
MySQL Editions - charliesome
http://www.mysql.com/products/
======
dangrossman
Judging by the comments people are confused. The free, GPL edition of MySQL
("MySQL Community Server") is still what you've always had. These are the
commercially licensed products. Oracle's shifted around some features and
pricing on support plans and such, but if you're not a commercial customer,
nothing's changed for you.

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jarin
What's the difference between community and commercial customers, aside from
support? Is InnoDB a feature? Why would MyISAM support be free but InnoDB
support have a yearly fee?

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dangrossman
MySQL is dual-licensed. If you download the community server, it's GPL
licensed. If you want to distribute MySQL as part of your application, then
your application may have to be GPL licensed as well, which is often
undesirable. ISVs and others that need to distribute MySQL can buy one of the
commercial editions to get it under a non-GPL license.

If you're worried about the future, Oracle agreed to maintain the dual-
licensing strategy until at least 2015 as part of the EU negotiations before
acquiring Sun.

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candeira
How exactly does distributing MySQL as part of your application make your
application GPL as well? It's not a retorical question, can you please suggest
a case? Unless you outright fork MySQL to make your own database, you can run
and distribute it with your proprietary stack without being forced to license
your code as GPL.

The FSF call it "mere aggregation": <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-
faq.html#MereAggregation>

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johnyzee
Here we go with the amateur legal stuff, but until a more educated comment
comes up, as far as I know, it is a question of the drivers being GPL, and
coding up against the drivers crosses the threshold.

~~~
avar
Not only that, but MySQL AB considered their network protocol to be GPL as
well, and went after anyone who tried to make a clean-room implementation of
it.

I don't know whether SUN and Oracle still pursue that strategy. Otherwise you
could indeed bundle MySQL with some clean-room libraries to talk to the
server.

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loewenskind
>and went after anyone who tried to make a clean-room implementation of it.

That doesn't sound legal. You're allowed to clean-room implement anything
aren't you?

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avar
The idea was that their network protocol was an original copyrighted work, and
that any clean-room implementation of it would be a derived work.

That does indeed sound crazy, but they also had piles of cash to throw at
lawyers to go after anyone who challenged them, and (maybe as a result of
that) nobody ever made e.g. a clean-room BSD or LGPL licensed version of the
mysql library. So it never made it to court AFAIK.

~~~
jrockway
A nice fiction.

The reality is that copyright covers verbatim copying. If you read a book and
write a review, the term "derived work" makes English sense, but not legal
sense. Similarly, if you read the MySQL code looking for magic words to say to
the server to get it to give you data, saying those words is not copyright
infringement. It's "learning", not "copying".

If anyone used MySQL, I would write a BSD-licensed API just to prove a point.
(And to be non-blocking.) But the world has moved on since the Oracle deal...

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eru
> Similarly, if you read the MySQL code looking for magic words to say to the
> server to get it to give you data, saying those words is not copyright
> infringement. It's "learning", not "copying".

What would happen, if the protocol would require sending a picture of a
picture of Mickey Mouse with each request (or some copy-righted novel)?

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fragmede
That's been tested in court before, in Sega v. Accolade
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade>). (You had to display a Sega
logo before your game could run, so you had to have their logo in your code)

In short, it's fair use.

~~~
InnocentB
My understanding from the Wikipedia article you linked is that you just had to
have the string SEGA in a specific spot on your ROM, and that the logo was in
fact part of the Genesis III BIOS. A four-character string and an image are
pretty different, copyright-wise.

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limmeau
Still, MySQL is under GPL, InnoDB is under GPL.

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bigiain
Does anyone have ballpark numbers for what a non gpl encumbered mysql licence
used to cost before this announcement? I assume Sun and/or Mysql ab used to
offer a similar range of mysql based licences?

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brandon
I'd negotiated licenses between $200 and $500 for their old basic offering
(depending on volume). I've been punting on a switch to Postgres for the last
few months, but they've forced my hand now.

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Travis
Any particular reason you're not just using the community edition? Do you need
the innodb features? (I'm asking because I've been wondering lately if I
should make the switch...)

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famousactress
The fee is for the JDBC connector, not the db.. regardless of edition..
Bummer, that.

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Uchikoma
Does the introduction of MySQL without InnoDB mean they can also remove this
from the community edition (and bug fixes) without getting into trouble with
the EU? They still provide a dual licensing strategy with the same code base
then.

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clam
The Community Server editions are still available.

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nkassis
Got confused until I read the legend at the bottom. Everything with a 1 next
to it is commercial edition only. This does not include InnoDB thus, it's
available in the community edition. Which is good, who uses MyISAM anyway?

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riffraff
maybe some people who want basic full text search capabilities but do not want
to roll their own solution or use solr/sphinx whatever, I recall innodb did
not support that?

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ars
Even the $10,000 cluster edition (which is based on NDB) is GPL.

So clearly they can not be selling software, I can only assume these are
prices for support, not for software.

Have they taken down download links? Removed source code?

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robin_reala
GPL doesn’t mean you can’t sell it; it means you have to provide source and
allow derivative products within the constraints of the license.

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ars
Isn't that what I said? It's GPL, so why are people so worried that they are
also selling it?

Edit: I guess I can see how you can read it in reverse from what I meant.

