MySQL Quietly Drops Support For Debian Linux [UPDATED]

volts writes "MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16, when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.' MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not support for Linux in general." Update: 12/13 20:52 GMT by J : MySQL AB's Director of Architecture (and former Slash programmer) Brian Aker corrects an apparent miscommunication in a blog post: "we are just starting to roll out [Enterprise] binaries... We don't build binaries for Debian in part because the Debian community does a good job themselves... If you call MySQL and you have support we support you if you are running Debian (the same with Suse, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and others)... someone in Sales was left with the wrong information"

Oh well

[0racle (667029)]

Is it really a problem? If you worried about support wouldn't you be using a distro that also offers support contracts?

Re:Oh well

[mr_mischief (456295)]

Maybe Canonical should step up and offer MySQL support on Ubuntu.

Re:Oh well

[ultranova (717540)]

Maybe I'm off track here, but I could certainly understand MySQL not wanting to offer an enterprise-level product for a platform that wasn't also enterprise-level.

Is MySQL "enterprise-level" nowadays ? Every time there's been a story about databases, people have told horror stories about MySQL quietly corrupting data in database.

And just what does "enterprise-level" mean, anyway ? Scales to infinity ? Reliable ? Costly ? Doesn't get the IT manager fired when the CEO find out he bought it ?-)

Re:QUIETLY?

[uglyduckling (103926)]

The real problem? "MySQL Quietly Drops Support..." ? Ok - so what should they do? Place posters all around your city saying "WE DROP SUPPORT FOR DEBIAN USERS!!!"?

I think the point is that they haven't made it clear, even on their website [mysql.com] that they have made a business decision to ignore everything but Red Hat and Suse. From the story: "We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.'". So a company got bitten by using a generic (Debian) Linux then asking for support and finding out that "generic" means anything but.

They really should make some sort of statement, even if it's market spun, e.g. "...for the benefit of our enterprise customers we are concentrating on supporting the two most popular commercial distributions... we expect third-party support companies and the active MySQL community to continue supporting less popular and non-commercial distributions". (P.S. for the benefit of anyone flicking through, I made that up!)

Those mother...

[Unoti (731964)]

Clearly we need to get some tough mother forkin programmers on this...

Bit misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

MySQL (the database) still works with Debian, but MySQL (the support company) no longer sells support for Debian.

Re:Bit misleading

[McDutchie (151611)]

MySQL (the database) still works with Debian, but MySQL (the support company) no longer sells support for Debian.

For medium and large companies (which are the only entities that would buy support to begin with), that difference is purely academic. If it isn't supported, it isn't worth running.

Re:Bit misleading

[dsci (658278)]

Most of the places I've worked have used Red Hat, because it has an enterprise reputation.
Point of clarification: places have RH because they offer support to their enterprise product. Debian's reputation for stability and such is pretty strong, but that only carries so far in the business setting. It's not reputation that drives RH over Deb to the enterprise...it's "I can pay YOU to fix it when it's broke." JMO.

Re:Bit misleading

[Matey-O (518004)]

I tend to avoid Redhat as they gave me the impression that they were the Microsoft of Linux. I loved Suse, then they got bought by Novell. I moved to Debian as they allowed me to install a bare system in 300 mb with text only and install JUST the parts I needed. Now I get to look for something else? (actually, it doesn't look like it as I haven't needed paid support for MySQL yet.)

Re:Bit misleading

[jellomizer (103300)]

Get one system with Red Hat. Put MySql on it get the suport. If the problem doesn't work on red hat and your own. Then call them up and tinker with the one RedHat box until it works and do the same on your box. Supporing every Linux Distro is disasterious for a company. To many of them all with their own quarks it make offering support near impossible. By sticking to a few Distros they can quickly figure out if it is an OS Problem or a MySQL problem.

