The MySQL petition

Shawn O'Shea shawn at eth0.net
Fri Jan 1 19:29:58 EST 2010


The feelings on the Oracle acquisition seem quite split in the open source
community. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center wrote an opinion
to the European Commission in favor of the acquisition [1] and Pamela Jones
of Groklaw has written a few articles about the merger in support including
one specifically addressing Moglen's letter [2].

At work, we were becoming concerned about MySQL as the community was already
becoming fragmented prior to Oracle's arrival on the scene. In addition to
the official Sun MySQL builds, there are enhanced builds with commercial
support from Percona [3] and OurDelta [4]. OurDelta is from former MySQL
employees. Monty Widenius himself, has forked MySQL as well as part of the
MariaDB project [5]. And there's the cloud geared fork/refactor called
Drizzle [6].

Monty also challenged Oracle on stewardship of MySQL and they responded that
they would keep MySQL GPLed. [discussion at 7]. maddog has already commented
in this thread on some Oracle acquisitions that have been kept in good faith
by Oracle. I think another important one to mention is InnoDB, the popular
transactional database engine that comes with MySQL. InnoDB is designed and
maintained by Innobase Oy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle [8] (acquired
in October 2005).

I'm no big fan of Oracle, but MySQL has enough issues and community
splintering. I think this fight over the Oracle acquisition does nothing but
continue to hurt MySQL. I also think Oracle has shown enough good faith in
past acquisitions that MySQL will be ok in their ownership. Besides, there's
always Postgresql [9]. :)

-Shawn

[1]
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/04/software-freedom-law-center-submits-opinion-oracle/
[2] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091204095942328
[3] http://www.percona.com/
[4] http://ourdelta.org/
[5] http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB
[6] http://drizzle.org/
[7]
http://thecommandline.net/2009/12/14/montys-challenge-to-oracle-over-mysql-stewardship-and-their-response/
[8] http://www.innodb.com/
[9] http://www.postgresql.org/

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:

>  Passing on this email. I'd be interested in your opinions of the issues
> raised.
>
>  Hi!
>
> I am contacting you because you have in the past shown interest in
> MySQL and from that I assume you are interested in the future
> well-being of MySQL.
>
> Now you have a unique opportunity to make a difference.  By signing
> the petition at http://www.helpmysql.org you can help affect the
> future of MySQL as an Open Source database.
>
> You can find more information of this on my latest blog post at:http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html
>
> Help us spread the world about this petition!http://www.helpmysql.org is available in 18 languages and every vote
> is important, independent of from where in the world it comes!
> If you know people that are using MySQL, please contact them and
> ensure they also sign the petition!
>
> Regards,
> Monty
> Creator of MySQL
>
> PS: If you already have signed the petition or know about it, sorry for
>     reminding you about this! Because of the importance of this issue,
>     I am trying to contact every person that I have ever communicated
>     with regarding MySQL.
>
>
> --
> Ted Roche
> Ted Roche & Associates, LLChttp://www.tedroche.com
>
>
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>
>
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