Wikipedia Moved To MariaDB 5.5

Peetke writes "As we all know Oracle is not the biggest friend to the Open Source Community. Long standing OSS supporter Wikipedia has now moved from an optimized fork of MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.5, for both its English and German sites. Wikipedia expects all other languages to follow within a month. Performance-wise, this move has no big implications, but it will ensure our biggest community database will live long and prosper."

Comments

seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Soo they don't like Oracle too?

Re:seriously?

[Ultra64]

Right, they couldn't possibly have a good reason for doing it.

Re:seriously?

[hairyfeet]

Sadly that is true and why FOSS will ALWAYS suck for anything bigger than a project that can be done by a handful in a garage, its a problem I noted years ago and gave the name "Busted shitter problem".

You see if I ask for somebody to paint me a picture or sculpt me a bust or write a song for free? I will get several offers, some of which might even be really good. If I ask someone to come fix that overflowing shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.

What does that have to do with FOSS? Its actually quite simple in that for every decent programming job you have a dozen shitty jobs which is why companies like Apple, MSFT, and even Red Hat have to offer competitive salaries, because nobody wants to do a shitty job for free. But sadly when you are talking about a project run SOLELY with volunteers you just won't see those jobs get done, nobody wants to fix the busted shitters. Don't take my word for it, go look at the bug tracker of any major distro...do you have bugs that are TWO years old? THREE years old? Do I hear FOUR? The bug tracker will have bugs as old as the distro itself because those bugs are shitty and would take a hell of a lot of work to fix and thus don't get done.

In a way its a lot like communism in on the surface communism sounds great, I mean everybody working together to make their their lives and the world a better place? How could that be bad? Well what you end up with is a billion artists and nobody doing the job cleaning up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese. It got so bad that the USSR had to actually assign soldiers to "potato duty" which was all the shitty jobs they couldn't get the people to do, but large FOSS projects don't have that luxury.

I'm sure every programmer here will instantly mod me down because they don't like to think that their job is shitty, but c'mon dudes, it really is. Bug hunts, regression testing, writing docs, dealing with those little weird errors that just seem to pop up in corner cases and are maddening to track down...those are shitty jobs. This is why you see so many new releases in FOSS when the previous one hasn't even had half the bugs fixed so they are adding new bugs onto old bugs because writing new programs? That is enjoyable, making something with your own two hands is something we humans have enjoyed and took pleasure in for thousands of years, being the guy that has to widen the ditch because the sewage is backing up? Not so much.

Re:seriously?

[hairyfeet]

And what is wrong with that? Give old Monty some credit, the man managed to sell the product and keep it at the same time so at the end of the day all the corp ended up with was a now worthless name! That is fucking brilliant! How he managed to get the corp to agree to buy without a non compete clause i don't know, probably by being just that fucking slick, but its a trick worthy of playing the WB "sucker!" music at Oracle, damned smart if you ask me.

Re:seriously?

[VortexCortex]

Sadly that is true and why FOSS will ALWAYS suck for anything bigger than a project that can be done by a handful in a garage, its a problem I noted years ago and gave the name "Busted shitter problem".

You see if I ask for somebody to paint me a picture or sculpt me a bust or write a song for free? I will get several offers, some of which might even be really good. If I ask someone to come fix that overflowing shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.

Which is why your "busted shitter problem" works the opposite way in FLOSS. Because when a FLOSS shitter breaks, it's not just you, it's a whole mess of people. Some of them are willing to pay to have the problem fixed, and some might even be capable of cleaning the shit off themselves. When ONE of them does fix the issue, then then everyone's busted shitter is fixed all at once. Compare this to a proprietary shitter than no one is allowed to fix but the shitter manufacturer: You have to wait on a specialist to come out with a fix, if they find it in THEIR interest to fix it... So, that's why Linux is better and faster than Microsoft is at patching OS vulnerabilities -- Linux, a successful project that runs damn near every web server on the planet, and powers the most smartphones as well, I might add. The many successful FLOSS projects that are bigger than a handful of devs does not completely obliterate your points, but makes you look pretty damn foolish, IMO.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that a core team of maintainers should be small. When starting out these maintainers are also developers. However, when the project gets bigger it's restructured so that devs get to keep developing and maintainers just merge and test and verify, etc. Lather rinse and repeat. Linux is successful because the dev became a maintainer quickly and let others do the dirty work. Protip: Linus doesn't write much code these days, but every kernel patch still crosses his desk. Ballmer and the late Jobs could only dream of such levels of control... Aside: What happens when Linus dies or quits? He's already set up the system of trust so that anyone can now replace him immediately.

