Why Oracle Can't Easily Kill PostgreSQL

ruphus13 writes "Claiming that 'PostgreSQL is a FOSS alternative to MySQL and hence Oracle should be allowed to pursue MySQL' is a specious argument, according to Monty Widenius. He fears that Oracle, or someone else, can easily squash PostgreSQL by just 'buying out' the top 20 developers. The Postgre community has fired back, calling that claim ridiculous. According to the article, 'PostgreSQL as a project is pretty healthy, and shows how vulnerable projects like MySQL are to the winds of change. PostgreSQL could die tomorrow, if a huge group of its contributors dropped out for one reason or another and the remainder of the community didn't take up the slack. But that's exceedingly unlikely. The existing model for PostgreSQL development ensures that no single entity can control it, it can't be purchased, and if someone decides to fork the project, the odds are that the remaining community would be strong enough to continue without a serious glitch.'"

Comments

Widenius please move on...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

You got your money and now you want MySQL (or at least the spotlight) back.

By your argument, PostgreSQL is fragile because the top 20 developers could be bought out by Oracle. If you think that's a buyout target that can be easily squashed, just think what a SQL DB with only one copyright owner can be? Oh wait, that was MySQL and we already know what you did....

Re:Widenius please move on...

[Anonymous Coward]

...PostgreSQL is fragile because the top 20 developers could be bought out by Oracle...

Sort of like how Monty's been trying to buy all the top MySQL devs away from Sun...

Re:Widenius please move on...

[turbidostato]

"there's nothing stopping these developers from giving $1m of this to pay for someone else to work full time on the project..."

Except the non-competing clause in their contracts, of course.

And of course too, Widenius has a point, a moot point but a point: buying out everyone that happens to compete with you is a tried and true strategy to get away competitors. It's only it is not a long time strategy against a strong and open market, it doesn't scale and it happens that open source projects with an open community backing them up (say, KDE, Debian... PostgreSQL) are the most resistant against such strategy.

So yes, Monty has a point... whatever.

Err...

[Enry]

While buying out the top 20 developers (and I find it unlikely they could in the first place) wouldn't necessarily kill PostgreSQL, it would hamper development until the next 20 developers get up to speed with the code. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft were to buy out the top 20 Linux kernel developers - Linux wouldn't be dead, but it certainly would be stagnant for a while. There's also the real possibility of major changes, since the next group of developers would have a different way of doing things and different goals for the project.

Re:Err...

[jbwiv]

Um....there's over 70 committers to PostgreSQL. And even the top 20 work for a wide range of companies. Buying them out would be virtually impossible. PostgreSQL is an open source database done right, both technically and politically. You MySQL apologists simply refuse to acknowledge that you hitched your wagon to the wrong horse, even when your horse may be put down soon.

Re:Err...

[dfetter]

If somebody were willing to come up with a billion dollars in cash, they could buy the top 100 people in the PostgreSQL project, and that would cramp it severely for a couple of years.

That said, Monty took VC money, which is basically legalized loan sharking. Taking VC money results, in the overwhelming majority of cases, in the complete screwing of the borrower. Monty was one of the lucky few who managed to get a fortune out of that situation, which makes his whining utterly unseemly.

Re:Err...

[Kjella]

Um....there's over 70 committers to PostgreSQL. And even the top 20 work for a wide range of companies. Buying them out would be virtually impossible.

And the whole concept seems to assume that there's a fixed pool of people. I'm guessing that if any of those companies lost their PostgreSQL guy, they'd be looking to hire another one and if it's anything like most open source software there's plenty unpaid or poorly paid people who'd love to take the position. Or with 10% unemployment, there would be soon enough if people knew they lacked developers. For that matter, I think it'd be hard to bury MySQL if just the entire community gathered on one fork and not a dozen.

Re:Err...

[TheRaven64]

Sun spent $1bn on MySQL. Spending the same amount of money on PostgreSQL would involve paying the top 20 developers $50m each not to work on PostgreSQL anymore (or to work on a proprietary fork of it). If I were offered that much not to work on a particular open source project, then I'd consider it quite seriously. For one thing I could pay someone else to work on the project full time while I did other things...

The argument doesn't really make sense, because Oracle is vulnerable to the same tactic. What would happen if IBM offered even $1m to each of Oracle's top database programmers to quit? Would Oracle be able to survive? They'd have to hire a completely new team, but they'd probably manage it. The same is true of PostgreSQL (and other big hippyware projects). Most of the people who work on it are employed by companies which benefit from the project existing. If they all quit then these companies would hire other people to replace them. You'd see a little drop in productivity, but nothing permanent.