Re:Bit misleading

[modir (66559)]

The article here on Slashdot is a little bit misleading. You still can get support from them. Them main part is this:
Will you support MySQL Binaries built by third-party vendors? No.
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/supportpolicies /policies-04.html#q04 [mysql.com]

The person who wrote this article wanted to take the binaries provided by Debian. And this doesn't work. But if you take the binaries from MySQL you should still get support.

What does this say for OSS as a business model?

[dsci (658278)]

MySQL (the support company) no longer sells support for Debian.

It seems to me that this decision must be driven by sales or market research indicated there is no market for support contracts on Debian based systems. So, does this challenge the notion that OSS can work in a capitalist world when the real "product" is support?

Debian based distros are a significant chunck of the Linux market|mindshare. This decision essentially means the combination of Debian + MySQL is doomed in the business setting.

Solution

[Shawn is an Asshole (845769)]

Loudly drop support for MySQL. Here are two excellent alternatives:

PostgreSQL [postgresql.org]
Firebird [firebirdsql.org]

Still, Debian provides good MySQL packages. Use them instead. If you need support, I'm sure you could find someone to provide it for you.

Re:

[PatrickThomson (712694)]

for "support" read "liability when it all breaks". That's what linux support is really all about. Would you want to be a technician personally responsible for downtime and several million of lost sales? Your bosses won't let it happen, because obviously you can't pay it back.

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, the good old "who do you sue" chestnut. How's suing Oracle working out for you whenever you find bugs in their database, or if you got bad advice from their support techs?

Indeed...

[Svartalf (2997)]

The "who do you sue" line's as old as the hills and, largely speaking, irrelevant because you're never
going to get to first base unless it's a screw-up of epic proportions. Even then, it's more likely to
be a colossal waste of your time and merely an exercise of fattening your lawyer's wallet.

Re:Solution

[virtual_mps (62997)]

you think that mysql support will buy unlimited legal/financial liability for costs incurred by downtime of your mysql installation?

really?

seriously?

hahahahahahaha

What your support contract buys you is the ability to call someone on the phone. If it makes your boss happy to have someone to call and yell at when shit breaks, well, ok.

Re:Solution

[Thomas Charron (1485)]

I have never in my entire life seen a softare company held financially liable for lost sales as a result of a database failure. Please, feel free to cite one single lawsuit if you can find one.

Re:Solution

[peragrin (659227)]

You know in the software industry that is a bunch of bullshite.

If that were true then MSFT wouldn't have any money at all as they would be responsible for billions in lost sales annually. Just one Virus through one product line(not even windows but MS SQL) a year would be expensive. Yet MSFT doesn't have to pay so why would Mysql, or IBM, or any other software company for lost sales or data?

Generic, huh?

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

I guess that's fair - my company migrated to supporting only "generic Red Hat Database", aka PostgreSQL.

Seriously, except in cases where you have no choice about database availability, I can't see a single reason to use MySQL these days. All of their cool features are owned by their competitors, and they're starting to pull desperate financing tricks like whittling away tech support and partnering with SCO. Are people still using it for new deployments, and if so, why?

Re:Generic, huh?

[LWATCDR (28044)]

Simple. Every nickel and dime hosting company uses MySQL so every CMS blog, and forum supports MySQL.
Up to and including Slashcode.
It is now catch 22. Everybody uses MySQL because everyone uses MySQL.
Heck I use MySQL for our CMS because not every module supports PostgreSQL.
I would much rather use PostgreSQL for everything but I don't have time to re-invent the wheel.

Oh well

[xenocide2 (231786)]

I can't say for sure whether it's the same level of support, but there's always Canonical [canonical.com] for Ubuntu and Progeny [progeny.com] for Debian support.

And yet...

[merc (115854)]

They're more than happy to be a SCO/Canopy partner.

I know where I'll not be spending my IT budget next year.

Fork or Spoon

[Paulitics (1036046)]

MySQL only lets me spoon it.

But Postgre lets me fork it all night long.

Get Ready...

