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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.'"
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....
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
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.
Postgres has a diverse group of contributors so it will be absolutely nothing like Oracle acquiring MySQL. Sure it would be temporarily damaging to the project if Oracle did go out and buy the leading contributors but I can't imagine that Oracle would get away with such predatory actions. FTR I believe that Oracle genuinely wants to use MySQL as s competitor to SQL Server in the bottom of the market.
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?
no text necessary!
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.
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.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
...sure makes some people whiny.
I would like to have a list of serious companies using PostgreSQL for serious stuff...and what stuff it is PostgreSQL is doing. In my world, all you hear is "...MySQL...MySQL...", even in cases where the back-end is being handled by PostgreSQL.
Our three major DBs have about 13.4 million records combined, with enormous amounts of data about clients. PostgreSQL has never failed us. I work in the insurance business.
I'm getting fed up to the back teeth with this guy. He must have got himself into some mental issues he can't get out of. He had a dual licensed database server in MySQL that brought in good money and had a side-effect of making it the standard database as the web expanded, which he then sold to Sun for a very tidy sum and he still now expects to be able to control MySQL's future?
Before Sun bought MySQL Sun was heavily involved with Postgres (still is in many ways) and they could have quite easily tried to take that project over as opposed to buying MySQL. They didn't, and they would have found that very difficult because there are a lot of different interests in Postgres now.
You forgot SQLite. It's small and good enough for most of what MySQL gets used for: simple web forms, stat counters etc.
Maybe, just to ensure that this can't happen, he should join the PostgreSQL project and become a top contributor...
EnterpriseDB is a company that offers commercial support for PostgresQL. They have salaried people on staff that contribute to the project, much like IBM, RedHat etc. contribute to the Linux kernel. So I would say Monty's scenario is about as likely as Linux going away by Microsoft or Apple paying off the to 20 kernel developers. Some people just don't get how open source works.
That is a very good point indeed. mysql was the cat's meow in the internet's early days; everybody was doing a web portal and mysql is fast as hell with simple lookups. Just the ticket. Now even databases that were supposed to stay simple are morphing into who knows what. mysql's engine still can't even do transactions and they own nobody whose plugin can. Even if they're not a target they'll always be weak in their market no matter how popular they are. Postgresql (for example) has always kicked mysql's butt in real database work, and now that it has pretty much closed the speed gap in the simple things there's no need to chase mysql anymore. They're after bigger game: Full SQL compliance and Oracle. And there's other OS DBs out there doing fabulous work as well.
Personally, mysql served me well back in the day but I've moved on to new tools for new needs. Unless thay can actually own a modern engine rather than begging one I think mysql should remain as it is; sort of a bug in the amber of simpler times.
PostgreSQL languished from 1993-1996. Then the developers who looked at the code decided it was best to rewrite everything from scratch. This slowdown in development is why MySQL became more popular in the late 1990's. Plus, it was the database used in almost PHP book published. PostgreSQL in the late 1990's through early 2000's had a very solid codebase but very little work had been done on it from a performance perspective. Work throughout the 2000's has improved the performance tremendously and now the core team is focusing on bring replication to it natively.
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
davecb@spamcop.net
Richard Stallman has clarified that he believes the GPL is necessary and sufficient protection for MySQL, in direct contradiction to Widenius' call that the license should be changed and copyrights rest in some entity other than Oracle.
Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center defend the GPL even more strongly:
you had me at #!
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.
Tweet, tweet.
It's not a multiuser database.
A web site is a classic multiuser scenario for an RDBMS; you have to have concurrency issues completely nailed down (ideally with row level locking and ACID).
It's also MySQL's sweet spot.
you had me at #!
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.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
If so, I suspect that the psql team will nullify a number of those patents with prior art. Long before Oracle 9/10's move into OO, Postgres was there.
Also, once Oracle creates that kind of ill will, how fast will MS move MS-SQL to Linux/Unix? It would happen within 3 months. They would KILL to have all those OSS coders switch DBs.
Finally, Oracle will not go after Postgres with patents. Right now, postgres has many similarities to Oracle. As such, it is increasingly being used for lower end work, and then projects move to Oracle. Basically, Oracle sees it as a feeder project. Personally, I would stick with Postgres for all bu the top demand projects.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
what a troll - and that was lying about what Stallman said
Can we get him put on some terr'rist list or something?
I once worked for a company called Great Bridge, which attempted to make money selling a boxed version of PostgreSQL. We employed/contracted with several key PostgreSQL developers, and I distinctly remember discussions with management and at least one of those developers about this very topic. The developers had agreed amongst themselves and with Great Bridge management to limit the number of key committers who took money from Great Bridge in order to ensure the company didn't exert too much control over the project (I'm sure we would have been happy to have every one of them on the payroll). History proves Monty wrong on this one.
