Novell to Ship MySQL With NetWare 6

An anonymous reader writes "Coming close on the heels of their announcement that they've ported PostgreSQL to NetWare, Novell announced today that they will begin shipping MySQL with NetWare 6. Owing to customer and partner doubts about the GPL, Novell has chosen the commercial version of MySQL, rather than the GPL'ed version."

No choice about the license.

[feinorgh]

Reading the license term for MySQL it seems pretty clear that Novell has no choice in choosing the license model. According to the terms at the MySQL page, MySQL is only GPL if the whole system is open sourced or GPL:ed. N'est ce pas?

Re:What version?

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be called 'alpha' or 'beta', but MySQL AB seem to err on the side of caution.

I consider MySQL 4 to be OK for production use.

Re:Shipping both?

[FreeLinux]

It appears that they will be shipping MySQL as part of the OS distribution however, PostgreSQL is available as part of a separate Software Developer's Kit.

does slashdot know what a misnomer is?

[linuxislandsucks]

The commercial version of MYSQL has two licenses, the one commercial one you buy for support from MYSQL AB and the gpled version covering the orginal gpl led code..

Guys wake up..

Novell asked ofr the commercial version becuase of support issues that they want MYSQL AB to handle..simple as that nothing more its stil has the gpl license as its base..

Great News!!!

[malraid]

I personally think that these are great news, both MySQL and PostgreSQL(although I really favor PostgreSQL)

Most slashdotters tend to think that NetWare is dying/dead. I feel that this very is far from true. Netware doesn't have the market share that it had some years ago, and it missed the .com revolution ( and also the .com burst by the way)

However I have found many Netware shops that say that they will continue to use it because:
1) it works
2) it's secure (maybe more than Linux, as you can't get Quake 3 to run on Netware yet!)
3) it can be cheaper than Win 2k, specially on large instalations.
4)NDS is acutally useful, compared with Active Directory which in my opinion is pretty much useless.

These shops tend to be in well established bussiness, definetly old-bussiness.

For example, just this morning I landed a consulting job with a large private school (300+ computers) where they run 5 NetWare servers (+1 Solaris) And I'm able to charge more than for a Win2k work, because most geeks think Netware is dead and can't offer support for it.

So go ahead and make it official, NetWare is dead!

Look at Netware 6

[FreeLinux]

I were Novell, I'd be more interested in developing a Samba-style SMB server NLM to try to replace NT file and print servers

Netware 6 already has this. I forget their name for it but, it goes under the guise of Any Client or some such. With this feature, Microsoft clients can connect to the Netware 6 servers without the previously required Novell client. The Netware 6 server looks to the client, like a NT server. Netware 6 also supports an NFS like export that allows *nix clients to also connect natively, without the use of Novell client software.

Netware 6 has a lot of really powerful features. What's more, I think that Linuxers would like it because it has a similar feel, even if the commands are different. Hell, it even runs Xwindows with the IceWM.

License Fees

[Bonker]

It's worth noting that MySQL commercial licenses... even with very little volume discout (US$395.00/license) are still two orders of magnitude less expensive than MSSQL or Oracle.

Re:What IS Novell??

[Magorak]

Novell has been around a long time and will continue to be around a long time regardless of what any Linux/NT/200 people may think.

The company I work for is a pure Novell shop. We run Groupwise for our email, and plenty of other Novell products and we do extremely well. In fact, Novell even powers our web presence. We will be upgrading from Netware 5 to Netware 6 this year.

It IS a real OS. Standalone server sits in my server room and runs all of it's apps very well. It's a hell of a lot more stable than any 2K/NT box and in many ways, just as stable as a Unix box. I won't say better, but I will say it does a good job.

I hate it when people say that Novell is dead and dying. They've been around a long time and they are still around because they always make a decent product and require very little maintenance, unlike the MS OSes out there.

Re:This is neat-o keen, but.

[eGuy]

As far as a samba server, NetWare 6 also bundles what they call Native File Access Pack. It makes your server appear as a Windows server(CIFS) to windows clients, Mac(AppleTalk) to Mac client or Unix(NFS) to Unix clients. It's also a free download for NetWare 5.

Re:What IS Novell??

[krammit]

Netware in its current incarnation is a top notch server OS. It's got one of, if not the best LDAP implementations available (NDS, eDirectory) that offers integration with all of its products for very easy administration. (Groupwise is an excellent Exchange replacement, minus the constant virus problems). Once its setup, that's it. It does not require constant attention like other server OSes *cough*. It does still load on top of DOS (for reasons I can't understand) but it is in no way a DOS based OS. In fact, it seems to have borrowed quite a bit from Unix in versions 5 and 6.

What you gain: dead easy file/print administration, extensible LDAP framework built right in, excellent reliablity/stability, can be easily (if you read the documentation) performance tuned

What you lose: application support and expensive licensing.

For small to mid size businesses, you could do better with a WinNT or *nix solution, but for large enterprises with massively distributed networks, Netware is an excellent way to go.

MacOS X 10.2 Server ships with MySQL too

[didiken]

Hey by the way, MacOS X 10.2 Server ships with MySQL too !

Re:License Fees

[brunes69]

Then it is also worth noting that PostgreSQL commercial licenses, even with very little volume discount (US $0.00/license) are still infinite orders of magnitude less expensive than MySQL, MSSQL, or Oracle.

Re:So what's new (and a Novell is dying troll, too

[erth64net]

This is just a me-too tatic by Novell. Many of Novell's previous me-too's have fallen by the wayside as well. One exception at present is Perl.

