Monty Widenius wants another billion dollars, should we help him?
Sometimes inbetween Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the “Help MySQL” initiative was founded. This initiative, publicly supported by Monty Widenius, the co-founder of MySQL would be interesting if it wasn’t somehow indecent. Let me explain.
What does “Help MySQL” advocate, in a nutshell? It claims that if Oracle were to merge with Sun, MySQL customers would be trapped in a market that would be pretty much controlled and captured by Oracle, both through its existing propietary databases offerings and the acquisition of MySQL. Another issue explained on the web site is that the inherent free and open source nature of MySQL will not be enough to grant effective freedoms to the market since Oracle would be the sole copyright owner of the code and trademarks.
I think I will not be the only one to notice that in a whooping twist of history, Monty Widenius explains us why the business and contribution model to MySQL he crafted himself since the beginning of the database company is terrible for customers. I am always quite skeptical of the “do as I say not as I do” lines of thinking, but so be it, let’s carry along. For months now, Monty and his interesting (and interested) acolyte, Florian Mueller, have been lobbying everything that seems to be possibly lobbied, from the press to the European Commission where they seemed to have been giving a hard time to Oracle, confused the European anti-trust with byzantine arguments leading to have MySQL relicensed under the BSD while portraying Microsoft as “understanding towards the Open Source ecosystem”.
You might then ask, again, why would Monty want MySQL back, or separated from Oracle? What would Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, and recently an advisor of the Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation, counter Sun’s acquisition by Oracle after having left Sun as fast as he could have? There seems to be many reasons, at least on a personal level. One of them, as Jan Wildeboer outlined today, might be that Monty just does not want to leave the command of MySQL. The problem is that the “competitive case” just does not seem to exist here. Not only can anyone fork MySQL (Monty already did it by the way), but the database market is competitive enough to have other credible incumbents fill in the gap, if Oracle were to become.. carnivorous, which remains to be proven. But there are other reasons, some of whose can be foreseen if one thinks about the possible outcomes of Oracle’s walking away from the merger at the end of the month. Sun Microsystems lost several of its most profitable and large customers with the globlal financial crisis. It is doubtful whether Sun could actually survive in the end. Sun would then be sold by chunks, and I cannot wait to see who would buy MySQL back… Monty Widenius, a fellow of the Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation, and a man who describes the asserted and patented monopoly as being “benevolent and understanding towards Open Source”. There you go, I know you must feel reassured that MySQL will end up in good hands if it does fall in Oracle’s portfolio.
Sun Microsystems being sold in chunks, or being merged with Oracle raises a lot of questions that I ‘m not aware Monty Widenius ever addressed in a constructive way: What about Java, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris (other examples might also be found)? I have not heard a word from Monty Widenius. The future of ODF does not seem to be very important, just like, in the same way, his new colleague at the Codeplex Foundation, Miguel de Icaza, seems to think. Perhaps the quest for another billion is too important and therefore Monty just hasn’t found the time to think and focus about other issues. By helping MySQL, it seems to me you are also helping the personal wealth of a billionaire who calls evil what some might do in the future while forgetting he did the same before.
All things considered, I am not really excited at the prospect of “saving MySQL”, and neither should you. For 2010, let’s rather focus on constructive conversations and projects.
Happy New Year 2010!
Free Software, OOo Postings, Open Source, OpenDocument Format, OpenOffice.org
AFAIK he does comment on OpenOffice en Java:
from :
Personally I think if Monty wants to offer Oracle $1billion to buy back MySQL then Oracle should be obliged to give due consideration to that offer. I don’t see that offer on the table though.
Alan,
Indeed, things would be easier and Oracle could give due consideration for this. But Monty thinks (perhaps rightly so) that it would not actually 1) stop the merger from happening and I think he has ulterior motives for that 2) he can make bid for much lower if the merger fails.
@ Jonathan;
I completely fail to see why OpenOffice.org is different, in terms of copyright and licence (GPL v3 with exception, which means LGPL) from MySQL. What has stopped anyone from forking MySQL?
