It's not surprising that a large scale site would use more than one RBMS though, in some role. Many Oracle shops - especially web sites - also run MySQL in some role. That may be a strategic factor in Oracle's purchase.
Yes, control was my fourth point, but I agree it is probably the most important.
Monty Program AB requires a contributor agreement essentially the same as Sun's SCA. Since MySQL developers have either already made peace with the SCA, are part of the MPAB camp, or simply trust Widenius implicitly (he does, after all, have fame and money, which some people find automatically persuasive), I don't think copyright assignment will be a major sticking point.
People tend to fall into one of the "OMG the sky is falling, stand behind Widenius", or "copyright assignment/dual licensing is broken" camps.
But why put effort into MariaDB, or stake one's job security on it, when Widenius openly argues it is not sustainable? (At a claimed burn rate of EUR 100,000 per month, his windfall isn't going to last long.) He may have to face the fact that it is wishful thinking to feed a family of developers forever who produce only "BSD code".
On this point, perhaps we have to agree; as an outsider, he may not be able to continue without sponsorship. But this has been true since Sun's takeover. It seems as if he looks at MPAB's bleak future and concludes the community has no future either. I can see why developers such as Paul McCullagh (PBXT) might be persuaded here. Yet the case is far from cut and dried: PBXT is a significant value add to MySQL, no matter who owns the copyrights, and it's not a given that Oracle will simply ignore these significant projects.
In any case Widenius seems to need a third way: Letting go, abandoning his cherished business model, eating ramen for a while while he designs a new "MySQL killer" (yeah, I know, there's Drizzle already), or hiring a great salesman to solicit the necessary corporate sponsorship of his ready-made MariaDB development dream team, GPL notwithstanding. MPAB has attracted a terrific bundle of ex-MySQL talent.
I'm no MBA or businessman, but waiting for the EU to drop a BSD-ish license in his lap seems like a weak gamble for everyone involved.
that gives him the right to whine to mommy government (The EU) to give him his toys back
I don't think so. While not a libertarian, I don't see that this outcome is either within the EU's power or within the bounds of probability.
From the irrational tenacity with which Widenius has stuck to his contrarian position, one could easily infer greed - as many observers have done, projecting their own materialism - but I would prefer to blame it on an emotional cocktail:
shock/surprise at the Sun sale to Oracle
regret over past decisions including a sense of having betrayed his lieutenants (some of whom are now the core MPAB team)
FUD over the product's future (such fears being externalised and made contagious by the blog, petition, and campaign)
inability to reorganise/regroup and imagine a future without controlling the product
delusive manifestation of the above in handwringing concern for the "community". (Such concern, not to mention lack of faith, is flatly contradicted by his licensing position.)
Some of these seem to be long-held personal positions (fear/distrust/competiveness with Oracle, dislike/distrust of GPL) which are now getting a comprehensive platform in the campaign.
Mr Widenius wants to be the EnterpriseDB in the MySQL milieu. He already has salaried developers working on MariaDB, for Monty Program AB. If his wish for MySQL to be relicensed under "a more permissive Open Source license" were granted, he's promised that MPAB would only add "BSD" code to MariaDB, but he could have other companies on the side doing closed enhancement too. In fact he has not explained any other way that MPAB can stay in business.
Do you have actual benchmarks showing SQLite outperforming MyISAM on reads? This might be surprising news to the sites which are using MySQL at large scale. I would repeat: SQLite won't scale.
(Benchmarks against InnoDB wouldn't be relevant of course, as InnoDB is an ACID, MVCC engine.)
Trac also allows other RDBMS back-ends. If you had a highly loaded site (for example, a popular public project) you would not pick SQLite for the reasons I mentioned. In particular, it does not implement MVCC or row locking. Locking is coarse grained (like MyISAM) which soon limits scalability.
Yes, SQLite's basic locking is good enough for light demands (say internal company intranet), and I am happy to use Trac+SQLite myself in these situations. I suppose if you know your site won't ever be popular, and assuming you don't need any of the other features offered by the major systems, you could get away with it for the basic stuff gmack mentioned:)
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).
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.
Stallman: One thing that makes no sense at all is the idea of changing the license of MySQL to something non-copyleft. That would eliminate the possibility of selling exceptions, but allow all sorts of proprietary modified versions. Wherever MySQL should go, it isn't there.
"The GPL was designed specifically to ensure the permanent freedom of software, and the ability of everyone to improve and share their improvements to the program, no matter who acquires the copyrights to the code," Moglen said of the argument he presented to the Commission. "The whole point of GPL as a copyright license is to deal with every contingency that could result in hobbling or destroying the freedom of code shared under it. The drafters of GPL versions 2 and 3 considered scenarios very similar to the ones that the Commission is concerned about now. The design of the license, and the experience we have had using it, show that it can be counted upon to operate as intended in situations like this one."
Programs released under the GPL, including Linux, Samba, and the GNU Compiler Collection, have continually proven to be resistant to anti-competitive conduct in the marketplace. "GPL’d programs competing effectively against offerings of the richest and most powerful monopoly in the history of information technology have resisted the efforts of the monopolist to find a chink in its armor," Moglen writes.