[eno2001 (527078)]

I see that a definite split of "Premium Linux" vs. "Unsupported Linux" is coming soon to a vendor near you. That doesn't mean that Linux will die, it's just going to smell funny (possibly like pee).

Forking won't necessarily do anything

[iamjoltman (883526)]

I see there's already a few comments that the code should be forked. The thing is, what is forking going to do for it? They are dropping support for Linux distros, but that's not saying it won't run on other distros, just that it's not supported. The only way a fork would do anything is if the forked version had it's own support as well.

All of my servers run Debian

[maynard (3337)]

While I don't currently have or need a support contract from MySQL, I wouldn't transition away from Debian within our machine room just for their sake. I can't say this is a mistake for them, as I don't know what sales numbers they see, but here's one potential customer that's gone as a result.

Re:

[PHPfanboy (841183)]

> While I don't currently have or need a support contract from MySQL

I think this says it all for most Debian users. They are either in-house experts, testing the water for their app or don't have a culture of procurement (read: lower budget or just plain cheap). This is not a criticism, it's just a business reality.

MySQL is a business, unless we want them to go out of business and drop support for everything there's not much to complain about.

Re:All of my servers run Debian

[chundo (587998)]

I doubt that's the point. I'm sure they just decided that rom a cost/benefit perspective, money spent training their support staff on Debian wasn't worth the amount of business they were getting from Debian customers. Which makes a lot of sense to me - in my experience, people that run Debian servers have a more thorough knowledge of the system and administering it, and consequently have less need/desire for software support (yourself included, it sounds like). And assuming that's true, it's also not much of a stretch to assume that someone that interested in the guts of a system would choose something like Postgres over MySQL anyways if they had a choice, since it's had more advanced features for much longer than MySQL has.

Sounds like a business plan waiting to happen

[xantho (14741)]

MySQL just said, 'We don't think that your business is profitable to us,' for whatever reason they might have. Well, I'm willing to bet that MySQL support for Debian in the enterprise setting is plenty profitable for some other people.

The only thing that really happened is that MySQL cleaved off a part of their business and gave it away for free to anyone who wants it. And I'll bet plenty of people do.

Linux

[Archangel Michael (180766)]

"Generic Linux"???

Isn't "Linux" "generic" almost by definition. The only differences between packages are choices and package manager and usually only a few homegrown eye candy pieces.

No really, I'm not trolling. I'm serious. I've used all sorts of different "distros", Redhat, SuSE, Debian, Slackware etc and I am able to quickly move between them because at the core of it, its all but the same. And I'm not a Linux expert by any stretch of the imagination, so if I can manage, why can't the big boys who do nothing but Linux?

Why all the drama?

[derrickh (157646)]

Why is this such a sore spot for so many people? Just because MySql no longer supports the flavor of the month distro of Linux, you all throw up your hands crying 'I never liked you anyway'.

The vast majority of mysql users will never buy a support contract, and those few who do, will probably be RedHat or Suse. (When was the last time a Debian user admitted he needed help for anything?)

Instead of having to support dozens of distros, Mysql is supporting the main two. It may be Open Source, but it's still a business.

D

If you need support...

[Sabalon (1684)]

Chances are that if you need the support they offer, then you are not just running some little fan site using MySQL to store what avatar's people choose. Most likely if you have support for the db, chances are you probably have some sort of support contract in place for the OS as well and the rest of your critical infrastructure. You are probably already playing by their rules using certain OS releases, etc...

That would be my guess at least.

Did anyone catch the relationship?

[Bright Apollo (988736)]

SUSE and RedHat are also the only IBM supported distros. Is IBM going for MySQL, ala Oracle grabbing Innobase and Sleepycat?

-BA

No need to fork!

[Builder (103701)]

There are a lot of calls here to fork the code. I'm a bit wary of calls to fork a project by people who lack the reading comprehension to understand the project. These may not be the best people to direct a project :)

Just to clarify the crappy summary, MySQL are not saying that their software won't run on Debian or Ubuntu or whatever... It will still run on most OSs and distros, but if you are using Linux, MySQL AB will only sell you a support contract for MySQL if you are running on Dead Rat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Novhell (SLES?).