And oh, OpenOffice.org is important, it really is. I fail to see why MySQL is more important than the rest. In fact it’s the only piece of software at Sun that actually has competition both open source and proprietary.
IBM offered for the whole of Sun, Oracle offered more. If Oracle walked away that would not be the end.
Oracle is the leading proprietary database. MySQL is the leading open source database. MySQL was viable on its own. Merging the two database players clearly reduces competition. This is clearly good for Oracle and Sun shareholders, what makes this a good thing for consumers?
@artsrc: er, I assume you’re familiar with the fact that Sun has been bleeding cash for over 6 months now?
Now: does the merger reduce choice? Of course it does, since… it’s a merger. So let me put in another way: do you prefer this merger, or MySQL being controlled by Microsoft?
MySQL is *not* a competitor to Oracle, either in capabilities or in pricing. PostgreSQL is the true threat to Oracle because it’s free, it’s catching up fast with Oracle’s capabilities and it can’t be bought or bought out. Better to snag low-end customers with MySQL (before they investigate and perhaps commit to PostgreSQL) and then move them on to Oracle as soon as their needs and wallets are fat enough.
Widenius conned Sun to the tune of a billion dollars (probably 42 Swedish Kroner after taxes) and now he thinks he can con MySQL users into astroturfing the EU so he can wiggle back into control of MySQL. He’ll have his cake and eat it too, and he sees that as a good thing because he has seen by now that nobody gives a damn about MariaDB. Let him cozy up with Redmond; the business world is littered with the corpses of Microsoft’s business “partners.”
Let MySQL go to Oracle. If being “free” is a strength, if being forkable is such a great bulwark against the robber barons then MySQL’s code is in no danger. Why are the OSS folks in such fear of a perfect test case of their philosophy?
I’m a Sun employee. I’m not thrilled at the prospect of working for Oracle, but I’m even less thrilled at the prospect of being unemployed. Now 3000 of my colleagues are former colleagues thanks to the EU, and Monty’s campaign effectively pushes the rest of us closer to the door. I suspect he won’t subsidize my kid’s college tuition or my mortgage. So hey, Monty, if you want another billion, go get it the old-fashioned way – work for it.
In this debate, the InnoDB case is almost never mentioned, while InnoDB (from InnoBase Oy) is by far the most popular MySQL storage engine for mission-critical enterprise applications that require ACID compliance and referential integrity (waiting a future native support of such features with MySQL 6.x). It’s part of the standard MySQL distribution and it’s covered by the standard MySQL support by Sun. Like MySQL itself, InnoDB is dual licensed (GPL/proprietary). And, last but not least, InnoDB is already an Oracle product, knowing that InnoBase Oy was acquired more than 4 years ago by Oracle. As far I know, the acquisition did never harm the development of InnoDB, which remains open, up and running. Of course, Oracle knows that killing InnoDB would just promote alternative transactional or non transactional storage engines such as, say, XtraDB or Infobright. For similar reasons, IBM didn’t kill Informix in the beginning (while they probably have initially planned to do the wrong choice before the merger), knowing that killing Informix would just trigger a panic migration towards Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL, that wouldn’t have been the IBM’s game. So, nothing in the history of the “naughty noughties” tells us that a full acqusition of MySQL by Oracle would be a disaster for the MySQL installed base and for the future of open source DBMSs. All the more that there is no really worthy, blameless and sustainable alternative for now.
@Gouarne
The Oracle development of InnoDB does not look too shiny:
http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html
“For InnoDB:
- Bug fixes were done (but this was done under a contractual obligation)
- New features, like compression that was announced before acquisition, took 3 years to implement
- No time tables or insight into development
- The community where not allowed to participate in development
- Patches from users (like Google) that would have increased performance was not implemented/released until after Oracle announced it was acquiring Sun.
- Oracle started working on InnoDB+, a better ‘closed source’ version of InnoDB
- In the end Sun had to fork InnoDB, just to be able to improve performance.”
Let’s bet Oracle will sell a proprietary version of MySQL+, since they are the ultimate copyright holders.