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Is MySQL's Community Eating the Company?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Dec 15, 2008 10:20 AM
from the get-yer-drizzle-on dept.
from the get-yer-drizzle-on dept.
mjasay writes "Craigslist's Jeremy Zawodny reviews the progress of MySQL as a project, and discovers that through third-party forks and enhancements like Drizzle and OurDelta 'you can get a "better" MySQL than the one Sun/MySQL gives you today. For free.' Is this a good thing? On one hand it demonstrates the strong community around MySQL, but on the other, it could make it harder for Sun to fund core development on MySQL by diverting potential revenue from the core database project. Is this the fate of successful open-source companies? To become so successful as a community that they can't eke out a return as a company? If so, could anyone blame MySQL/Sun for creating its own proprietary fork in order to afford further core development?"
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Five Questions With Michael Widenius 71 comments
volume4 writes "With two MySQL execs leaving Sun in the last week, the internet is buzzing about what is going on at Sun, what is the future of MySQL and what lies ahead for Michael Widenius. Over at Open Source Release Feed, Widenius spoke candidly regarding his split from Sun, the future of MySQL, Monty Program AB, and the open source ecosystem in general."
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more of a sign they need to improve their process (Score:5, Insightful)
Monty has been blogging some about the need to be a more inclusive project. Its one thing to be open source, but to be an open source community project thats still owned by a company takes real effort on the part of the company. Perhaps this would encourage some of these enhancements to be rolled into the main branch.
Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce (Score:5, Interesting)
An important question is not whether the Open Source community is eating some of SUN's cake, but whether the cake itself (and thus SUN's total amount of cake) is larger because of the community. I don't have any figures but this is at least a considerable possibility. After all you have something technically superior like PostgreSQL *ahem*
Half of a big cake or all of a small one. SUN bet on the former, I think.
Parent
Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If Sun actually cared for the "long term unix community" you speak of, you wouldn't have that "unix like" OS in hand.
Thank God both them and various companies are wise to ignore such long term communities so they keep doing favours.
Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't HATE Microsoft like so many people do. Making money is not evil.
Note: I strongly dislike Microsoft, but not because they're profitable.
Parent
Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't hate MS either, but I don't think the reason people hate MS is because they make money. It's because they've often been assholes about it. People generally love a good success story as long as the recipient of the success seems to have done it in a fair way. Witness Warren Buffet. Or Google... as long as they shy away from evil. Apple is loved for now, but they're evil enough to get themselves thoroughly hated down the road.
But the point is: making money is not evil, but if you make money while being evil, people will hate you. And that's as it should be, really. Nobody likes to see assholes get ahead.
Cheers.
Parent
Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is an advertising company. People don't hate them simply because they're a *good* advertising company, carefully controlling their corporate image. Google makes money by putting ads in front of you - hardly somehting to love them for.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
um, doesn't the x-box have poor QC (Score:3, Insightful)
The X-Box 360 was put out before their production line was ready to make it. More like capitalism at its worst.
How could we blame sun (Score:5, Insightful)
For paying that much money for a company that gives its core product away for free!? MySQL made a bit of money through support contracts, but now they have a lot more zeros to account for when they pay the bills.
This isn't MySQL's fault. If someone wanted to pay me 3million for my piece of crap car, I would sell it for half that, so they thought they were getting a bargain, but how could Sun justify paying that much?
Re:How could we blame sun (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as Sun's proprietary MySQL goes, I'm sure it will be just as popular in comparison to the open MySQL as their StarOffice is to OpenOffice, another community product eating away at the company. The only distro I'm aware of that comes stock with StarOffice is Solaris, which is losing whatever popularity it had to OpenSolaris, another community-driven product quickly gaining popularity.
I'm lost as far as a solution to this goes, but Sun needs to do something before this gets out of hand and they start losing their company.
Parent
Re:How could we blame sun (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe they'll become OpenSun.
Parent
Re:How could we blame sun (Score:5, Insightful)
how could Sun justify paying that much?
