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Comments: 339 +- Developers: MySQL Quietly Drops Support For Debian Linux [UPDATED] on Wednesday December 13 2006, @10:35AM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday December 13 2006, @10:35AM
from the any-color-as-long-as-it's-black dept.
from the any-color-as-long-as-it's-black dept.
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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"
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There is something in the pang of change
More than the heart can bear,
Unhappiness remembering happiness.
-- Euripides
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Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
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 ?-)
Parent
Re:QUIETLY? (Score:5, Informative)
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!)
Parent
Those mother... (Score:3, Funny)
Bit misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bit misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Bit misleading (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Bit misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bit misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bit misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Will you support MySQL Binaries built by third-party vendors? No.
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/supportpolicie
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.
Parent
What does this say for OSS as a business model? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Indeed... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Generic, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Oh well (Score:3, Informative)
And yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
I know where I'll not be spending my IT budget next year.
Fork or Spoon (Score:5, Funny)
MySQL only lets me spoon it.
But Postgre lets me fork it all night long.
Get Ready... (Score:5, Interesting)
Forking won't necessarily do anything (Score:5, Insightful)
All of my servers run Debian (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Sounds like a business plan waiting to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be my guess at least.
Did anyone catch the relationship? (Score:4, Interesting)
-BA
No need to fork! (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt most Debian users will care.
Re:Let's fork it! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Let's fork it! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Profitability (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Companies kill off profitable lines all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:UBUNTU ! Why Hath Thou Foresaken Me ? (Score:5, Funny)
Only in WoW...
Yes, I know, there goes my Karma.
Parent
Re:Let's fork it! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let's fork it! (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Parent
Re:Let's fork it! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Let's fork it! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Regards,
Johan Louwers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)