considering before.

The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans were made for a company considering an IPO, but made less sense in the context of Sun, a large company with a whole family of complementary open source software and hardware products.

Re:ZFS next to be open sourced?

[Kjella]

I'm sure you could write a patch to get it in the kernel without FUSE, you just couldn't distribute it. Actually, nothing could stop you distributing just the patch under the CDDL. You definately couldn't ship binaries, and I'm not sure if they could go together since it's somewhat beyond "mere aggregation". The more likely problem is that you'd need to hook fairly deep into the kernel's subsystems and so keeping a set of zfs-pathces current with each kernel release would be no non-trivial job.

Floating a Balloon to see if it will Fly

[zuperduperman]

This has all the hallmarks of a classic PR maneuver - Sun wants to figure out how they can extract more $$ from the high end users of MySQL. They need to find out how the market will react if they start selling closed source MySQL extensions without committing themselves if it goes horribly wrong. So they sprinkle some unsubtantiated vague rumours around and look for the reaction. The reaction was: PostgreSQL. So now they can kill the whole idea with minimal losses and try their next plan for how to "monetize" MySQL some more without pissing off their entire user base and killing the golden goose.

I don't believe for a second that things like this are an accident. These folks are far too smooth to just accidently let this kind of thing drop and run for a week.

no onus

[mkcmkc]

I'd say there is no "onus". Linux has a license that the Linux developers like, and ZFS has a license that its owners like. If it happens that they are incompatible, that's okay. As long as no patents are involved, the Linux people are free to reimplement ZFS, and Sun is free to reimplement Linux. This is a good thing.

As a practical matter, I suspect that virtually no one would switch OSes to use ZFS, but for some users this will be a good tradeoff.

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:no onus

[mrsteveman1]

Yea, but one of the strengths of open source is that you don't NEED to re-implement stuff all over the place. This however is a political license issue completely voiding one of the strengths of open source code.

In this case with ZFS, GPL is causing problems. There are other operating systems using the ZFS code Sun released, the odd one out is Linux because of the GPL.

Re:no onus

[dreamchaser]

That's because the GPL, for all the good it's done, is at the end of the day more of a political statement than a license.

Yes, yes I know I'll get modded as flamebait for this, but the truth hurts. Don't get me wrong, I use tons of GPL software and have contributed to some as well. I'm just sick of the more fanatical among the OSS crowd acting like it's the only license fit to ever use under any circumstances. As others have noted in this discussion it's also held Linux back in a few areas.

Re:no onus

[mkcmkc]

As others have noted in this discussion it's also held Linux back in a few areas. Well, the fact that I'm not willing to give away the fruits of my labor also "holds me back", but I don't look at it that way because I have goals other than just wanting as many people as possible to use my software. The same can be said for the GPL--it's goals are simply not the same as those of Open Source in general. I think you'd have to say that RMS has gone to great ends to make that clear.

Re:no onus

[mkcmkc]

I think it's fair to ask whether Sun has an agenda in choosing one license when they could have chosen another. That's not the same as saying that they don't have the right to choose any license they like.

Personally I don't really care. Solaris is about where Perforce is--they can still make money, but the leading edge has passed them by, probably forever. The thought of using an OS/distribution with which I couldn't install (say) callgrind in 90 seconds is just about unthinkable at this point.

Re:no onus

[E-Lad]

One can also say, with some agreeable degree of accuracy, that RMS birthed the GPL and chose that for his code due to an agenda of his own. Is it a surprise to you that licenses are chosen and nix'd based on how in line they are with the choosing org's goals? That's an agenda dictating things. Everyone has one. The question is, is whether you are amicable towards that agenda, or not. But, yes, some people can be bafflingly dumb and pick a license out of thin air with no purpose or foresight behind why they did so.

Re:no onus

[BlueParrot]

As others have noted in this discussion it's also held Linux back in a few areas.

Ok, this is nonsense. There is a license incompatibility, yes, but it is because BOTH licenses make requirements the other does not fullfill, not just the GPL. In other words , the license of ZFS does not permit using it in Linux because the GPL does not fullfill the requirements of the CDDL. SIMULATENOUSLY the GPL does not permit combining Linux with ZFS because the CDDL does not fullfill the requirements of the GPL.

There are a lot of trolls here who try to interpret this as the FSF the GPL being fanatic and Sun and the CDDL being more reasonable, the reality is that the the incompatibility arises from similar terms that exist in both licenses, namely that you cannot impose any further restrictions on derived works. Since the set of restrictions in two licenses differ they are incompatible. So basically, if you are going to consider this "a problem caused by teh GPL" then it is as much "a problem caused by the CDDL" and vice versa.

Of course bashing the GPL on slashdot is a lot more fun, but the boring reality is that both Sun and Linus have picked a license of their choice, and they turned out to be incompatible. It is either the fault of both parties or neither. You can't have your cake and eat it.

Re:ZFS next to be open sourced?

[mysidia]

So is a patch not considered to be a derivative work?

It is, but you can dual-license your modifications under both the GPL and the CDDL.

You distribute your modifications to the kernel to add ZFS hooks as one piece (dual-licensed).

Then you distribute the CDDL-licensed pieces as a separate package, modified to utilize the hooks you added to interact directly with the separate CDDL-licensed package.

Your ZFS hooks enable the the separate package to be 'loaded' into the kernel after it is compiled from source.

A derivative work is created when the CDDL -licensed package is loaded, BUT this derivative work is created by the end-user, not you the programmer, or you the person distributing the package.

The act of the user creating a derived work isn't prohibited by the GPL, so long as they do not copy or distribute their derived work.

The modified CDDL-licensed package is a derivative work of your own kernel modifications, hence the choice to dual-license the kernel-modification package.

Closed source... no wait, open source

[c_stromblad]

Whichever side you're on in this never ending battle between the choice of open source or closed source I find it most interesting that sun is "committed" to open source. How come? The acquire MySQL, try to make parts of it closed source and ... then because of market forces decide not to do it. Then in some weird market propaganda they are suddenly committed to open source.

Ha, good one.