About 38% of Sun's income, ~$5.26 billion, is derived from services. If MySQL represents just $100M of that $5.26B, the purchase price was probably fair, given that their support sector generally operates quite profitably.
Parent
SunSQL (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Sun should rename their fork of MySQL to SunSQL Solaris Edition JDK
I'm ready to use PostgreSQL now
Welcome to GPL/OSS (Score:4, Interesting)
This is always the case when you release open source. Someone else can offer support cheaper than you. Someone else can make modifications that people want. Someone else can even fork it and choke you out if they're doing whatever gets more attention than what you are doing. The good news (for them) is that you provided them a getting-started point with all your work so they didn't have to put all that time (and money, since time is money) into getting it off the ground. This is the way GPL/OSS is *supposed* to work. You have to keep investing more time and money while pushing and driving your costs to zero or you'll get snaked by just about anyone else who has the motivation to do so.
Re:Welcome to GPL/OSS (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Welcome to GPL/OSS (Score:4, Insightful)
So what does that mean to costs like .. umm .. I don't know ... "salary"???
that's the question. Those whose job was to re-invent the wheel, and re-write from scratch a new application to compete with a existing one, their pay should be driven to 0.
Those who's job is to use whats out their to be as productive as possible should be way more productive, thus more valuable, and thus their pay can be much higher, while still making their parent company more profitable.
So the computing, support, and customization jobs in general, pay should expand. The create stuff from scratch jobs should go away. Does that result in fewer jobs, probably not, but a slower growth of jobs.
Parent
Re:Welcome to GPL/OSS (Score:5, Insightful)
The good news (for them) is that you provided them a getting-started point with all your work so they didn't have to put all that time (and money, since time is money) into getting it off the ground.
SUN didn't do any work creating MySQL. It purchased it. It was already open source and MySQL wouldn't be worth a dime without all the improvements made by the community. SUN knew what it was purchasing. Major companies want support from a company they trust. There is value in that. And SUN can always roll the communities code into its version. Without cost I might add. So what's the beef?
Parent
Re:Welcome to GPL/OSS (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. SUN *could* snap up patches from the community that are floating around under the GPL -- but then SUN wouldn't own copyrights to all the code in MySQL (the individual authors whose code they snapped up would retain copyright over the snippets they had written).
This is why SUN's Contributor Agreement [mysql.com] explicity states that the contributor must assign copyrights to SUN (you hereby assign to us joint ownership...). SUN wants to retain copyright (or at least joint licensing) to the entirety of the MySQL codebase so that they can sell closed source forks to companies wishing to release a product with MySQL embedded, without having to GPL their whole product, or any part thereof. IANAL.
Parent
Re:Welcome to GPL/OSS (Score:4, Insightful)
If all Sun wanted to do was run a support business for MySQL, why did they even worry about buying it? Why not just hang out a shingle and say, "I will install MySQL for you for $99.99"? Why bother trying to "own" the community instead of joining the community? Try to own, get powned.
Because those who control the budgets that make support contracts profitable want someone to "own" the problem. Now that MySQL AB is a subsidiary of Sun, Sun has a claim to MySQL that nobody else can have. Sure - there are plenty of other outfits out there that are entirely capable of supporting MySQL. But none of them ARE MySQL.
Parent
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's all OSS, then why isn't MySQL picking up the best 3rd party pieces and rolling them back into the official distribution?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's all OSS, then why isn't MySQL picking up the best 3rd party pieces and rolling them back into the official distribution?
Because they wouldn't be able to include those parts in the proprietary version?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
s/KDE/Qt/
KDE is purely Free Software and there is no proprietary version.
KDE is build on top of Qt, which is dual-licensed and available either via the GPL or via a commercial license. The code is identical, but the commercial license allows you to build non-GPL products with the tools, and provides some support.
Bull! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun is the worlds largest open source company both in terms of size and contribution.
