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Why You Shouldn't Panic About Closed Source MySQL Extensions

Posted by Soulskill on from the time-will-tell dept.

jfruhlinger writes "Oracle has released proprietary extensions to the open source MySQL database, seeming to reinforce the worst fears of those in the open source community who opposed Oracle's acquisition of MySQL in the first place. But open source observer Brian Proffitt urges you not to panic: This dual source strategy really isn't unusual in the commercial open source world, Oracle has already released a bevy of open source improvements to the database, and anyway the EU extracted a commitment to keep MySQL open for another four years when it approved the Sun-Oracle merger."

3 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just another 4 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Its already forked :)
    http://mariadb.org/

  2. Re:"open for four years" by hholzgra · · Score: 5, Informative

    As if PostgreSQL didn't have it's own ecosystem of commercial-only extensions, too (EnterpriseDB, GreenPlum, just to name a few) ... the big difference here is that in the MySQL ecosystem Oracle is the only one that can do such dual-license stunts while in the PostgreSQL ecosystem anybody can ... (whether that's good or bad is a different story)

    For "improvements"/"what's been added":

    * lots of multi CPU scalability work (although part of it came from Google/Facebook and other sources where Sun/Oracle 'just' did the integration work)
    * MySQL Cluster got a *lot* better in Sun/Oracle days
    * the InnoDB plugin improved InnoDB affairs a lot (and this has been Oracles baby even in the Sun days)
    * connectors, e.g. PHP/mysqlnd
    * more interesting InnoDB improvements (e.g. fulltext indexes, finally) are in the queue, how these are going to be licensed remains to be seen though

    It's not that everything is going into the optimal direction with MySQL under Oracle (i'm not working for them anymore for a reason), but saying there has been no development ever since the Sun acquisition is not fair, and i don't see any reason to believe that things will radically change on day 1462 either ...

  3. Re:I just migrated... by buchner.johannes · · Score: 4, Informative

    Migrating from MySQL to PG may be easy, but migrating from MySQL to MariaDB is trivial.

    --
    NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.