~~~
randallsquared
_Isn't that what I said?_

"Selling software" is distinct from "preventing others from selling copies of
[said] software", and confusing the two is the source of much fear,
uncertainty, and doubt about the GPL, so some people get a little defensive
when they're conflated. When I ran a small software shop, most of the work I
sold to small business was built on libraries and other works that were GPL,
but this didn't prevent me from charging money for it, it just meant that I
couldn't prevent them from selling or giving away copies themselves. Of
course, few small businesses are interested in paying for software and then
providing it to their competitors, so in practice that never mattered.

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charlief
Oracle has updated the page and clarified their lowest offering:

Embedded Database6

6 MySQL Classic Edition is not available as an Annual Subscription. ISVs, OEMs
and VARs can purchase a license to use as an embedded database.

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cageface
It's about time! All three specs of MySQL have been OP for too long.

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timhastings
You have got to admire the evil villany we're up against. Buying the 'M' in
LAMP and then exploiting that position.

Business first, not the heart and minds of developers.

Luckily the 'L' + 'A' + 'P' cannot be bought.

LAPP stack anyone?

~~~
Roboprog
I take it the extra P is for PostgreSQL? As far as I could ever tell, the only
advantage MySQL ever had over PostgreSQL 10 years ago is that it ran on
Windows, and Postgres did not, back then. Oh, and by skipping ACID features,
MySQL was faster.

So, back in the day, that drove me to conclude that all the MySQL fans were
crazy, and I decided to use Postgres at home, since Windows != server, and
having done quite enough XBase once upon a time, DB integrity had some value
to me.

LAPP? Bring it!

Is the final P PHP, or Perl (which would be my preference)? Maybe make it an R
for Ruby? :-)

~~~
steveklabnik
Most Rubyists (I have no numbers for this, just a general sense of the
community, I could be totally wrong, all generalizations are false, etc) use
Nginx nowadays, so it'd be more like LNPR.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Most Rubyists also seem to be squarely in the NoSQL camp too, so try LNNR.

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LiveTheDream
Some people are capitalizing on this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866064>

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Kilimanjaro
Somebody please fork mysql and get rid of oracle once and for all.

I bet the whole community will support the new sql.

~~~
hapless
There are several MySQL forks, have been for years. Most notably: Drizzle,
MariaDB, Percona MySQL. There are many others.

I don't see anyone rushing to abandon mainline MySQL for the forks.

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sabat
Percona's is probably the closest to the MySQL people are looking for; Percona
is the premier MySQL consultancy, and they've patched the codebase for
performance, etc.

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runningdogx
From Monty's presentation about MariaDB,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL1l9Puh0sk> I got the impression that MariaDB
is the primary open MySQL fork, with Percona merging their patches and
becoming a downstream of MariaDB. Did MariaDB and Percona have a falling out
in recent months?

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jarin
Wow, yeah hello PostgreSQL

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nodata
I think the reason you are being downvoted is that you are comparing
PostgreSQL with the commercial version of MySQL. A better comparison would be
between EnterpriseDB and the commercial version of MySQL.

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Andys
Afaik, the free version of MySQL doesn't let you do a live transaction-safe
database dump of InnoDB tables.

A pretty basic feature I thought, which is included in the free version of
PostgreSQL.

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nodata
Well you can _almost_ get there (completely if you're not changing schemas):

mysqldump --single-transaction

This option sends a START TRANSACTION SQL statement to the server before
dumping data. It is useful only with transactional tables such as InnoDB,
because then it dumps the consistent state of the database at the time when
BEGIN was issued without blocking any applications.

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mrj
Unfortunately, mysql still doesn't have transactional DDL, I believe...

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koenigdavidmj
Nor does Oracle, for what it's worth.

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iwr
So now Workbench costs $2000?

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cstuder
No, the MySQL Workbench Community Edition is still GPL and free.

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Calamitous
Well, don't imagine anyone's too terribly surprised by this.

Time to start boning back up of Postgres, I guess.

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alanh
Well, fuck. InnoDB is now a premium feature. So long, ACID compliance?

 _Edit_ “Classic Edition” — what a cop-out name. It should be “Crippled
edition.”

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RyanGWU82
Just to be clear, "Classic Edition" is not the free open-source MySQL that we
all know and love. It's a separate product for inclusion in other proprietary
products. MySQL has always been a dual-license product, and this is similar to
previous offerings by MySQL AB and Sun.

The "N/A" price probably just means "contact us so our sales team can squeeze
you for all you're worth" -- which is how enterprise software deals typically
work.

~~~
AlexC04
I'm glad I read the comments. I had the same knee-jerk reaction as above. Glad
to know I'm still safe :)

