librelist archives

Re: Help save MySQL; Sign the petition

From:

Gerardo Diaz

Date:

2010-01-01 @ 15:40

si hay interes en traducirlo me avisan

2010/1/1

> 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 keep the Internet free
A big part of the Internet is built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and
PHP/Perl/Python). Now Oracle is trying to buy Sun, which owns MySQL.

It's not in the Internet users interest that one key piece of the net
would be owned by an entity that has more to gain by severely limiting
and in the long run even killing it as an open source product than by
keeping it alive. If Oracle were allowed to acquire MySQL, we would be
looking at less competition among databases, which will mean higher
license and support prices. In the end it's always the consumers and
the small businesses that have to pay the bills, in this case to
Oracle.

Thanks for all the help in the first Save mysql effort. The blog got
hit by more than 60,000 users and we where able to generate an
approximate number of 10,000 emails to the EC. New answers are still
coming in. Of the answers 0.7 % says "I trust Oracle". The rest 99.3 %
says that they don't trust that Oracle would be good owner of MySQL.

We have got an indication that this is making a difference within EC,
but we don't want to take any chances. We need to counter BOTH the
about 400 Oracle customers that Oracle has persuaded to contact the EC
AND the political and public pressure Oracle is putting on EC.

This is why we are now launching a world wide campaign in several
languages to get a very large number of names that we will give to
those taking the decision. This will include the European Commission
(EC) and the representatives of the 27 EU Member States who will meet
in Brussels in early January to discuss the case. It will also include
regulators in other jurisdictions (where it would, unlike in Europe,
not be acceptable to announce in public who they are).

We are searching for volunteers to help us with this effort. If you
are interested to help, join the #helpmysql IRC channel on Freenode.
Help us keep the infrastructure of the Internet free!

In the rest of the blog I will try to answer all the questions and
concerns that were raised in the first Help-MySQL campaign. This is
not required reading, but may be of some interest for those the want
to know a little more about my thinking of the current situation.

I will do this in the form of a self-interview, something a lot of
famous bloggers have done in the past.

Q: Why don't you trust that Oracle would be a good owner of MySQL?

Oracle is the company that has the biggest market share in revenues
for databases in all customer markets/segments. MySQL is the database
with the highest number of installed units in all markets (except in
the high enterprise market where it has only a medium size unit
share). If Oracle were allowed to buy MySQL then Oracle would almost
be in a monopoly position in many market segments.

MySQL is causing Oracle sales losses around 1 billion usd/year (in
lost sales to MySQL and because of having to do heavy discounting when
competing with MySQL). Why would Oracle have an interest to invest in
an open source MySQL long term?

Oracle has studied MySQL a long time and even offered to buy it twice
before, but I have not yet seen the logic or explanation from Oracle
that would explain how they can continue to develop and support MySQL
without cannibalizing the most profitable part of their business.

There is no other logical reason why Oracle would buy MySQL than to
control it, reduce the competition with the present Oracle offering
and slowly change it to a more closed source product and start
charging for it and at the same time eliminate the competition between
MySQL and Oracle.

If we examine what has happened lately, we don't get any reassurance
that Oracle would be a good owner:

    * Instead of working with the EC to quickly resolve things, Oracle
has delayed the process in every imaginable way and instead resorted
to public pressure to try to convince the EC to quickly approve the
deal.
    * Oracle did not provide any remedies to the EC and the public
promises they have published are just empty promises.
    * As part of the new layoffs in Sun, a lot of open source people,
including people from the MySQL group have been fired. It seems that
Oracle has been part of choosing the people that will be laid off.
    * Oracle as a company is not known for releasing its own software
as open source. The open source software it has acquired, like InnoDB,
has after being acquired, been developed secretly and slowly which is
against how things are done in the open source environment. Larry
Ellison's own statement about open source summarizes it nicely "We
don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source".
    * The main work Oracle has contributed to open source is extending
the Linux kernel, but they have done that mainly to ensure that their
own products works better on Linux.


Q: Can Oracle change the license of MySQL ?

Oracle can't change the license for old versions of MySQL. They can
however change the license for all new code and put a majority of all
new development on the new closed source version. Over time the MySQL
GPL code from Oracle will be as usable as Betamax video cassettes. It
is just not enough to give promises for the next 5 years as MySQL will
be needed in the market for years to come.


Q: MySQL is free (GPL) software, how could anyone be able to kill it?