Get it? Got it? Good!

Who cares

[houseofmore (313324)]

I've been using Mysql for many years, through several companies, small and large. Never once has mysql support ever been requested / needed -- it's rock solid. What does support conist of anyway, help with sql syntax?

I doubt most Debian users will care.

Re:Let's fork it!

[eln (21727)]

I suppose you could do that, but unless you're planning on offering Enterprise support for your offering on a wide variety of platforms, you're not really gaining anything. MySQL will presumably still run on Debian, at least for now, but without the ability to buy support for it on that platform, you're not going to get approval to put it on that platform in any sort of business-critical environment.

Now, if you wanted to start a new company that offered Enterprise support for MySQL on Debian, you might have something there. I don't know that you would make any money, but at least you'd be offering something that isn't currently offered.

Re:Let's fork it!

[jmorris42 (1458)]

> I don't know that you would make any money, but at least you'd be offering something that isn't currently offered.

I doubt it. And more important than my opinion, MySQL doubts it and has the sales figures to show it. Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.

Profitability

[Colin Smith (2679)]

I doubt it. And more important than my opinion, MySQL doubts it and has the sales figures to show it. Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.

Just because one person can't do something profitably, doesn't mean that someone else can't do it profitably.
 

Companies kill off profitable lines all the time

[brokeninside (34168)]

If a company holds that it can make a 50% ROI on one product line and a 25% ROI on onther product line (and all other things being held equal) they will put their resources into the line with the 50% ROI until such time as the law of diminishing returns brings the marginal ROI for additional resources being added to under 25%.

For example, when I was a kid a local pizza delivery chain started delivering breakfast pizzas. They made money hand over fist. But after a few months, the calculated that the additional cost of maintaining a third shift of workers and an expanded breakfast menu would bring in more money if put into opening additiona stores serving the traditional lunch, dinner, late night crowd with the normal pizzaria menu.

Most likely what is happening is that the MySQL corporation finds that if it spends the same number of dollars training a support tech, those dollars bring in more money if the tech is dedicated to Redhat and/or SuSE than if the tech is also trained on Debian. This doesn't mean that there is no market for Debian support. It means only that MySQL has a higher relative profit from supporting just two databases. The calculation may be different for another company that has a different resource pool. For example a company that already supports Debian Linux, may have a very low marginal cost for adding MySQL on Debian support and, consequently, have a far higher ROI for supporting MySQL on Debian.

Re:UBUNTU ! Why Hath Thou Foresaken Me ?

[nutznboltz2003 (832752)]

Am I not a ...woman ?

Only in WoW...

Yes, I know, there goes my Karma.

Re:Let's fork it!

[ciggieposeur (715798)]

First, by support the article refers to technical support contracts, not whether or not the software will actually run on Debian. And MySQL has decided that they will provide technical support only for a very limited subset of the popular Linux distros. As far is this issue is concerned, Debian is in the same boat as a lot of other distros and was not singled out for special treatment.

Second, the Mozilla trademark issue was at its core unavoidable. Debian has to be able to say to its derivative distros that everything in "main" is really free, Mozilla had copyrighted images that were NOT free, so Debian couldn't use them and Mozilla responded by saying they had to rename the browser. So they did, and the Mozilla-branded browser remains in "non-free" due to the copyrighted images. Everyone accusing Debian of hypocrisy on the trademark issue because they have an official logo is (to be blunt) wrong. Debian has an official logo (that they hardly ever use) to provide legal recourse to stop anyone else claiming to be Debian. It is otherwise of no use in the project and does nothing to prevent derivative distros from doing their own thing when they want to.