What? The open source replication alternatives are good enough
You have:
* PGCluster
* Slony-I
* DBBalancer
* pgpool
* PostgreSQL table comparator
* SkyTools
* Sequoia
* Bucardo
* Mammoth Replicator
* Cybercluster
* GridSQL (shared-nothing)
All are open source and some even offer additional commercial support.
From my perspective, it's not about "selling out". Given the offer of that kind of money, I'd have had tar'd the repo up and personally delivered it to Sun within the hour in a set of gilded DVD cases, and I won't begrudge anyone that same choice either. What *is* annoying is the whole "I want to eat my cake and have it too" whining that Monty has been expressing through this whole thing.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
PostgreSQL did not exist in 1993-1995. It was Postgres, and Postgres95 in that timeframe. It had its own query language. It was re-written to use SQL, and then became PostgreSQL.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Every time I've gone looking for information on how to use FireBird with my favourite language (which changes frequently) I've come away unsatisfied. So I've gone with something that was easier to figure out how to use.
That's a part of why FireBird gets ignored. It was sort of like what Linux was in the late 90's. Probably quite capable, but the documentation seemed to assume that you knew someone to coach you over the undocumented spots. Or that you were familiar with something sufficiently similar. Over the last decade Linux has backfilled, but FireBird hasn't. In fact it seems to have retrogressed, just based upon the last time I considered using it. (I didn't want to use SQLite because I wanted a system that let me use integer keys, and the SQLite interface to the language I was then using didn't. But I wanted a DB that would allow me to pick the file I was using as my database and store it locally with the program. FireBird would seem to have been ideal...but I couldn't easily figure out hot to use it, so I used something else. [I think that time I packed the integers into byte strings with each byte using only 7 bits.])
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Whatever!
The point is received gobs of money and now he's whining like a toddler. I think everybody's fucking sick of it by now.
If he signed a bad deal, THAT IS HIS FAULT AND HE SHOULD FUCKING COPE WITH IT LIKE AN ADULT! And stop spamming up this, and other, forums with his bullshit whining.
Comment of the year
I've last used Firebird about two years ago, so this may not be true anymore... but anyway. I've had two major problems with it.
First is documentation. There's no single place to go for it. Effectively you end up with the original Interbase manual, and then various bits and pieces which explain what was added/removed/changed, and you have to piece it all together by yourself (and there's no way to tell if you even have all the pieces in the first place). This applies to admin docs, SQL reference, and language API references.
Speaking of which, we come to the second point: API bindings are rather messy (the C one, at least). Much more so than SQLite API, for example. Among other things, I recall it requiring things like (char*) casts back and forth to reinterpret data of appropriate types, and it seems to make a lot of assumptions about sizes of various C types, so its portability to more exotic architectures would be rather suspect.
It also doesn't seem to be nearly as feature-rich as PostgreSQL. The core is solid, but e.g. standard function set is rather minimalist, and you end up rolling out your own for many occasions.
That said, Firebird/Embedded is a very nice database specifically for embedding, small and yet full-featured. If you ever missed things such as stored procedures in SQLite (and they actually make quite a lot of sense specifically for embedded DBs, where DB is tightly coupled to the application anyway), I would advise to look at FB/E.
It is in fact easy to set up and maintain -- it just requires a bit more thinking, mostly to get the authentication and such things working right, but that's a matter of editing a config file. Maintenance wise, PostgreSQL doesn't need much of that, the occasional vacuum and that's it. With auto-vacuum enabled, even that is taken care of.
I used MySQL a lot in the past, and ended up going to PostgreSQL around version 7.3, because I needed the triggers and the views. Never looked back to MySQL, PG might be slower at certain things, but at least I don't end up getting a call at 3am in the morning in the weekend informing me the database crapped itself up again, only to have to wait for myisamchk to go through near 20Gb of data.
Give it a shot and you will be enlightened :)
There is no sig...
Because it allows people behind pg to -on one side- give you for free a half-baked RDBMS but -on another side- ask money for the tools/etc to make it usable.
That what BSD license allows. And in past it was practiced by PostgreSQL core team most of whom were employed by the company which was offering all the extras to PosgreSQL.
But that is not per se BSD license weakness - it was pg business model in the past. It kind of feels f***ed up when somebody offers a patch but it gets rejected by pg core because it competes with their commercial offering.
That is btw explanation why pg has much lower visibility compared to MySQL. MySQL was much more open and Monty/etc were investing their time to reimplement -instead of rejecting- into their proprietary fork what OSS community was contributing to GPL'ed MySQL.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.