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Is MySQL's Community Eating the Company?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Dec 15, 2008 11:20 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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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: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:5, Insightful)
Parent
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: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: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
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
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: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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.