Comments on: Monty Widenius wants another billion dollars, should we help him?

By: European Commission Approves Oracle Acquisition of Sun

European Commission Approves Oracle Acquisition of Sun — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:30:01 +0000

[...] is making OSS acquisitions look very dangerous and dicey.” Charles H. Schulze also has excellent post on [...]

By: François Pellegrini – Programmes Politiques » MySQL : « a license to kill »

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:40:22 +0000

[...] force est de constater que les arguments avancés par Monty Widenius sont plus que spécieux. Selon lui, MySQL AB n’a pu générer de revenus suffisants pour soutenir son activité que [...]

By: Links 7/1/2010: GNU/Linux Gains Among Key OEMs | Boycott Novell

Links 7/1/2010: GNU/Linux Gains Among Key OEMs | Boycott Novell — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:54:05 +0000

[...] Monty Widenius wants another billion dollars, should we help him? 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. [...]

By: snake

snake — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:27:34 +0000

@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.

By: Jean-Marie Gouarné

Jean-Marie Gouarné — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:10:28 +0000

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.

By: jdd

jdd — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:58:44 +0000

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.

By: error.h

error.h — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:21:20 +0000

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?

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:44:50 +0000

@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?

By: artsrc

artsrc — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:36:59 +0000

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?

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:01:21 +0000

@ 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.