With killed, I mean a project that is not actively developed and for
which you don't get bug fixes or support. By not spending money on
development of the open source version of MySQL and/or position it in
the market as 'not reliable' or 'for testing only' Oracle could make
the open source very unattractive for most users. The open source
version of MySQL would not be an attractive alternative for long and
users will start searching for other alternatives. The easiest
alternative, because of no migration costs, will be paying for a
closed source Enterprise version of MySQL from Oracle.

GPL only guarantees that the (old) code will always be free. It
doesn't guarantee the economics around the project or that anyone can
or will develop it further.


Q: But why can't one just a fork (make a copy of it and start developing it)?

MySQL is an infrastructure project, a building block which others
either enhance (like storage engines) or which they embedded in other
products (think of a GPL library).

You can fork a GPL infrastructure project, but not the economic
ecosystem around it. You can read more about it in my earlier blog
posting.

The short summary is:

    * The fork can't be used with other products that are using MySQL
as a building block for their closed source applications.
    * The fork has to work in an environment where no one has to pay
for it. (How can there be enough money to earn for serious development
?)
    * In addition to the above, it's also very hard to do a full fork
of a project like MySQL. You need, among other things:
    * Leaders that have passion for the project (Almost all big
successful open source projects have passionate leaders that help
coordinate and provide a vision).
    * People who know the code and can maintain and extend it.
    * Money: For hardware, company infrastructure, marketing to get
known (especially if you fork a known trademark, like MySQL) etc.

To continue develop a fork of MySQL so that it continues to be a
competing force in the database industry, you need 5-10 musd/year to
put on development. There is very little chance that a fork can get
enough money to do the needed development when there are very few
companies that can use the fork to generate direct revenue. There are
also very few investors that are prepared to put money into a product
with no sure income stream and a model that is only based on services.

I don't know if there ever has been a successful fork of a big
infrastructure program like MySQL. It is wishful thinking to claim
that released under the GPL license is enough remedy for Oracle and
"if Oracle is doing something bad" a fork will 'appear' and take care
of things.

    * I don't think that competition cases should be judged based on
wishful thinking.

Oracle has made a big point that they are not a threat to MySQL
because anyone can just fork it. If they really believe this is true,
then they would have divested MySQL a long time ago to get a quick
clearance of the Oracle/Sun deal and would then have forked MySQL.
They would not have let Sun lose 1 billion usd (based on Larry
Ellison's estimate) while waiting for clearance because of MySQL.

If MySQL were be so easy to fork, Sun would also not have paid 1
billion for MySQL.


Q: You are doing your own fork of MySQL called MariaDB. How can you do
that if it's so hard to fork MySQL?

When we started with MariaDB, MySQL was owned by Sun, which has a lot
of reasons to keep MySQL alive and well. We had seen no changes in the
policies of SUN regarding licenses or costs. In this scenario it's
possible to do a successful fork if you can provide added value to
what Sun is doing (like working more closely with the community).

However with an owner that has nothing to gain by developing MySQL,
under an open source license, things are totally different.

The reason we are continuing with MariaDB is that all persons in Monty
Program Ab are committed to work on the product, for which many of us
have worked for close to 10 years.

We don't expect to make a lot of money while doing this, but we hope
to be able to ensure that MySQL can continue to live as an open source
product for some extended time.

In the discussions now people are very easily saying that "there is no
problem, the community will take care of it if Oracle tried to kill
MySQL".

I can tell you it's not easy; I have the best possible team working on
MariaDB, still it has taken us 9 months to do some small required
changes and create an infrastructure to be able to do our first
release (we released a beta last month and are now working on
releasing a release candidate (RC)).

We are spending 100,000 Euros/months just to keep MySQL alive (as
MariaDB) and there are no sure signs we will ever be able to get that
money back. Fortunately we have enough funding so we can continue some
years with doing this. This is however not sustainable forever.


Q: Why have a lot of companies put money into developing Linux?
Doesn't Linux have the same problems with GPL as MySQL?

While Linux is indeed distributed under the GPL, as is MySQL, Linux
has an exception that allows anyone to run any kind of applications
(including closed source applications) on top of Linux.

The main reasons companies are taking part developing Linux is that
they want their hardware and software to work with Linux. They don't
make money directly on Linux, they make money on the things around
Linux, without being affected by the GPL.

As closed source vendors can't use a fork of MySQL, because with MySQL
they are affected by the GPL, they will not spend time or money to
develop MySQL.