Stop quoting Monty

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop quoting Monty in slashdot stories, you're giving him a bigger platform for his comments than he deserves. He sold MySQL to Sun and then left Sun. That should be the end of the story. Now he's making sounds like a regular cry baby. Someone please tell him to get some balls and grow up.

Why trust Sun?

[argent]

This is precisely why people were concerned about letting ANY single company own it.

Any company can be bought out.

If a product can't be effectively forked, it's not completely open source.

If a GPL fork of MySQL isn't good enough, then whose fault is that? And what does that mean for other dual-licensed GPL+Proprietary products?

And Monty Widenius knows about being bought!

[Anonymous Coward]

no text necessary!

Not even Oracle is evil enough to try this

[atomic777]

While he is technically correct that Oracle could just bribe the key developers to abandon pgsql, this would likely backfire.

First, it assumes that the pgsql developers of importance can be bought. Our world is decadent, but not everyone has a price tag

Second, seems Monty has been dealing with mysql code for too long. The pgsql code base (at least the parts I've seen) is significantly more pleasant to work with than MySQL's, and the sheer number of projects building off of it, commercial or OSS (due to BSD licence) are a testament to how accessible it is. Even if all of the current developers were to be bribed and stopped working on postgresql, there would be a significant incentive for other parties to step in and pick up the slack, given that postgresql has a sizable user base, and especially since it is now widely seen as the heir-apparent to mysql as the open-source rdbms of choice for your run-of-the-mill applications.

Add on top of that the bad press from a failed attempt to use such questionable tactics, and I think not even Oracle is greedy or dumb enough to try anything.

Re:Not even Oracle is evil enough to try this

[Hurricane78]

I agree. Hell, even PostgreSQL’s documentation is literally fun to read. It’s clean, it’s complete, it’s concise. Other projects should learn from them.

Re:Let me say this as a developer, contributor,

[Bill_the_Engineer]

if anything 'bad' happens to mysql, heads will roll.

Probably yours...

Widenius is only using scare tactics to try to get MySQL back after enjoying the profits from selling it in the first place.

His constant whining will morph into a cautionary tale about using open source programs in a production environment.

Phrases like "You don't get fired for buying from Oracle, Microsoft, or IBM" will return to the IT workplace and all the work open source developers did to enter the workplace will be set back several years.

Re:Firebird

[davecb]

He's just pushing a straw-man argument, having unwisely made it for MySQL, and after embaressingly being caught twisting RMS's words (see groklaw, http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100108114314405).

I fear he's strictly in this for himself and his friends, a certain well-know monopolist with a "Codeplex" Foundation...

Bother! I wanted this to be over months ago, so I could get more consulting from Sun's (Now Oracle's) customers.

--dave

Some people don't do money for the money

[weston]

Some people don't do it for the money. You can't buy them. Ever.

I don't know. I mean, I know what you're talking about: I've turned down a well-paying job with equity that would have set me up pretty good because I felt there was something more important than the money.

But here's the thing: at a certain level, once people offer you enough money (the mark starts somewhere around a million bucks) they're not just offering you money anymore, they're offering you freedom to do whatever you'd like to with your time. If the top 20 Postgres devs would rather do nothing else than work on Postgres, then you're right, this wouldn't happen. But if enough of them have other interests, then it's entirely possible someone could buy their non-participation -- with the ability to spend all the time they like on something else.

I had the privilege...

[Toze]

of speaking with Monty on freenode's mysql channel, when he responded to my suggestion that he needed a helmet and a big cup of STFU. I asked him about forking and MariaDB, and he had pretty much the same response as in the blog linked above. The way he talked about open source, though, it was like he thought it was impossible for a large open-source project to succeed without a strong leader. He expressed little trust in the community, and no faith that an abandoned project could be picked up again. When I asked him about developers scratching itches, and solutions drawing users and more developers, he didn't seem to think it was a feasible solution. He kept defending his posts about Oracle as being about "for the users," and his motivation being to maintain choices.

I think the problem is less about Monty wailing about Oracle's calumny, and more about Monty's view of how FOSS works. He seems to think it needs heroes, and that the rest of us plebes need someone to follow before we can get anything useful done. I'll agree with him that projects need leadership, but like comments above have said, there's a difference between project leadership and making yourself indispensable. If Monty was indispensable when he left MySQL, then he was the one that killed it, not Sun, and not Oracle.