This flexibility and scalability in structure is something that all companies should take a look into. Many are doing so. Some, companies are letting users fix their broken shitters for free to the benefit of all. Others claim control over all shiter functions, and thus become synonymous with their broken shit.

Re:seriously?

[Man Eating Duck]

<Something something> communism <something something>FOSS

<more communism>

It seems like you haven't used proprietary software at all... I've seen a lot of QA issues like those mentioned in your rants in proprietary software, as well as OSS. On the other hand, I regularly use two very slick OSS projects both privately and at work: calibre and Sigil. Both are hands down the best option available in their category, proprietary or not. Nothing else even comes close. Both are maintained by extremely competent devs, have quick issue turnaround, and are relatively simple to run from source, as I have done to make (and contribute) a couple of fixes and improvements myself. In the case of calibre, millions of non-tech users are happily using it to catalogue their ebooks.

In your case, as it seems like OSS ate your dog, feel *very* free to look elsewhere. I've done so as well when I can't find anything that suits my requirements. There have been a few of your kind visiting the forums of those two projects. These people make incoherent, irrational demands, rant, won't listen to reason, and even refuse to explain what they mean so that people can help them. None of this is constructive for anyone. Although they're generally treated politely, we're frankly better off without them. Then you have people who bring rationally presented and relevant complaints to the table while behaving themselves, they usually walk away with a fixed issue, a workaround they're happy with, or a good explanation why a solution is not forthcoming (and yes, this can be "I'm not personally interested in implementing this feature, patches are welcome"). The project benefits from these people as well. Of course there are also bad and irrational maintainers out there, as well as projects so bad they're worthless, the barrier of entry isn't exactly high.

The point is: No, OSS devs aren't your employees. Neither are you their paying customer, and you have no right to make demands. No, not even if you donate $3. Take what they offer, or not. Nonetheless, if you can't see the indescribably huge value in a plethora of OSS projects, including Wikipedia, I feel sorry for you. There are millions of people with better people skills and/or technical knowledge than you who actually make OSS work for themselves, every day.

Re:But... But... Why?

[serviscope_minor]

"Oracle may screw MySQL".

Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?

One definition of madness is to try the same thing again and again and keep expecting different results. It's Oracle. You will get screwed.

Re:But... But... Why?

[CRC'99]

It's part performance and part philosophical. Given that wikipedia is a strongly philosophical enterprise, this seems reasonable.

Well, the performance difference didn't seem to be huge - in fact, some stats were slower.... I don't buy for a second that it was for performance reasons.

Philosophy - maybe - however Oracle contribute quite a bit to OSS - more than a lot of companies - See: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/technical-contributions-1689636.html

In a nutshell, they are working on NFS over IPv6, data integrity checks for ext3, they maintain libstdc++, they worked hard on BTRFS, If anything, they have helped open source much more than most other companies.

Again, I don't see the philosophical reasons other than 'because we can'.

Re:That's simple

[M. Baranczak]

Java was already open source when Oracle bought Sun. And since then, Oracle has been trying to close it back again with bullshit patent claims.

Re:But... But... Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

however Oracle contribute quite a bit to OSS

Looking like you support OSS is not a bad business move as even Microsoft has learned. It also makes underhanded sabotage of OSS much easier because they can "We support OSS and aren't greedy scum" FUD most people.

Re:But... But... Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has a few employees that are solid OSS contributors, and apparently they have some management support. That's been true for years (e.g. their OCFS filesystem...). However, they're only an OSS contributor in a tactical sense. Many years ago (and much earlier than one would've expected!) they came to the realization that Linux was the future (or at least, a large chunk of the future) in the server space, and they made the very smart tactical decision that they didn't want to be relegated to a dusty corner where their products only ran (well) on legacy Sparc/Solaris, HP/UX, IBM AIX, etc environments. So they made their core Oracle products work on Linux, and as a part of doing that job fully and trying to make their stuff really shine on Linux, they necessarily had to get involved in the OSS community.

Later came the MySQL acquisition, which was another tactical decision along the lines of "Well, that worked great and we retained our corporate Oracle customers that wanted to move from Sparc/Solaris (etc) to x86/Linux, but... we can't get all these exiting Linux/OSS users to adopt Oracle because MySQL works well enough for them and its free, so lets take over MySQL too and own the Linux relational database space".

It's all tactical, and it's all designed to corner the market on relational databases (and various other bits that go on top of them) as hard as they can. Philosophically, as an organization, Oracle doesn't have any real interest in promoting Open Source or doing right by the community. Their vision isn't long-term enough for that. It was just barely medium-term enough to make the right calls to get involved in OSS at all. Their big-picture motivation isn't "Build awesome free software for the world to share", it's "Let's find a way to trap all these Linuxy people into paying us for something".