MariaDB is not commercial; It's only available under Open Source
And you claim above, and on your blog in several contexts, that under GPL there is "no incentive to invest in development" and "direct revenue" cannot be generated, MariaDB itself lacks a viable business model and will eventually run out of funds. The only rational step is to cancel that project, unless you believe something is about to magically change, and a BSD-like license (anything but that pesky GPL!) were suddenly to allow MariaDB to demand "direct revenue" from its development fruits.
You seem to believe this is the only way the community should go forward, as a whole - if we overlook the contradictory aside on EnterpriseDB.
You claim MPAB would produce "only BSD" code in MariaDB, but we have only your word for this. And you have omitted to mention how MariaDB development is funded under this model. You claim the only money to be made in the community is by eliminating the GPL, yet your own company will altruistically refuse to take advantage of such a license to sell closed enhancements, while it burns up your cash? This is stretching credibility.
(If I wanted to be terribly cynical, I'd point out the loophole that *another* Monty Company could take on commercial extension of BSD code without breaking the letter of your promise, while being lucrative to you, and perhaps even keeping MariaDB alive financially - latter to the community's benefit, naturally - but this isn't spelled out on your blog. This model is not so dissimilar from that allowed to a copyright holder under GPL, of course. But by keeping development partially closed you begin to encroach on those sins you expect from Oracle.)
It seems as if you are conflating a personal preference for this business model with the entirely separate possibility of a healthy community continuing around the GPL code. The point is not that your critics have better facts about outcomes if the sale proceeds, or if MySQL were not GPL, but that your own statements are so self-contradictory. Furthermore they are easily misconstrued in unflattering ways, as so many commenters here have done. Personally I am not accusing you of greed, but prefer to infer a forgivable irrationality.
there is very little incentive to put money into MySQL development.
Unless you own it.
If PostgreSQL was under GPL, they could not do that and would not have an incentive to do development on it
So why did you use EnterpriseDB as a counter-example in your blog? BSD prevents bidirectional community involvement. It makes taking easy but when you give back, you do not give back to a community.
You wrote: The PostgreSQL market is also, as far as I know, dominated by Enterprise DB that provides a closed source version of PostgreSQL, which is not good enough for companies standardizing on open source.
The SQL dialects are different enough to make the switch quite a lot of effort. Only applications designed for SQL portability from the beginning (a non trivial goal) would be the exceptions.
MySQL would need to be a sufficiently revenue-producing entity in order for it to sustain internal development at Oracle
A MySQL owned and developed by Oracle would make for some decent competition for SQL Server, wouldn't you think? It's probably easier to position MySQL like that than their traditional product (which tends to be associated with high costs, at least in minds).
Slashdot Mirror
This presentation on IMDB architecture, written some time post-2006, only mentions MySQL.
It's not surprising that a large scale site would use more than one RBMS though, in some role. Many Oracle shops - especially web sites - also run MySQL in some role. That may be a strategic factor in Oracle's purchase.
Yes, control was my fourth point, but I agree it is probably the most important.
Monty Program AB requires a contributor agreement essentially the same as Sun's SCA. Since MySQL developers have either already made peace with the SCA, are part of the MPAB camp, or simply trust Widenius implicitly (he does, after all, have fame and money, which some people find automatically persuasive), I don't think copyright assignment will be a major sticking point.
People tend to fall into one of the "OMG the sky is falling, stand behind Widenius", or "copyright assignment/dual licensing is broken" camps.
But why put effort into MariaDB, or stake one's job security on it, when Widenius openly argues it is not sustainable? (At a claimed burn rate of EUR 100,000 per month, his windfall isn't going to last long.) He may have to face the fact that it is wishful thinking to feed a family of developers forever who produce only "BSD code".
On this point, perhaps we have to agree; as an outsider, he may not be able to continue without sponsorship. But this has been true since Sun's takeover. It seems as if he looks at MPAB's bleak future and concludes the community has no future either. I can see why developers such as Paul McCullagh (PBXT) might be persuaded here. Yet the case is far from cut and dried: PBXT is a significant value add to MySQL, no matter who owns the copyrights, and it's not a given that Oracle will simply ignore these significant projects.
In any case Widenius seems to need a third way: Letting go, abandoning his cherished business model, eating ramen for a while while he designs a new "MySQL killer" (yeah, I know, there's Drizzle already), or hiring a great salesman to solicit the necessary corporate sponsorship of his ready-made MariaDB development dream team, GPL notwithstanding. MPAB has attracted a terrific bundle of ex-MySQL talent.
I'm no MBA or businessman, but waiting for the EU to drop a BSD-ish license in his lap seems like a weak gamble for everyone involved.
Did they convert?
I don't think so. While not a libertarian, I don't see that this outcome is either within the EU's power or within the bounds of probability.
