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.
Eh, it wasn't something he intended at the time. It's the fact the database is being sold to its competitor is the issue. If say, McCaffee or Apple bought SUN, I doubt he'd be pulling this stunt.
>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.
I'd say, I'd be really hesitant to buy something from the dude again. But then again, I've always thought MySQL AB was a bit of a scam and counseled against linking against MySQL it (and therefore having to buy it). The claims could serve Monty, for sure, but they also serve all the rest of us as well.
>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.
I honestly think that's a fine cost. You see, the reason we're seeing issues is here is one of the most restrictive commonly used licenses (GPL) was used without linking exceptions. That's a retarded thing to do for a library you want to be used. Then as a band-aid, MySQL AB repeatedly allowed de facto linking exceptions, but they are not clearly allowed by the license, more as notices, comments, etc.
The GPL, used in libraries, without linking exceptions, is a HORRIBLE thing for consumers of the library, especially mixed with this wink wink nod nod stuff that MySQL engaged in to allow people to use the free version.
If they wanted exceptions, they should have put them in the license. As it is, they DIDN'T, so they've left a huge swath of products build on this wink wink nod nod understanding in legal limbo.
But yes, the GPL, without exceptions, is a horrible license for infrastructure that you integrate against, like DB servers. I think industry SHOULD be hesitant to use it.
What you need to do is point out WHY the GPL is bad in this case, so industry understands the finer point there, and pushes back to have more libraries add exceptions.
> He sold the product, and now he is actively undermining the product that he sold
Monty's actions leave a bad taste in my mouth too.
I've still signed the petition, because I think Oracle's intentions towards MySQL can only be bad -- they want to neuter it so people have to buy their expensive databases instead. This would not matter so much, except that MySQL is an important part of the technology infrastructure, particularly as part of the LAMP stack.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
You're right, but I think 'scam' is too harsh a word. Reserving the right to create non-GPL'd versions is a legitimate business model and way to finance copyleft software. It's just that since it was an allowable strategy for MySQL AB, it should be allowable for Oracle Corporation, too.
FWIW, a variant of the same business model was used by Sleepycat Software for the BerkeleyDB family of products -- which have continued to be supported and improved and sold since Oracle acquired them.
I view the idea of pure GPL when used in libraries as a overly idealistic concept that doesn't really fit with people trying to develop software for the real world.
GPL is fine for libraries, if it has exceptions for building on top of it (but if has that, why aren't you using LGPL...), but without that, only other open source projects can really use it, and few of them at that will use the code.
Public domain, BSD, MIT, Apache etc are much more useful and free for the purposes of 99% of the world for libraries.
MySQL AB did not explicitly set out REAL exemptions to make lots of development legal, however they were wink wink nod nod allowing all sorts of things, so now the developers who built on it are likely screwed, as they need to have oracle issue the same sort of wink wink nod nod statements themselves, or explicitly relicense the whole thing.
MySQL is the HUGE competitor for Oracle's main product on the medium sized deployment target. I for one hope the regulators don't approve if Oracle isn't forced to change the licensing to more link Linux (link exception) or to a more permissive license (Apache/MIT/BSD), like the de facto licensing regime was.
>. It's just that since it was an allowable strategy for MySQL AB, it should be allowable for Oracle Corporation, too
I thought it shady as hell back when MySQL AB was independent too, but the issue is that Oracle puts out a competing product. By buying MySQL, they basically acquire their main competitor and have power to jack up the prices everyone pays for DB software in the simple case, or guide the MySQL product to areas to make it less competitive with Oracle in the more subtle case (thereby making the public less well served).
> 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.
That's my understanding too. Maybe he could fork MySQL, and create some tools roun it that also work for other SQLs (Postgres, SQLite, MS-SQL, etc). He could use the dual-licensing approach for these tools (since they are not tied to MySQL)
Naw, the issue is he had a greedy dual licensing scheme that didn't properly allow proprietary development on top of the GPL version. (Linux has an exception in the GPL which specifically allows proprietary development on top without forcing GPL adoption].
The only version he can fork is the GPL - no ability to do the split license from before. So his desired business model is out the window unless we all get together and 'save mysql' thereby allowing him to make money off it again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.