Oracle buyout of Sun and it's affects on mySQL

[Bernard Devlin]

I have to agree with Ruslan on this (but perhaps from a different
perspective).

Monty's call to arms just seems bizarre and under-handed.  MySQL was
never really free (unlike Postgres or Firebird or Sqlite).  He sold
MySQL to Sun and became very rich.  Now he wants to claim that Oracle
is a threat to free software, when MySQL was the least free of the
free databases.  There are several equally good or better alternatives
to MySQL.  There are several equally good or better commercial
alternatives to MySQL.  Microsoft got away with it's 90+% dominance of
desktop computers and office software for the best part of twenty
years, and it wasn't the Competition Commission that reduced
Microsoft's market share.

But we have a hard time predicting t the future.  Who knows what
Oracle will do.  That is one of the problems with having to pay
run-time licenses.  The developer is effectively a hostage to fortune.
 In some ways MySQL might be better off with Oracle.  After all, they
went to the trouble of buying the various storage engines for MySQL,
something which MySQL AB never bothered to do.  Paying MySQL customers
might be much happier to have all that technology owned and secured by
one company.

I certainly wouldn't consider developing a project now that was
dependent on future versions of MySQL being available with the current
(pseudo-)free licensing.  Even if you are happy distributing the
current version of MySQL with your app (and on the server), and paying
the licenses costs, there is no saying what those costs might be in
the future.  That is what was so underhand about the way in which
MySQL was marketed as free-in-some-circumstances.

I think on is better to consider Sqlite or Valentina client-side, and
Postgresql server-side  (I don't know enough about Valentina server to
offer an opinion about the suitability of that option.)  And if you
want to have the 'same db' on both the client and the server then use
a data-abstraction layer like SQL Yoga.  I believe that Sean Shao is
also working on some kind of abstraction layer.

Then you can swap out one database for another, and (hopefully) the
abstraction layer will take care of any differences.

As a fan of Firebird, I was advocating years ago that RunRev produce
drivers for that database.  That way one could run that same
completely free, fully-transactional, multi-version concurrency
control, fully-acid compliant db technology as both an embedded
database and a multi-user server database.

Bernard

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Ruslan Zasukhin
<ruslan_zasukhin at valentina-db.com> wrote:
> Well, this is wave of cry raised by author of mySQL some weeks ago.
> You can find site with his letter on few languages.
> And you can read comments of people to him on this.
>
> Many people say that they support him,
> But exists IMO adequate comments which point something like this:
>
>    Hey man, you have SOLD your baby for billion of cache to Sun.
>    This means you have loose control over it.
>    Do not try now return control back. This is not fair game.