From the irrational tenacity with which Widenius has stuck to his contrarian position, one could easily infer greed - as many observers have done, projecting their own materialism - but I would prefer to blame it on an emotional cocktail:
Some of these seem to be long-held personal positions (fear/distrust/competiveness with Oracle, dislike/distrust of GPL) which are now getting a comprehensive platform in the campaign.
For C apps, libdbi supports Firebird, and many other RDBMS with a single API.
as do some other storage engines available for MySQL (such as PBXT).
MyISAM does not, of course; it is more comparable to SQLite, although the latter does have transactions.
"all of the original founders of MySQL got collectively less than 12 % of the Sun deal". This meant EUR 16 million to Widenius personally last year according to his Wikipedia page. So buying it back is out of the question (even if the owner wanted to sell it) - and no billionaires were made in the deal.
Nothing new to see here.
Mr Widenius wants to be the EnterpriseDB in the MySQL milieu. He already has salaried developers working on MariaDB, for Monty Program AB. If his wish for MySQL to be relicensed under "a more permissive Open Source license" were granted, he's promised that MPAB would only add "BSD" code to MariaDB, but he could have other companies on the side doing closed enhancement too. In fact he has not explained any other way that MPAB can stay in business.
Do you have actual benchmarks showing SQLite outperforming MyISAM on reads? This might be surprising news to the sites which are using MySQL at large scale. I would repeat: SQLite won't scale.
(Benchmarks against InnoDB wouldn't be relevant of course, as InnoDB is an ACID, MVCC engine.)
Trac also allows other RDBMS back-ends. If you had a highly loaded site (for example, a popular public project) you would not pick SQLite for the reasons I mentioned. In particular, it does not implement MVCC or row locking. Locking is coarse grained (like MyISAM) which soon limits scalability.
Yes, SQLite's basic locking is good enough for light demands (say internal company intranet), and I am happy to use Trac+SQLite myself in these situations. I suppose if you know your site won't ever be popular, and assuming you don't need any of the other features offered by the major systems, you could get away with it for the basic stuff gmack mentioned :)
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.
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:
Microsoft took one of your bug reports seriously?
Look at the state of IE. There's a huge pile of WONTFIX.
They managed to sell while keeping critical parts to themselves. In MySQL's case, that ship sailed when Sun bought it.
And you claim above, and on your blog in several contexts, that under GPL there is "no incentive to invest in development" and "direct revenue" cannot be generated, MariaDB itself lacks a viable business model and will eventually run out of funds. The only rational step is to cancel that project, unless you believe something is about to magically change, and a BSD-like license (anything but that pesky GPL!) were suddenly to allow MariaDB to demand "direct revenue" from its development fruits.
You seem to believe this is the only way the community should go forward, as a whole - if we overlook the contradictory aside on EnterpriseDB.
You claim MPAB would produce "only BSD" code in MariaDB, but we have only your word for this. And you have omitted to mention how MariaDB development is funded under this model. You claim the only money to be made in the community is by eliminating the GPL, yet your own company will altruistically refuse to take advantage of such a license to sell closed enhancements, while it burns up your cash? This is stretching credibility.
(If I wanted to be terribly cynical, I'd point out the loophole that *another* Monty Company could take on commercial extension of BSD code without breaking the letter of your promise, while being lucrative to you, and perhaps even keeping MariaDB alive financially - latter to the community's benefit, naturally - but this isn't spelled out on your blog. This model is not so dissimilar from that allowed to a copyright holder under GPL, of course. But by keeping development partially closed you begin to encroach on those sins you expect from Oracle.)
It seems as if you are conflating a personal preference for this business model with the entirely separate possibility of a healthy community continuing around the GPL code. The point is not that your critics have better facts about outcomes if the sale proceeds, or if MySQL were not GPL, but that your own statements are so self-contradictory. Furthermore they are easily misconstrued in unflattering ways, as so many commenters here have done. Personally I am not accusing you of greed, but prefer to infer a forgivable irrationality.
When I think about "what comes (immediately) after MySQL," it really does look a lot like Drizzle.
Unless you own it.
So why did you use EnterpriseDB as a counter-example in your blog? BSD prevents bidirectional community involvement. It makes taking easy but when you give back, you do not give back to a community.
You wrote: The PostgreSQL market is also, as far as I know, dominated by Enterprise DB that provides a closed source version of PostgreSQL, which is not good enough for companies standardizing on open source.
Q.E.D.
There might have been a *joke* in this thread somewhere. :)
You don't need petitions to get water to run downhill.
The SQL dialects are different enough to make the switch quite a lot of effort. Only applications designed for SQL portability from the beginning (a non trivial goal) would be the exceptions.
MySQL would need to be a sufficiently revenue-producing entity in order for it to sustain internal development at Oracle
A MySQL owned and developed by Oracle would make for some decent competition for SQL Server, wouldn't you think? It's probably easier to position MySQL like that than their traditional product (which tends to be associated with high costs, at least in minds).
n/t
Have you been reading my journal? :)
Oracle actually wants it, and it's worth 10-100x what Monty could personally afford.