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Widenius Warns Against MySQL Falling Into Oracle's Hands

Posted by Soulskill on from the they-must-not-activate-the-superweapon dept.

jamie sends in a blog post from MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius calling for help to "save MySQL from Oracle's clutches." While the US DoJ approved Oracle's purchase of Sun back in August, the European Commission has been less forthcoming. Widenius points out that Oracle has been using their customers to put pressure on the EC, and he questions Oracle's commitment to MySQL, saying their vague promises aren't good enough. He writes: "Oracle has NOT promised (as far as I know and certainly not in a legally binding manner): To keep (all of) MySQL under an open source license; Not to add closed source parts, modules or required tools; To not raise MySQL license or MySQL support prices; To release new MySQL versions in a regular and timely manner; To continue with dual licensing and always provide affordable commercial licenses to MySQL to those who needs them (to storage vendors and application vendors) or provide MySQL under a more permissive license; To develop MySQL as an Open Source project; To actively work with the community; Apply submitted patches in a timely manner; To not discriminate patches that make MySQL compete more with Oracle's other products; To ensure that MySQL is improved also in manners that make it compete even more with Oracle's main offering."

2 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So fork the damn thing already! by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Informative

    SQL is pronounced .in many old timer circles as "squeal"

    Old-timers never pronounced it "squeal" or "sequel" - that's a give-away that you're either a newbie or you come from a Microsoft background. Real old-timers pronounce it "ess queue ell".

    Just saying ...

  2. Re:Oracle by butlerm · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't work for Oracle, and I would like to see other databases to get into the same league inf every material respect. Take Oracle RAC (formerly Oracle Parallel Server) for example, Oracle's shared everything database clustering technology. There are no open source equivalents. MS SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL don't have anything like it. Apparently IBM DB2 does, but only in the mainframe editions.

    There are often things that can be done to work around these limitations (replication works in some cases, for example), it is just a question of cost effectiveness. There is no reason to buy Oracle just because it is "Oracle". Only if it does what you need better than the alternatives. For many businesses that is the case. Oracle doesn't dominate the business because of FUD. It dominates due to true technical superiority. A business would be positively stupid to pay a large premium for a database that doesn't have any real superiority to much less expensive (if not free) alternatives. That is one of the reasons why it would be great if the alternatives caught up. Transparent clustering for PostgreSQL would be outstanding.

    I *can* use PostgreSQL to do everything I could with Oracle 7 back in the early 90s. That is saying something (MySQL doesn't come close). A lot of people don't need much of what Oracle has added since then. If that is the case, there is a great case to be made for using something else. It is certainly a lot less expensive.