Q: What does your company, Monty Program Ab do?

Monty Program Ab Ab is a development company. We are working on a
branch of MySQL, called MariaDB. MariaDB is an enhanced (faster, more
features and less bugs) drop-in replacement of MySQL that is only
available under GPL.

Monty Program Ab is planned to be a small company with a close
connection to its employees and we have no plans to grow to more than
50 people (as after 50, you often lose the family-friendly feeling in
the company).

We do mainly development of new features and extensions to MariaDB and
MySQL. We also provide level 3 support to companies delivering support
on MariaDB.

We don't do and don't plan to do e.g. end user support or training. We
don't plan (and we don't want) be a new MySQL AB.

Monty Program Ab is created around the 'Hacking Business Model' that
in practice makes the company 'employee owned'. There is no money I
can personally make from Monty Program Ab.


Q: Why are you working with the EC to try to block the deal?

I have two main objects in my business life:

    * Save the product, that I worked on for 27 year, from getting
killed as an open source project.
    * Ensure that the core developers of MySQL, who I have worked with
for many years, get a good 'home' where they can continue to develop
MySQL.

I am hoping for the EC and other regulators to ensure the first of the
above. Monty Program Ab was created to ensure the second.


Q: In your view, what are the possible solutions for the Oracle / Sun
/ MySQL deal?

The European Commission (EC) has recognized that MySQL and Oracle are
competing products and issued a statement of objections (SO) against
the merger between Oracle and Sun on 11'th of November 2009.

As long as the products are recognized to be competing, any solution
that the EC would accept has to ensure that there is as much
competition in the database field before the merger as after the
merger.

For this, I only see two working solutions:

   1. Oracle should divest MySQL.
   2. Oracle should change the license of MySQL to a more permissive
Open Source license that would ensure that if Oracle would try to kill
MySQL, the community would be able to take over and rescue MySQL and
develop it as a product that can be freely used by everyone.

Divesting is the normal case to handle competition cases.

Doing a license change is a controversial thing that the EC can't
force Oracle to do. This is however something that Oracle can suggest
to the EC as a remedy to not have to divest MySQL.

Personally I would prefer divestiture as this is a clean solution to
the problem. However, I could personally live with the solution 2) as
this would achieve my main personal objective: That MySQL can't be
killed.


Q: Isn't it unreasonable to require Oracle to change the license of MySQL?

Yes, of course neither the EU nor any other jurisdiction could dictate
anything like that. Divestiture is the normal solution when you need
to clear competition concerns. But since Oracle is trying to get away
with some compromise, and if a compromise is what we get, it should be
one where MySQL has a chance to survive. Not a compromise that just
means a different kind of death for MySQL.


Q: How do the proposed remedies benefit your company, Monty Program Ab?

We do not know but hope that many companies would be unhappy with the
new competitive situation if Oracle is the owner and would seek out
MariaDB instead. But a big portion of the revenue would not come to us
(as we cannot sell licenses, we do not produce first line support...)

If MySQL were divested to a strong player in the market that would
care about MySQL and would have the trust in the market, Monty Program
Ab would get a hard competitor and would have a hard time to get
business.

If MySQL were licensed under a permissive license, like BSD, then the
users would benefit as they now can securely continue to use MySQL in
all context. Monty Program Ab would also switch to only produce code
under BSD for the MariaDB server, to ensure that also MariaDB can be
used in all context.

Monty Program Ab would benefit very little from of this; We cannot
take money from selling BSD; We can only hope that there is a market
demand for our skilled engineers.

The companies that would benefit the most from BSD are the companies
that enhance MySQL (storage engine vendors and companies providing
extensions to MySQL) and companies that embed MySQL in their products,
like Adobe or Cisco.

The reason we are hoping for regulators to get the deal blocked on the
current basis is thus not to earn more money, but because it's more
important for us that MySQL will continue to be free, available for
all, and developed in a way that meets the needs of all major market
segments.


Q: As you are suggesting a license change, is GPL then a bad Open
Source license?

I think that GPL is a great open source license, in many cases the
best license. The GPL license ensures freedom of the code and at the
same time gives the copyright holder a very strong control on the code
and it's ecosystem, especially it's closed source customers.

Thanks to this property of GPL, it's safe for many closed source
vendors of embeddable software, to release their software as GPL. They
get the benefit of the open source community, they help promote free
software and can still make a good living of it. Those that need the
software under another license than GPL are paying the bills.