MySQL
OpenOffice
Java
VirtualBOx
Open Solaris
are all wholly Sun projects but they also contribute to numerous other open source projects [sun.com].
Sun may not be perfect but, there are none better at the moment.
lack of understanding of the biz model (Score:5, Informative)
Sun should welcome such improvements into their dev cycle. If such forks are superior, then they should eventually find their way back into the parent model. The successful business models around OSS rely on the services/consulting/support that sit around and on top of the actual OSS code. Red Hat, IBM, HP, and others all understand this. Sun, unfortunately, still has the MySQL model wrong IMHO.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
RedHat and MySQL are in a completely different line of business, and I don't mean OS vs database.
RedHat provides a product that is better and often more functional then the alternatives (Windows, Solaris) but still requires a large amount of maintenance. Large, non-technical corporations are very likely to both use RedHat Linux for functionality and to prefer "official" hand-holding for peace of mind.
MySQL is favored by either small, startup level firms or tech firms with high skill levels. The first
Re:lack of understanding of the biz model (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's Taco's way of passive-aggressive intellectual baiting. He wants us to get pissed about the idea and shoot it down thoroughly.
At least that's what I -HOPE- is going on.
Parent
Re:lack of understanding of the Corporate Life (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no need to put the blame on the corporate body. Developers have mortgages too.
"So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them. Can you explain to us what value you bring to SUN, and why we shouldn't just hire or reward the 3rd party contributors directly?"
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them. Can you explain to us what value you bring to SUN, and why we shouldn't just hire or reward the 3rd party contributors directly?"
Which of the six developers who's work I committed do you propose to hire? If they're busy vetting other people's code, when will they have time to keep writing this great stuff?
This is known as the "developer as interior decorator" model, where the developer is hired on their ability to mix and match code that is in good taste that blends attractively with the existing architecture.
Too late for a proprietary fork? (Score:5, Insightful)
"If so, could anyone blame MySQL/Sun for creating its own proprietary fork in order to afford further core development?"
Wait - what good would it do for MySQL/Sun to create it's own fork if, by the poster's own declaration, community supported forks are *already* better?
I think, maybe, part of the problem is companies (not just Sun/MySQL, but other companies I've seen this with too) not really treating open source projects *as* open source. They release the software under GPL, or whatever free license, but because they want to maintain 'copyright purity' (that is, the code they distribute is 100% owned by them, because that is the only thing that will allow them to potentially make the codebase proprietary for selling 'enhanced' versions; if they accepted other contributors' code under the GPL, they would then have to accept the code to be GPL forever, for all versions), so they won't/can't integrate other contributors' code into the main distribution (unless they can work out some seperate licensing agreement with the third-party developer).
Whenever you have a situation like that, as a company, you are giving other developers the benefit of Free Software while *denying* it from your own customers (well, sorta, until they stop being your customers and start using the other forks), and yourselves.
I don't know what the 'best' business model is for open source companies, but if you really want to leverage open source/free software, you have to give up on directly charging for 'enhanced' versions of the software, because the only way to play that game is to force this situation where you cannot benefit from the enhancements of the community. If you are successful, like MySQL, then eventually the community grows to the point where the community's developer resources are greater than your own as the company, and you find yourself in a situation where you can't really keep up with the community.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've done my share of programming under the GPL... and I've never liked it. I never implied that proprietary was better, rather I prefer software that is free in every way. If you have a BSD-licensed app and you want to use an awesome code snippet from a GPL piece of software, you can't. (At least, not without going back to the contributor and working out some sort of deal.)
Let's Free VirtualBox Too! (Score:2)
I hail the MySQL community for a good job.
Now it is time to fork VirtualBox into community driven project. It is getting more and more crippled Since Sun eated the Innotek.
You need to execute well. (Score:4, Interesting)
MySQL seems to be a project with alot of mindshare that doesn't execute well.
With commercial software, you're screwed when the vendor decides to do stupid things. With OSS, you have options besides moving to a new platform or living with the vendor's stupid decisions.
