Is MySQL's Community Eating the Company?

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?"

This is really MySQL's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep doing a select statement to download the distribution, thinking it'll only return one result, but it keeps returning more. I submitted it as a bug, but it was marked as WONTFIX.

SunSQL

[azior]

Maybe Sun should rename their fork of MySQL to SunSQL Solaris Edition JDK

I'm ready to use PostgreSQL now

Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce

[Chrisq]

I know a long term Unix Hack. He says. "Fuck Sun. Fuck IBM. Fuck SCO. Fuck Microsoft..... come to think of it Sun aint too bad"

Re:How could we blame sun

[EmperorKagato]

Maybe they'll become OpenSun.

Re:more of a sign they need to improve their proce

[hubritc]

THE CAKE IS A LIE!