I am constantly encouraging companies to release their software as
GPL, including companies like MoSync, that I have myself invested
in.

It's however the strong control that GPL gives the copyright holder
for embeddable software that is a problem in this particular case of
MySQL. It gives Oracle the possibility to slowly kill MySQL as not
everyone can use it. Oracle can this way starve the ecosystem around
MySQL so that nobody can live there decently.

The code is still free, but in practice not everyone would or could use it.

This is why GPL is not very often used for libraries (and other
infrastructure software). For libraries one normally uses LGPL, that
allows anyone to freely use the software in their application.

What MySQL AB did, that was unique at the time, was to use the
'inconvenience of GPL' in a library as a way to do dual licensing. By
providing commercial licenses for MySQL, everyone could use MySQL (for
commercial vendors for a small price).

In short, GPL is a fantastic license, but without dual licensing, not
very good for a library that is to be used by everyone.


Q: What other things can go wrong if regulators approves the deal?

If the deal is approved based on the fact that 'MySQL can be forked',
that will be a big blow to open source Software.

It means that open source software is not protected for
anticompetitive measures and it will be ok for big companies to freely
buy up their open source competitors and kill them.

Note that not even PostgreSQL is safe from this threat! For example,
Oracle could buy some companies developing PostgreSQL and target the
core developers. Without the core developers working actively on
PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL project will be weakened tremendously and
it could even die as ar result.


Q: There have been some suggestions on the net that in the past you
did approve of Oracle buying MySQL. Have you now changed your mind?

"Anyone who knows me, knows that I don't change my mind" :)

Jokes aside, when the Oracle proposition to buy MySQL first time come
up, I said that I could stand behind the deal only if the MySQL
license was changed to BSD as part of the deal. Even back then, I
wanted to ensure that MySQL would continue to be free, available and
developed to meet the needs of all major market segments, in spite of
what Oracle would try to do to it.


Q: Are MySQL and Oracle really competing products ?

Yes.

To be fair, they don't compete for all applications and it's in many
cases prohibitively expensive, risky and time-consuming to migrate an
old Oracle application to work on MySQL.

However for new applications MySQL and Oracle are competing in almost
every customer segment. Oracle has for years tried to come into the
Web market, but has not succeeded, mainly because MySQL has already
been there.

When a MySQL sales person goes and visit customers, it's in most cases
Oracle, and in many cases only Oracle, that MySQL is competing with.


Q: How about MySQL on Windows? Does MySQL compete with MS SQL Server?

Windows was not the key target platform for MySQL. Almost all
developers at MySQL AB worked on Linux/Unix and did their development
there. This was not because we didn't want MySQL to run well on
Windows, but because we had not found developers that wanted to work
on MySQL on Windows and also because most of our big customers were
running Linux/Unix.

It's also clear that Sun would never have been interested in MySQL if
MySQL primarily compete on Windows (as Oracle claim it does).


Q: Why can't everyone just switch to PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL is a great database; I am friends with many of the
PostgreSQL core developers.

The problems with PostgreSQL are:

    * It's not compatible with MySQL (different feature sets and
different support by various applications) and it's far from trivial
(in many cases practically impossible) to convert MySQL applications
to PostgreSQL and vice versa.
    * It doesn't have a single strong company backing that MySQL has
to deliver high class support globally.
    * The PostgreSQL market is also, as far as I know, dominated by
Enterprise DB that provides a closed source version of PostgreSQL,
which is not good enough for companies standardizing on open source.

So for the Oracle/Sun/MySQL case, PostgreSQL is not an answer that
would help approve the deal, the market share is too small.


Q: Don't you care about what happens to Sun?

Yes, I grew up developing on Sun hardware and I feel deeply for Sun.
However MySQL is my project that I have worked on for 27 years and
must be my first priority.

We also have to recognize that it's Oracle that is holding Sun hostage
just to get MySQL. Oracle could have got the deal closed very quickly
if they had divested MySQL and just forked it.


Q: "What differentiates MySQL from other open source products Oracle
would be acquiring with Sun, like Java or Open Office?"

Oracle doesn't have competing products for Java and Open Office, so
there is no reason to assume that Oracle would not take good care of
them and generate money from them.

Open Office is also an end user product under a permissive license,
LGPL, which means it can easily be forked if Oracle would not take
good care of it.

With MySQL this is unfortunately not the case.


Q: Didn't you sell MySQL to Sun? Do you want to have the cake and eat it too?

