Mickos Urges EU To Approve Oracle's MySQL Takeover

mjasay writes "Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has written to EU Commissioner of Competition Neelie Kroes to urge speedy approval of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, including the open-source MySQL database. The EU has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum. But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL-the-community from MySQL-the-company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: 'Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close, mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.' In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he 'couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action,' and is 'motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter.'"

Let them

[Norsefire]

I use MySQL exclusively and it would nice if Oracle were given a shot at supporting MySQL. Even if they do try and kill it to gain leverage for their own database, there's always MariaDB [askmonty.org] (a MySQL fork by Monty Widenius, the original creator of MySQL).

Re:Fork it

[Z00L00K]

There is already a fork: MariaDB [askmonty.org] by Monty, one of the MySQL founders.

what competition?

[mcover]

I don't see why the EU is worried in the first place. First of all MySQL could never compete with Oracle's DB. They will never compete and never have. Completely different use-cases. Apart from that, I'm still using PostgreSQL and if i had an app specifically designed for MySQL, I'd go with Drizzle(fork).

Re:Oracle already owns an open source database

[nxtw]

Oracle owns Berkeley DB, from when they bought Sleepy Cat Software. Has anyone heard of _any_ useful progress in Berkeley DB, which used to rule Linux for lightweight, small databases?

Berkeley DB is still being developed [oracle.com] with new features - such as those in version 4.8, released less than a month ago [oracle.com].

Anyway, Berkeley DB is a different kind of database than MySQL or Oracle Database.

I thought not: they supported it a little bit, and it's been profoundly ignored for years now, by both its owners and the open source community at large.

Surely the rise of SQLite [wikipedia.org] has something to do with what you perceive to be Berkeley DB's decline?

Re:Oracle already owns an open source database

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely the rise of SQLite [wikipedia.org] has something to do with what you perceive to be Berkeley DB's decline?

Don't tell that to the OpenLDAP people. [openldap.org]

Re:Fork it

[Anonymous Coward]

"The name MySQL (just like the MyISAM storage engine) comes from Monty's first daughter "My". MariaDB continues this tradition by being named after his younger daughter. "

Re:Not so fast

[jadavis]

Granted, there are some exceptions, but that's just what they are: EXCEPTIONS.

They aren't just "exceptions", you have hand-waved away a majority of the free software people use.

I don't know of any free software compiler that uses that approach (not gcc, ghc, python, ruby, perl, etc.); nor any OS (GNU+linux, freebsd, opensolaris); nor any desktop environment or GUI tools; nor any browsers or email clients; nor text editors/IDEs. For database systems, MySQL and BerkeleyDB do, but postgresql, firebirdsql, and sqlite do not. Let's say that OO.o does, as well.

When I think about the volume of quality software that I use, the part that uses a dual licensing model is there, but it's not the predominant portion. For one thing, any dual licensed software project requires that you sign over the rights if you are an outside contributor. Not many open source projects do that, because it generally eliminates outside development except from some special cases.

the mere possibility of support or no-business development model means there is no cause for concern

There's plenty of cause for concern, as with any project using any model. Ultimately, a lot of things need to line up for a project to really take off and sustain itself. The "hybrid licensing model", however, is not the only way to do it.

or have been subsidized heavily by some other business for other reasons

That is very common, and it's a very different model than the "single company plus dual licensing" model. I would also add that it's often many businesses. It's probably a lot better in many cases -- PostgreSQL and Linux are both backed by various companies. I don't think you should marginalize this as a model for a successful project.

Google contributes heavily to MySQL, yet they are a second-class citizen in mainline MySQL, because they have to sign over rights to get improvements accepted. I don't think this state of affairs will last very long -- they will throw their weight behind one of the forks, and become a first-class contributor to the project, among others.

I do not think it is an accident that those few open vibrant open source products

Which few? I use a lot of free software from vibrant projects, and a lot of it quite simply does not follow your "hybrid licensing" explanation at all.

Re:Alternatives

[Zontar The Mindless]

They have already killed mysql 6.0 "MySQL 6.0 was not developed beyond Alpha status and new releases have not been made for some time, so the manual has been withdrawn as well."

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/index.html

Wrong. We have NOT 'killed' 6.0, but it not going to be the focus of our development for a while, and we won't do any more official 6.0 releases for some time to come. But we HAVE moved it to the back burner, so to speak.

If you really want 6.0, you can get it right here:

https://code.launchpad.net/~mysql/mysql-server/mysql-6.0-codebase [launchpad.net]

No guarantees right now as to how well it'll build and run on any given day; I think I last built it last Tuesday or Wednesday, and it seemed to do okay, but of course YMMV. That being said, go get the code and knock yourself out.

In the meantime, we're backporting what we think are the best bits of 6.0 to 5.X.

so what is next ?

You'll find some answers to that question here...

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-next-series-plans.html [mysql.com]

And here...

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/ [mysql.com]

And what's this? The latest release, from less than a week ago:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/news-5-4-3.html [mysql.com]

That's the clone-off date, BTW. Binaries should be available here

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.4.html [mysql.com]

in a few days.

5.x on the death row

I think that's a bit of a stretch. Why don't you see what we say about it on the site?

http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/lifecycle/ [mysql.com]

NB: We have a choice between (a) honouring the policies on this page and (b) breaking contacts with paying customers.

Can you guess which of these we're more likely to do?

maybe is time to move to postgresql , firebird ...

That's one of the reasons why it's called Free Software -- you're absolutely free to move to something else if you like, and we wish you every success with it if you choose to do so.