Five Questions With Michael Widenius 71
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."
Politics as usual (Score:1, Interesting)
people in MySQL management made my life hell; They didn't let me participate in MySQL development, didn't give me resources in doing Maria development and did a lot of backstabbing to make my life difficult.
Do you find the politics in the real world more difficult than the ones in the Open Source community?
Re:Politics as usual (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this thread is about 5 question for MW that he has already answered :)
Back to what you said: I think it was mostly the management and less of politics. The role of management is usually to dictate terms that they have absolutely no clue about. A marketing exec managing a SQL functionalities is gonna make the team go sour given enough time.
Re:MySQL to be thrown onto the community? (Score:2, Interesting)
What a funny interview. He talks all about trust and open source, and yet one of the major reasons I have always avoided open source is because I personally distrusted the two major developers.
I remember reading countless times how this or that missing feature wasn't needed, and how it was bad practice to use it in the first place. Then, next version, they'd brag that they had it. They would ignore referential integrity, but hide that fact, and call their bugs "Gotchas" or "Features". They would claim that having intelligence in the database and reduce traffic across the wire was bad practice, and that you should move entire result sets into the middle tier and filter it there in their forums, and on and on and on.
If they had been forthright about what compromises they made, what the strengths and weaknesses of their design were, and been prepared to acknowledge that there were tasks it wasn't fit for, I might have put it to more use. But at the end of the day, I couldn't trust the developers not to engage in misleading behavior, so I stayed far away from it, and used PostgreSQL instead.
In the end, the developers tried to pull a DivX Networks/Project Mayo type of move and rip off the community, and this was only reversed when Sun bought them out.
It's good to see that those lying, thieving bastards are no longer involved with the project. Particularly since I am now obligated to use their bastard child at work.
Re:Good he could sacrifice a good 30 seconds (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Five Questions... (Score:2, Interesting)
I liked the "I just answered that." It takes real skill to get someone to answer like that in a short non-controversial interview.
Re:MySQL to be thrown onto the community? (Score:3, Interesting)
See, that's the thing. There are narrow niches where that's a strength, where a little bit of garbage data in there isn't going to cause any harm, and the speed mitigates the weaknesses. And if they had been upfront and forthright about the capacities of the project, that would have been fine.
But when you come across another "not-a-bug-a-gotcha-or-a-feature" every other month that you didn't know about because they were forthright, and you're forced to work with projects that were incredibly poorly designed because people trusted the developers advice and did everything wrong... there isn't any trust there. You couldn't feel safe using it for anything significant unless you're actually getting right in there and hacking it yourself and seeing what it does, because you know from experience that they'd flat out lie to you if they thought it would increase their market share.
Re:English is Author's Second Language? (Score:1, Interesting)