First a little background:

I started to work on a code that would later become MySQL in 1982.
MySQL was released in 1995 under a dual licensing scheme that allowed
David Axmark and me to very quickly work full time on developing
MySQL.

I lost the rights to the MySQL copyright in 2001 when MySQL AB was
created and we allowed investors to come in. We needed to bring in
investors to be able to create a full-scale working company to satisfy
big customers and to be able to hire more developers and take MySQL to
the next stage. To ensure that MySQL would continue to be free, David
and I stated in the shareholder agreement that MySQL AB would have to
keep MySQL under an open source license. The problem with a
shareholder agreement is that it is terminated when the company is
sold. This is just how things works.

David and I however thought that this would not be a problem, as we
would help ensure that MySQL would be bought by a good owner.

I continued to lead the MySQL project and have been one of the leaders
and top contributors for the project since then.

When the sales process to Sun started, I was at the time not anymore
in the MySQL Board (just a MySQL shareholder). I was just informed
about the deal, after it was agreed to. I did get money for my shares,
that is true, but it did not change in any way my dedication or
involvement in the MySQL project.


Q: Was SUN a good owner?

Even though I had no say in the deal, I was happy because I thought
that Sun, who has been one of the big advocates of open source, would
be a good home for MySQL. MySQL was also the missing piece in Sun's
software stack and as Sun didn't own any database competing with
MySQL, it would be in Sun's interest to continue developing MySQL as
an open source database.

This was proven right a couple of months later when the old MySQL
management, who was still in charge of MySQL development, announced
that they would now, (when they were not anymore bound by the
shareholder agreement), add closed source addons to MySQL. Sun's upper
management stepped in and forced MySQL's management to retract the
statement.

After the Sun deal, I continued to work on MySQL and the Maria storage
engine in Sun (in the CTO lab) and, together with Sun upper
management, to help Sun be a driving force in open source. I also
tried to get Sun to improve the MySQL development organization and
change the MySQL development model to be more community friendly.


Q: You left SUN. Did you put pressure on SUN to be able to set up your
own company?

The reason I left Sun was that after almost one year of trying, the
MySQL development organization was still lacking vision, strategy and
engineering excellence and it did not engage with the community.

Some of the developers did in addition not fit in a big publicly
listed company and started to talk about leaving SUN.

To ensure we would not start to lose critical MySQL resources from the
MySQL ecosystem and to ensure that MySQL would live on, I departed
from Sun on good terms, with an understanding of what I needed to do
and without any competition clauses.

I created Monty Program Ab and continued to work on a branch of MySQL,
now under the name of MariaDB, together with the community and the
core MySQL developers that left Sun. We are now 19 persons in Monty
Program Ab and all totally dedicated to keep MySQL alive.


Q: How did things change when Oracle came into the picture?

Now when Oracle is trying to buy Sun, I am continuing to what I have
always done and never stopped doing; Do what I can to ensure that
MySQL is kept alive as an open source product, free and available for
all. With Oracle as a buyer this is not a guaranteed outcome, which is
why I am working to get the EC to ensure that Oracle can't kill MySQL
even if they tried.

As seen from my this and previous answers, the main benefit I can
personally get by working with regulators to get the deal blocked, is
that MySQL is not killed. This is also the only logical answer, as I
already have enough money and could just sit down and relax instead of
spending 18 hours a day to try to keep my project alive.

The cake at stake is a free infrastructure for the Internet, which is
a cake that millions of MySQL users and billions of Internet users are
enjoying today.


Q: Sun paid a billion dollar for MySQL. What did Sun buy?

Sun bought:

    * The MySQL trademark
    * The copyright to the MySQL server and other components (and thus
control of the MySQL economical ecosystem).
    * Access to the MySQL community of 15 millions users and probably
more than 50 millions installations.
    * MySQL AB's customers contracts.
    * The core developers work contracts
    * All other assets in MySQL AB

What they didn't buy was the control of MySQL as an open source
project. You can't buy an open source project with money, the currency
in open source is trust. Anyone can and is allowed to fork MySQL and
continue develop it outside of Sun and the community will follow the
branch/fork they trust more. This doesn't however guarantee that the
fork will succeed, especially not economically. In the worst case no
one will win, like what happened to the BSD operating system.


Q: Who would like to buy MySQL?

