

What's your take on the save mysql? - pedalpete
http://www.helpmysql.org

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tentonova2
It's duplicitous and wrong. He sold the product, and now he is actively
undermining the product that he sold with the potential of costing Sun/Oracle
considerable sums of money to defend against his clearly self-serving claims.

Even if Monty does not succeed, he has the ability to do significant damage to
Oracle, Sun, and even industry perceptions of not only the GPL, but of open
source in general.

~~~
mbreese
> he is actively undermining the product

I wonder when some Sun/Oracle lawyer is going to give him a call and let him
know about the legal trouble he could be in for this. I mean, wouldn't this
type of behavior have been dealt with in the original MySQL purchase
agreement?

~~~
gte910h
He's urging public bodies to block the merger. I doubt they can have an
effective agreement that involves anything more than firing him. And he
doesn't work there anymore.

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briansmith
If you sold something for a billion dollars, and you had a 1% chance of
getting it back just by writing some letters and blog posts, so that you could
sell it again for another billion dollars, would you do it? If you had a much-
higher-than-1% chance of getting Sun/Oracle to pay you many millions of
dollars just to STFU, would you do it?

Some of us would say "no," others "yes." Monty is definitely a "yes" man.

~~~
jonny_noog
If I managed to sell something for a billion dollars, I'd be off doing
something more interesting than trying to make more money for the sake of it.
I guess that makes me a "no" man.

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jacquesm
I think it's easy, if you sell it you lose it.

If Monty wants to continue working on MySQL he should simply fork the project
and get it over with. Announce the new name, if he manages to assemble a good
enough team then I'm sure he will gain some traction.

It's not like he couldn't hire a few talented people.

In fact, using some of the money he made from the SUN deal in order to do this
would probably be one of the best ways to make use of it, provided his
contracts do not stop him from doing that.

~~~
joshu
I think the problem is that he would have to fork from the GPL'd version,
which means he can't sell a proprietary fork.

(Someone please correct me as I am most probably wrong)

~~~
gte910h
The issue is that you can't write non-open source programs on it anymore. You
have to write JUST GPL programs with it.

It doesn't have a linking exception like Linux does [which allows you to write
non-GPL programs to run on it].

Basically, the dude used pure GPL [a bad idea in my book] with no linking
exceptions. He did this to make $$$$ off of the dual licensing scam that MySql
AB [The company] was doing. He then sold the company, and got bit in the ass,
because you can't make a useful fork of the application due to the overly
restrictive license [which pure GPL is for a library, such as MySQL].

Basically, if you wrote a proprietary app that uses MySQL, you're hosed if
regulators don't block this.

~~~
mbreese
You're only hosed if you use the C library. If you use a Free/Open source
licensed language (Python,PHP,etc...), you're in the clear. MySQL has a FOSS
licensing exception (and always has). So the clients for these languages
aren't GPL-viral.

Now the C-library is a different story. If you want to use it, then you're
looking either GPL or one of their supported FOSS licenses. So, it isn't quite
as bad as you're making it sound.

What really needs to happen is to have someone write an LGPL or BSD MySQL
client library. That would pretty much put up a licensing firewall. This might
even be the case with something like DBSlayer. It would be even more clear if
the middleware supported multiple DB backends.

MySQL has always straddled this GPL/FOSS/proprietary fence, and never made it
very clear if you really needed a commercial license. I could be
'misremembering', but I thought that at one time they even explicitly said
that if you used Python/Perl/PHP/etc you could write proprietary software w/o
a commercial license. However, they also said that if your program "required
MySQL features" that you had to have a commercial license. They made all of
their money off of this confusion. But I think that if a third-party BSD
client library spoke the correct binary protocol to the server, that you'd be
in the clear. Then again, I'm not a lawyer...

<http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/foss-exception/>

~~~
carey
I read somewhere recently (here or proggit?) about libdrizzle, which is a BSD-
licensed client library that is compatible with the MySQL network protocol.
The developers are quite clear that you can use it with their own GPL 2
database server: <https://answers.launchpad.net/drizzle/+faq/134>

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gte910h
I've always thought the Oracle acquisition a bad bad thing.

Then again, I always thought using GPL for a database is ALSO a bad bad thing.
It probably should have been LGPL at the most, probably something like
apache/MIT/BSD instead.

To my opinion, this is MySQL AB's old owners getting bitten in the ass for
their greedy dual licensing model. They should have licensed it with a more
permissive license.

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nfnaaron
My take is if mysql is important to you as a resource, get together with
similar people and settle on a fork, then move on.

As for trying to influence the status of any IP owned by Sun and acquired by
Oracle ... good luck with that.

~~~
gte910h
Europe's merger approval body is already concerned, I think there is a real
chance the merger may at least block for awhile unless they address something
along this angle.

The issue with MySQL is there is a lot of stuff built on it MySQL AB said is
"okay" that isn't specifically allowed in the license. That damages hundreds
if not thousands of other projects that are in that gray area. Oracle has a
huge incentive to enforce the actual license on these companies....so now you
see the issue.

------
gojomo
I'm concerned about having a leading (by usership) free SQL database under the
control of the leading (by revenue) proprietary SQL database vendor.

And, I believe it would ultimately be better for MySQL users for it to be
under a more permissive, non-copyleft license. It allows for a broader
commercial ecosystem.

But, I'm uncomfortable with regulators telling companies what to do with their
lawfully acquired property/rights based on speculation about potential abuses
that haven't even occurred yet.

And, I'm uncomfortable with someone who chose for their own benefit one
doctrinaire set of rules -- the GPL -- now asking for the rules to be
rewritten, against the wishes of the people to whom he sold his package of
rights.

So I can't support the campaign, even though I'd like one of its sought end
states (non-copyleft MySQL).

Maybe if someone other then Widenius led a purely-antitrust-based case for
divesting or relicensing MySQL. As an advocate, he's tainted.

------
manbearpig
My personal opinion is that it's time to let SQL and RDMS go. Free the world
from the shackles of schema.

~~~
gte910h
I don't know why you're getting downvoted.

If the oracle approach is voted through without forcing an licencing exception
change, I will be pushing people VERY strongly to NoSql solutions who need any
scalability. MySQL was pretty much the best solution for many projects, and
being used as a base with it in the hands of Oracle is a questionable thing to
advise from a business risk perspective.

