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Widenius Warns Against MySQL Falling Into Oracle's Hands
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."
Perhaps Monty SHOULDN'T HAVE SOLD the damn thing in the first place if he's so worried about these things happening, no? Besides, there is NOTHING in the world preventing him from forking it, naming it something else and continuing development. NOTHING.
It's worse than that - Monty is a greedy self-centered pig. He sold it, then waited long enough so that he couldn't be sued (non-compete), then starts whining about how nobody else can be trusted with it.
If Oracle *doesn't* get it, I'm switching everything to a combination of PostgreSQL and NoSQL. I trust Oracle more than Monty any day. Oracle at least has a business case to not screw around - unlike Monty, who has already demonstrated his crappy ethics.
People in the Open Source community have been warning against this for years with MySQL. It is one of the key tenets in the PostgreSQL vs MySQL playbook. Use PostgreSQL because no single company controls the source. It can't be bought. MySQL dug its own destiny by tying its hand into the GPL AND (note the AND) being owned by a single entity.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
No one should take his opinion seriously because if he really cared then it wouldn't have sold it. Just fork the thing and forget Oracle.
Maybe he's hoping it would stay open source so he could pinch Oracle's improved code an basically have his mysql money and access to the myql code as it improves so he can plug it into his branch.
I agree that Oracle's dominance and proprietary nature places it in a unique position to dictate terms to its customers. The problem is that Oracle is at least twenty years ahead of all of their competitors in database technology. Oracle 7, ca 1991, has a better overall implementation than the latest and greatest from IBM, Microsoft, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and so on. I mean MySQL is barely out of the 'toy' stage (special purpose applications excluded). In the intervening two decades Oracle has widened the gap. That means for a certain classes of OLTP applications, people tend to think you are suicidal if you recommend anything else.
The only way to minimize this problem is to bring (open source) databases closer to parity, even with where Oracle was twenty years ago. PostgreSQL is the only one that comes close in the open source world. MySQL started out with so many bizarre design decisions and gratuitous incompatibilities, that I wonder if it will *ever* come close, at least not without losing backward compatibility in a big way.
Agreed. As a big ferinstance, MySQL just barely got two-way replication w/ 5.1, and even then you had to do some seriously weird hoodoo on it to make that happen (hint: it's not a listed feature)... this is a basic function of any full-on enterprise-level DB.
Now Postgres comes fairly close, but everyone else can't even touch it.
If Postgres ever got something resembling the ease and power of RAC, then Oracle would have something to worry about. Until then, they're in a position to dictate whatever terms they want to. (I would've put MS SQL Server as a contender, but clustering that into something resembling RAC is a friggin' nightmare to build and maintain, and I doubt that too many MCDBAs have quite wrapped their heads around using SQL Server on a Core (read: non-UI) install of Windows Server just yet.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Just to make his life easier?
Welcome to the world of commercial open source...
I didn't say "features" (although there are those) but rather "better overall implementation".
For example, with Oracle you can add columns, drop columns, and modify columns while there are ongoing transactions against the table. Try that with DB2 sometime.
MySQL is worse:
That is a trivial example. Generally speaking, however, Oracle gets significant new features with a high quality implementation about a decade before anyone else does. For example, during the 1990s the lack of MVCC and row level locking were serious problems with virtually every database except Oracle. Without them, you can't reliably run large or long running transactions without risking locking every other user out of the database, even if the transactions don't have any row level overlap.
Factually, Oracle bought InnoDB and improved it's performance, while Sun bought MySQL proper and improved it's performance. Not a rational use of their money if the aim was to kill the product. In fact, something of the opposite to what one would want to do to kill it.
According to Groklaw, the objectors to the deal were Microsoft, who competes with MySQL, SAP, who competes with Oracle, and Monty, who has some kind of relationship with Microsoft, albeit not one involving an explicit employer/employee relationship.
I smell a rat, arguably involving our favorite monopolist.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net