It has been speculated that I would be interested in buying MySQL.
This is completely untrue. First I don't have that kind of money (all
of the original founders of MySQL got collectively less than 12 % of
the Sun deal). Second I am not interested in MySQL AB.

I much more prefer to work in a small family-oriented company, where
things are handled in a fair, transparent and open source way.

However, there are a lot of potential buyers on the market: (Note that
this is just speculation, I have no information about the intentions
of any of the companies mentioned below)

    * IBM (DB2 and MySQL are working in mostly different markets and
our sales persons very seldom compete with DB2).
    * Any of the major Linux distribution vendors.
    * Fujitsu (as Fujitsu has close connections with Sun, it has it's
own storage engines and is also doing development of databases).
    * Some investment group who would like to take MySQL public (like
it was originally planned).
    *

Q: Any final words?

Just that all users of MySQL still have time to influence their own
future by going to helpmysql.org and sign the petition to help keep
MySQL free and available for all.

We are searching for volunteers to help us with this effort. If you
are interested to help, join the #helpmysql IRC channel on Freenode.

Help us keep the infrastructure of the Internet free!
Posted by Monty at 15:43
8 comments:

Palmax said...

    It's a huge problem, we need to make an effort for helping MySQL.
    December 28, 2009 11:49 PM
John said...

    "Oracle were allowed to acquire MySQL, we would be looking at less
competition among databases, which will mean higher license and
support prices"

    My MySQL license (GPL) only cost me $0 and grants me lifetime use.
As for support prices, it's not like Percona, Pythian or other
consultants will raise their prices because of Oracle. And if Oracle's
basic support (not performance-oriented) is too expensive, some smart
startup will certainly fill the niche.

    I'm sure there are valid concerns to be had about Oracle acquiring
MySQL, but MySQL's price is just not one of them. Especially not after
spending years swearing that its opensourceness would protect it from
evil practices. (e.g. when InnoDB got acquired by Oracle, when the
"Enterprise edition" was created, when MySQL sold to Sun, etc...)
    December 29, 2009 12:21 AM
Monty said...

    Answering John:

    Yes, the current MySQL version under GPL costs 0$.

    However, you probably don't want to forever use a version that is
not updated or maintained. Sooner or later you have to upgrade or
switch to something else.

    When this happens, you are depending on who owns MySQL and how
MySQL is developed. It's at this point you have to pay, if MySQL is
owned by someone that doesn't have a reason to develop it further.
    December 29, 2009 3:36 PM
adsm said...

    Why shouldn't Oracle own MySQL when it already owns InnoDB, which
is by far the most popular and comprehensive storage engine available
for MySQL?

    Do you have any objection to the way InnoDB has been handled by Oracle?
    December 29, 2009 4:28 PM
dmarti said...

    If the problem is having something that's good enough for LAMP,
what about Drizzle? If I understand their FAQ correctly, there's no
copyright assignment required, so no possibility of a proprietary or
GPL buyout release. But they're still getting outside contributors.
    December 29, 2009 8:42 PM
Larry Alston said...

    A strong and independent open source community behind any project
is the key to success. MySQL's community was never completely
independent certainly not as independent as PostgreSQL or Linux for
instance. PostgreSQL facts also need some clarification, see here
http://blogs.enterprisedb.com/ for some comments on that topic
    December 29, 2009 9:39 PM
Monty said...

    Answering dmart:

    Drizzle is also GPL, so it has the same problem as MySQL.

    I also don't see any reason why Oracle would keep developing
Drizzle (for many of the same reasons they are not likely to keep
developing MySQL).
    December 29, 2009 9:59 PM
Stefan Kaltenbrunner said...

    I think the PostgreSQL related comments in that post are rather in
need of some clarification.
    For example while EDB is a very important community member it by
no means "dominating the postgresql market" (whatever that is actually
supposed to mean).

    EDB does have a commercial offering with some addons(a lot of them
would likely not even accepted by the core project) the market share
of that product compared to "normal" postgresql installations is
likely way less than 1%.

    Also while hiring "away" core people is a danger for every project
(be it commercial or OSS) a complete community based project like
PostgreSQL is way more robust in that regard caused by the large
number of actual code submitters and also the diversity in their
employeers.
    A non community based OSS project that is mostly lead by a single
entity (like MySQL historically has been) is way more vulnerable to
that problem and this is what I think is actually happening now.


-- 
Gerardo Díaz
email: gerardo.diaz@gmail.com
blog: http://QueHacemosConLasPilas.WordPress.com