NetWare ships with Perl 5.00307, an almost useless and stripped down old version (released October 1996 by the Perl folks, and released November 2000 by the NetWare folks) - where you cannot compile your own Modules without a Windows NT machine (95/98 will not be sufficent) Microsoft Visual C 4.2 or later, a CodeWarrior compiler and linker, the "NetWare SDK", "NLM & NetWare Libraries for C" and "NetWare Server Protocol Libraries for C".

To put it as breifly as possible; Perl for NetWare is poorly supported, and does not support basic things such as fork(), chown, syscall, chroot, alarm, and about 20 other functions that are standard with a real, and current Network Operating System (ie: Unix based systems, and to a lesser extent, Win32 systems).

MySQL users on NetWare will very likely fall into the same unsupported trap... History speaks for itself, beware!

Re:No choice about the license.

[WilliamX]

The reasoning is somewhat inaccurate here. The mysql client library is LGPL, making it prefectly ok to link in non-GPL software.

What gets people is that MySQL continues to describe the GPL licensing of MySQL in a false light, and as such creates a confusion among those who are not already knowledgable about the GPL.

As I said in my earlier post, I understand the reason why they are doing it, they want to encourage purchase of commercial support licenses. But in doing so, they are making themselves look ridiculous, and should instead post an accurate explanation of the licensing.

It's my opinion that MySQL AB never really wanted to open source their product, but did so under pressure from the community who regularly used its non-open source licensing as an attack against it. So this is their way of getting open sourced, but still trying to make people feel that they are obligated to purchase licenses that they are not obligated to do under the GPL license.

Re:Dead OS with dead DBMS

[Anonymous Coward]

I did my own benchmarking with the latest mysql 4.0.4 alpha release and postgres 7.3.b2 beta release. Operations included selecting from two tables, deleting and inserting from two tables. Like everyone else has found, mysql is great with a few concurrent connections.. much faster than postgres. Then start adding concurrent connections, delete's/updates within transactions, and mysql barely moves along while postgres chugs along at a constant rate, no matter what kind of load you put on it. # of concurrent connections, inserts/deletes don't change performance numbers as much as these factors change mysql.

Basically, mysql is less performant compared to postgres with high, complex load involving transactions... from what I've found and from what most other benchmarks have found. If, on the other hand, your load is light and you use it in a non enterprise-level environment, mysql is probably better.

Mysql I believe can archive logs and replay those, although I have yet to see the details. This is in Postgres 7.4.

Re:What version?

[colenski]

Good point - this is a marketing issue. Really, if you guys go to Fry's or Best Buy or whatever and you saw "Rip and mix CD v .98 beta" next to "Rip and mix CD 2.5" which one are you going to buy? Microsofties in da house (and I know there are more than a few, like me, who read /.) remember that MS stirred up some controversy when NT was released in '93 - they have it the version number 3.1 when it was actually 1.0 - the official MS line was that it was in keeping with the nomenclature of Windows 3.1 - of course, we know total B.S. but again, if you are MIS or PHB for a Fortune 1000 and Microsoft wants you to switch to version 1.0 of a new OS, are you gonna feel better if there's an ominous version number of "1.0 build 2192" or nice fuzzy "3.1 build 2192"??

Makes me laugh about this "New AOL 8.0 vs New MSN 8.0" crap - is it a full point upgrade (nope) or is it just Marketing getting freaked out because someone else is shipping something that says 8.0 - life imitates Dilbert more and more every day.

Re:This is neat-o keen, but.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been available for a while now (over 1 year) and is known as the NFAP (Native File Access Pack). It is an add-on for Netware 5.1 and native in Netware 6. Full support for almost all clients including Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux with full grandular File access rights.

http://www.novell.com/products/nfa/

Check Out Novell Connection

[foo fighter]

Novell Connection magazine is really an excellant rag. http://www.nwconnection.com/ [nwconnection.com]

It's short, which means you can find time to read the whole thing each month.

It has informative articles about Novell products, not lame marketing-written crap. It's worth keeping up on what Novell is doing because most of their products are truly kick-ass.

You can probably qualify for a free subscription.

The killer feature is the monthly column on packet filtering and traffic shaping. Awesome. Probably the best regular column out of the dozen or so IT/Networking mags I get each month.

Re:Here it is.

[ttfkam]

Information has to be held somewhere; why not a database? The common misconception is that Btrieve and MySQL (or other relational databases) are equivalents. They are not. Btrieve is closer in concept to BerkeleyDB and variants.

Apples and oranges. And the network data has to be stored somewhere.

Re:No choice about the license.

[zak_greant]

Hrm. Nothing like responding to dead thread to drag out the hours of the night, but here goes... :)

The MySQL 4 client library is GPL not LGPL.

Regarding the licensing explanations, what is unclear about:

"This is our licensing policy in brief: Our software is 100% GPL, and if yours too is 100% GPL (or OSI compliant), then you never have to pay us for the licences. In all other instances, you are better served by our commercial licence."
-- http://mysql.com/support/arrangements.html

As for never wanting to be Open Source, we have had an open license for non-Windows versions of the software from day one. For a period of time we did sell the Windows version of MySQL as shareware, but this opened up after we gained a bit more confidence and stability as a company.

Of course, we want people to buy licenses, but we don't have to do a bait and switch to get them to do it. :)

Your friendly neighborhood mysql evangelist...
--zak