At the end of the day, this is good for everyone, and is an example of why OSS is good for society.
Bring improvements back in (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the keys to a successful open-source project is to take the improvements being made in forks and bring them back into the main project. One of the reasons forks are created is that users have a need that's not being met by the project. If you bring their solutions back into the mainline project, the fork will tend to die because it's no longer needed.
This is, BTW, one of the reasons to use a GPL-like license. If you do, you're guaranteed that you can bring improvements from forks back into your mainline codebase. If you go with a license that allows you to create a fork with things that aren't available to others, it simultaneously allows others to create forks that aren't available to you. Then you end up in Sun's situation with no way to resolve it except by creating the same improvements yourself. And there's more of your competitors than there are of you, which means they will win this particular race to create improvements. If you go with a license that forces improvements to be available to you but not anybody else, many people who might have created an improvement you could use will simply not contribute to your project. It's a perception issue: GPL-like terms lead contributors to think in terms of their contributions helping everybody and you just happen to be one of that "everybody", while "owner gets everything, everybody else gets what the owner gives them" terms tend to lead contributors to think you want them to work solely for your benefit without you giving them anything in return. That turns a lot of people off.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad article. (Score:5, Informative)
OurDelta isn't a fork of MySQL. It's builds for the regular MySQL with optionally some third party patches.
Drizzle isn't a fork of MySQL. It's a complete restart and reengeneering of the database core of MySQL and will likely become a base for the future releases of Sun's MySQL and other database products. Drizzle is to MySQL like MinWin is to Windows, though maybe bad analogy, MinWin is just as porly understood by most people.
Sun doesn't have a propriatary fork of MySQL. Former MySQL AB wanted to put some proprietary services and applications on top of the existing open-source product, but the community reacted and since Sun never approved of this direction, those plans were immediately dropped.
Re:Bad article (Score:4, Informative)
Hi!
We typically call Drizzle [launchpad.net] a fork, since we do have a common ancestor at this point (though it is doubtful you could apply a patch between the two). We are pretty up front about this though. Drizzle is supported by Sun which the article does not mention, though we are different in that we have patches that have to date come in from 30+ companies.
OurSQL is more of a distribution then anything else. Their tree is a collection of patches they apply at each release.
Cheers,
-Brian
Parent
In a word, 'yes' (Score:5, Interesting)
Sun/MySQL can and should be blamed if they are failing the community that made MySQL so popular and strong.
Sun has a bad reputation for having very closed open source projects such as OpenOffice. The project is managed much more like a proprietary venture than an open source project and community input is minimized or ignored altogether.
I can't feel sorry for Sun when they drop buku bucks on MySQL and then complain that others are taking their revenue away from them doing what the OSS community does best - improve the software on their own.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun/MySQL can and should be blamed if they are failing the community that made MySQL so popular and strong.
Up front: I think MySQL sucks. Having said that, how dare you blame them for "failing" in any way, having given the community the product in the first place? They released it as Free Software from the beginning. Anything they do after that is just icing on the cake. You can wish that they did things differently, but they don't owe jack to "the community" other than obeying the license on any code that comes back their way.
Well, other than quit lying by saying that you have to buy a commercial license if
Re:In a word, 'yes' (Score:4, Insightful)
I referred to MySQL as Sun/MySQL because the company by the same name as the project is now owned by Sun. As such, I'm really accusing Sun of failing the community.
It's näive to think that Sun would have purchased MySQL if it weren't for its community base of users and developers and indeed, MySQL would not have been much of anything without said same user and developer base. So to suggest that "the community" is owed nothing for their efforts (developing, testing, debugging, suggesting improvements, etc) is also näive.
MySQL is as popular as it is because of its environment as well as its code base. If you take away either component it will fail, and Sun doesn't seem to get that by taking away the community participation it's killing the project/product it just bought.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So to suggest that "the community" is owed nothing for their efforts (developing, testing, debugging, suggesting improvements, etc) is also näive.
