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Mickos Urges EU To Approve Oracle's MySQL Takeover
mjasay writes "Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has written to EU Commissioner of Competition Neelie Kroes to urge speedy approval of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, including the open-source MySQL database. The EU has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum. But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL-the-community from MySQL-the-company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: 'Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close, mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.' In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he 'couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action,' and is 'motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter.'"
I'm happy he is taking action.
Too often, technically-knowledgeable people don't recognize or accept the need for them to be social leaders.
if they mess MySql up(even more that is), people can just move to Postgre, Firebird, Couchdb, Drizzle, etc.. There's anything but a shortage of open-source databases.
It's not that easy to kill an open source project.
I use MySQL exclusively and it would nice if Oracle were given a shot at supporting MySQL. Even if they do try and kill it to gain leverage for their own database, there's always MariaDB (a MySQL fork by Monty Widenius, the original creator of MySQL).
Even the threat of Oracle owning MySQL is motivating commercial users to look more closely at the BSD-licensed PostgreSQL. If the sale goes forward, it may the biggest boost yet to the PostgreSQL community.
I don't see why the EU is worried in the first place. First of all MySQL could never compete with Oracle's DB. They will never compete and never have. Completely different use-cases. Apart from that, I'm still using PostgreSQL and if i had an app specifically designed for MySQL, I'd go with Drizzle(fork).
Berkeley DB is still being developed with new features - such as those in version 4.8, released less than a month ago.
Anyway, Berkeley DB is a different kind of database than MySQL or Oracle Database.
Surely the rise of SQLite has something to do with what you perceive to be Berkeley DB's decline?
Once upon a time, MySQL supported the use of Berkeley DB as one of its back end storage engines. Then Oracle acquired Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB (which was, and still is, open source). MySQL didn't like the idea of Oracle controlling their back end, so they phased out its support.
Now it doesn't matter anymore. Oracle is going to own MySQL and Berkeley DB. In my opinion, Berkeley DB is the finest storage engine on the planet. Either with a relational/schema layer on top of it (like MySQL), or all by itself (in which case it's simple key/value pairs), it is insanely reliable and its performance is excellent. I can't say enough good things about it. So how about it, Oracle? Can we get these two great pieces of software together again?
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Granted, there are some exceptions, but that's just what they are: EXCEPTIONS.
They aren't just "exceptions", you have hand-waved away a majority of the free software people use.
I don't know of any free software compiler that uses that approach (not gcc, ghc, python, ruby, perl, etc.); nor any OS (GNU+linux, freebsd, opensolaris); nor any desktop environment or GUI tools; nor any browsers or email clients; nor text editors/IDEs. For database systems, MySQL and BerkeleyDB do, but postgresql, firebirdsql, and sqlite do not. Let's say that OO.o does, as well.
When I think about the volume of quality software that I use, the part that uses a dual licensing model is there, but it's not the predominant portion. For one thing, any dual licensed software project requires that you sign over the rights if you are an outside contributor. Not many open source projects do that, because it generally eliminates outside development except from some special cases.
the mere possibility of support or no-business development model means there is no cause for concern
There's plenty of cause for concern, as with any project using any model. Ultimately, a lot of things need to line up for a project to really take off and sustain itself. The "hybrid licensing model", however, is not the only way to do it.
or have been subsidized heavily by some other business for other reasons
That is very common, and it's a very different model than the "single company plus dual licensing" model. I would also add that it's often many businesses. It's probably a lot better in many cases -- PostgreSQL and Linux are both backed by various companies. I don't think you should marginalize this as a model for a successful project.
Google contributes heavily to MySQL, yet they are a second-class citizen in mainline MySQL, because they have to sign over rights to get improvements accepted. I don't think this state of affairs will last very long -- they will throw their weight behind one of the forks, and become a first-class contributor to the project, among others.
I do not think it is an accident that those few open vibrant open source products
Which few? I use a lot of free software from vibrant projects, and a lot of it quite simply does not follow your "hybrid licensing" explanation at all.
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