Incidentally, the Mozilla trademark dispute has caused me to reinvestigate my use of ALL software from Mozilla. I'm finding that KDE software is far more user-friendly and powerful than the Mozilla software across a number of applications. KMail can be made (rather easily) to store mail in ~/Mail in mbox format, its mail filters execute much faster, I can right-click -> "Create Filter" -> "Filter on From" in seconds, and in dozens of other ways it kicks mozilla-mail's ass. Likewise KNode, Konqueror, and Kontact.

Re:

[Nasarius (593729)]

Why? Is there a problem with the code, or the license? You're free to start your own company and offer tech support and other services for MySQL, and there's always PostgreSQL. But if the MySQL coders are still doing good work, I see no reason to fork.

Re:

[Alchemar (720449)]

The problem is support, not inoperability. The software still works, you just don't have anyone to call when it doesn't work the way you expected. Forking the project does not solve this problem. If a third party wanted to sell a customer support contract for it, they could do so without needing a fork. If MySQL started releasing later versions of the software without the source, then a fork would be needed to have a branch that could be supported by another company.

Re:Let's fork it!

[Drasil (580067)]

Guys, it's time to fork MySQL.

...or switch to the excellent Postgres [postgresql.org] which is more open and a more complete SQL implementation than MySQL anyway.

Expect to see more things like this happening as the IT landscape undergoes it's coming changes.

Re:Let's fork it!

[killjoe (766577)]

Yes but it doesn't have what people REALLY want. Replication, clustering, failover, case insensitive where clauses.

If you want high availibility you have to cobble together slony and pgpool (which does not support multi master replication) neither of which is suitable for working over a WAN.

There is a reason why people choose MySql and that's because it delivers the features people really want first. Even the features are not 100% "correct" they are delivered "good enough" to get "real work" done.

Take case insesntive where clauses for example. For the last five years or so that I have been following the pg mailing lists there must have been hundreds of requests from people who want to switch over from mysql, ms-sql, oracle, informix, firebird etc for a case insensitive collation option. They just get ignored and told to change all their queries to use ILIKE or *~ or some other stupid non standard postgres only SQL. Oddly enough their primary excuse for not providing it is that it's not a SQL standard.

So if you using any kind of an ORM and you can not stomach asking your employees or web users to remember the exact capitalization of everything they have ever typed into your database then postgres is not an option.

Sorry.

Re:Let's fork it!

[suntac (252438)]

Mmm fork MySQL? Why? There is nothing wrong with the code. You could try to fork the support and start a company specialized in MySQL support on Debian.....

I think there is a market for this. The only thing you need is a couple of good people. You/we(the community) could also create a company GPL style. Create a pool of people willing to devote there time on solving MySQL Debian support problems. Create a ticket like system and assign questions to people in the pool.

This way you can quickly create a non-profit company with little to non investments. The biggest "problem" is that you have to attract people willing to become part of you expert pool.

While writing this, it might even be a good challenge to start this..... I will think some more about this. :-) Anyone in? ;-)

Regards,
Johan Louwers.

Re:

[Professor_UNIX (867045)]

I guess it time to dig in and learn another tool to replace it.

Meh, I'd rather replace MySQL than my Debian distribution. If I was truly concerned about commercial support for my database then I'd buy a commercial database like Sybase or Oracle. People use MySQL because it's free, not necessarily because it's better, or even comparable, to commercial offerings.

Re:

[dsci (658278)]

Then again given the amount of helpful people around not wanting a dime for the help they provide, the only people giving a damn are those people paying for an enterprise version of Linux.

Community support is a great thing, and hopefully all of us that USE F/OSS software give back to that in some way. But the business world, and many individuals, operate on the principle of "you get what you pay for." Most of the time this is a good guideline, but F/OSS is an exception. There are QUALITY products out

Re:

[Stumbles (602007)]

Wadya mean? Postgresql is pretty easy to compile from source and I've had zero problems installing it from RPMs, etc. As for it's documentation I have found it to be very useful. What do you mean by configure anyway? You got your conf files that normally live in /var/lib/pgsql and their annotations are pretty clear. So I think your just blowing smoke.