I'm not sure how the community is owed anything. They have what they are guaranteed: code and a license that allows them to take it (almost) wherever they want. Seems like payment in full to me. The accounts are balanced and everyone can split right now - although it would probably be mutually beneficial if everyone continued to play nice (especially Sun).
For many, it will be a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
People need incentives to buy products, and open source software doesn't give people that incentive outside of the enterprise realm where paid support is a big money maker. Let's get closer to regular users here. What incentive do home users have to buy StarOffice when OpenOffice is more than good enough? How about pay anything for WordPress when it's free and easily installed by CPanel? I can't see any, aside from altruism, and only economically-clueless nerds tend to put much stock in altruism as a source of revenue (this also explains why so many think that bands will still sell large amounts of recorded music, even though most of it can be downloaded for free on a P2P network).
In the case of MySQL, a big part of their problem is that Sun isn't dumping a lot of R&D money into them to make MySQL 6 really competitive on an enterprise level with PostgreSQL. A pure open source approach isn't going to allow Sun to make good money on their R&D investment, but if they were to dramatically improve MySQL and provide high quality tools at reasonable prices, that sort of hybrid approach would work. Companies that want to make their core software open source are going to have to make compelling products that interact with them if they want to be able to sell more than consulting and support services.
Open source advocates need to be realistic. If you do work outside of the enterprise realm, chances are you will end up doing it for free and never seeing a dime from it unless your users are feeling overly generous. That's just because most users outside of the enterprise realm have no incentive to buy anything you might be selling related to your open source product.
Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Who even pays for MySQL (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously. What is the business case where one may justify using MySQL and paying for it?
Whenever the issue of MySQL vs other RDBMS is raised on Slashdot, its niche is typically defined as cheap hosting and other low-budget solutions where reliability and data consistency are simply not as important. Nothing wrong with that, but isn't it precisely the segment that's not going to pay so long as they can get the same for free? Support - I doubt many people actually care much about that, especially for MySQL.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Your point is a good one because we do have competent DBAs here, and Sun's addons don't add much value for us. But entire systems ar
Bundle it with products !! (Score:3, Insightful)
think it like this - imagine you are going to offer a webserver solution. hey, the database server development is already handled by the open source community, cutting many of your development, bugfix, testing costs.
AND you will sell support. no, really. no business can go to an open source forum, post their problem and wait for a useful answer in a busy workday. they will want to have someone to call and get support fast. AND that will be the company who sold the solution to them. charge reasonably for support.
do NOT try to go into the ancient 'hey we did something, we are gonna sell it and make money'. in our days and times, support, service are constant revenue streams. whilst you buy a server every few years. which you would want to bank on ?
MySQL has the mindshare (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of the article & threads here seem to be supposition, and niche arguments. MySQL has the mindshare because, back when RedHat was all the rage on production servers, MySQL + Apache was just an RPM away, and LAMP started to really kick in (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). PHP has big mindshare too, and the MySQL functions *are* the DB functions for a lot of coders out there.
So even if you fork, add third party patches, or whatever... the fact is that the basic MySQL dominates the low to mid range server DB market in Open Source, and that's that. Of course there are better alternatives available, but hiring staff that know those alternatives isn't as easy.
So I reckon Sun won't be affected too much, their product does what most people need already. Those who need something else can pay Oracle, MS or work with PostgreSQL, which kinda got to the party late. Yes, it is more powerful. But it's LAMP and not LAPP, and the tutorials for PHP/MySQL outnumber PHP/Postgres by a large factor.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember Sparcworks, the official, surprisingly expensive compiler for Solaris with really annoying license requirements that your management made you buy, that immediately became shelfware in favor of the free and far superior GCC if you hoped to do anything approaching ANSI C development?
You mean the Sun compiler that is ANSI compliant and produces better (smaller, faster) code than GCC? And what's "annoying" about the license? At my last firm we developed trading software for Solaris, and none of our c