Lonely Spooky's Blog

A atual situ­a­ção do MySQL vem me pre­o­cu­pando pro­fun­da­mente. Com a aqui­si­ção pela Ora­cle enga­ti­lhada para acon­te­cer, o futuro do MySQL parece incerto e, vamos admi­tir, algo de muito ruim pode acon­te­cer com milha­res de apli­ca­ções pelo mundo inteiro que usam o banco de dados da Sun.

Venho acom­pa­nhando fre­quen­te­mente o desen­vol­vi­mento do Mari­aDB, preparando-me para pos­sí­veis alter­na­ti­vas ao MySQL e, por esse motivo, estou sem­pre de olho no blog do Michael “Monty” Widenius,que criou o MySQL. Ele, agora, pede ajuda, num texto inti­tu­lado “Ajude a sal­var o MySQL” e eu tam­bém peço que o máximo pos­sí­vel de pes­soas dê uma força.

Publico aqui, na ínte­gra, o texto. Peço que me des­cul­pem por não traduzi-lo, mas trata-se de um post bas­tante extenso. Aque­les que não tive­rem muita fami­li­a­ri­dade com o inglês, não desa­ni­mem, leia a ver­são tra­du­zida pelo goo­gle (sei que não é uma boa tra­du­ção, mas é melhor do que nada).

Não dá pra ficar parado, não é? Mande seu e-mail, repro­duza esse texto, encha o saco da sua lista de contatos.

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I, Michael “Monty” Wide­nius, the cre­a­tor of MySQL, is asking you urgen­tly to help save MySQL from Oracle’s clut­ches. Without your imme­di­ate help Ora­cle might get to own MySQL any day now. By wri­ting to the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion (EC) you can sup­port this cause and help secure the future deve­lop­ment of the pro­duct MySQL as an Open Source project.

What this text is about:
– Sum­mary of what is hap­pe­ning
– What Ora­cle has not pro­mi­sed
– Ora­cles past beha­vior with Open Source
– Help spread this infor­ma­tion (Jump to ‘What I want to ask you to do’)
– Exam­ple of email to send to the com­mis­sion (Jump to ‘send this to:’)

I have spent the last 27 years cre­a­ting and wor­king on MySQL and I hope, together with my team of MySQL core deve­lo­pers, to work on it for many more years.

Ora­cle is trying to buy Sun, and since Sun bought MySQL last year, Ora­cle would then own MySQL. With your sup­port, there is a good chance that the EC (from which Ora­cle needs appro­val) could pre­vent this from hap­pe­ning or demand Ora­cle to change the terms for MySQL or give other gua­ran­tees to the users. Without your sup­port, it might not. The EC is our last big hope now because the US govern­ment appro­ved the deal while Europe is still wor­ried about the effects.

Ins­tead of just wor­king out this with the EC and agree on appro­pri­ate reme­dies to cor­rect the situ­a­tion, Ora­cle has ins­tead con­tac­ted hun­dreds of their big cus­to­mers and asked them to write to the EC and require uncon­di­ti­o­nal accep­tance of the deal. Accor­ding to what I been told, Ora­cle has pro­mi­sed to the cus­to­mers, among other things, that “they will put more money into MySQL deve­lop­ment than what Sun did” and that “if they would ever aban­don MYSQL, a fork will appear and take care of things”.

Howe­ver just put­ting money into deve­lop­ment is not proof that anything use­ful will ever be deli­ve­red or that MySQL will con­ti­nue to be a com­pe­ti­tive force in the mar­ket as it’s now.

As I alre­ady blog­ged before, a fork is not enough to keep MySQL alive for all future, if Ora­cle, as the copy­right hol­der of MySQL, would at any point decide that they should kill MySQL or make parts of MySQL clo­sed source.

Ora­cle claims that it would take good care of MySQL but let’s face the facts: Unlike ten years ago, when MySQL was mos­tly just used for the web, it has become very func­ti­o­nal, sca­la­ble and cre­di­ble. Now it’s used in many of the world’s lar­gest com­pa­nies and they use it for an incre­a­sing num­ber of pur­po­ses. This not only sca­res but actu­ally hurts Ora­cle every day. Ora­cle have to lower pri­ces all the time to com­pete with MySQL when com­pa­nies start new pro­jects. Some com­pa­nies even migrate exis­ting pro­jects from Ora­cle to MySQL to save money. Of course Ora­cle has a lot more fea­tu­res, but MySQL can alre­ady do a lot of things for which Ora­cle is often used and helps peo­ple save a lot of money. Over time MySQL can do to Ora­cle what the ori­gi­nally belit­tled Linux did to com­mer­cial Unix (roughly speaking).

So I just don’t buy it that Ora­cle will be a good home for MySQL. A weak MySQL is worth about one bil­lion dol­lars per year to Ora­cle, maybe more. A strong MySQL could never gene­rate enough income for Ora­cle that they would want to can­ni­ba­lize their real cash cow. I don’t think any com­pany has ever done anything like that. That’s why the EC is skep­tic and for­ma­li­zed its objec­ti­ons about a month ago.

Richard Stall­man agrees that it’s very impor­tant which com­pany owns MySQL, that Ora­cle should not be allowed to buy it under pre­sent terms and that it can’t just be taken care of by a com­mu­nity of volun­te­ers. http://keionline.org/ec-mysql

Ora­cle has NOT pro­mi­sed (as far as I know and cer­tainly not in a legally bin­ding manner):

- To keep (all of) MySQL under an open source license
– Not to add clo­sed source parts, modu­les or requi­red tools.
– To not raise MySQL license or MySQL sup­port pri­ces
– To rele­ase new MySQL ver­si­ons in a regu­lar and timely man­ner.
– To con­ti­nue with dual licen­sing and always pro­vide affor­da­ble com­mer­cial licen­ses to MySQL to those who needs them (to sto­rage ven­dors and appli­ca­tion ven­dors) or pro­vide MySQL under a more per­mis­sive license
– To deve­lop MySQL as an Open Source pro­ject
– To acti­vely work with the com­mu­nity
– Apply sub­mit­ted pat­ches in a timely man­ner
– To not dis­cri­mi­nate pat­ches that make MySQL com­pete more with Ora­cles other pro­ducts
– To ensure that MySQL is impro­ved also in man­ners that make it com­pete even more with Ora­cles’ main offering.

From loo­king at how Ora­cle han­dled the InnoDB acqui­si­tion, I don’t have high hopes that Ora­cle will do the above right if not requi­red to do so:

For InnoDB:
– Bug fixes where done (but this was done under a con­trac­tual obli­ga­tion)
– New fea­tu­res, like com­pres­sion that was announ­ced before acqui­si­tion, took 3 years to imple­ment
– No time tables or insight into deve­lop­ment
– The com­mu­nity where not allowed to par­ti­ci­pate in deve­lop­ment
– Pat­ches from users (like Goo­gle) that would have incre­a­sed per­for­mance was not implemented/released until after Ora­cle announ­ced it was acqui­ring Sun.
– Ora­cle star­ted wor­king on InnoDB+, a bet­ter ‘clo­sed source’ ver­sion of InnoDB
– In the end Sun had to fork InnoDB, just to be able to improve performance.

It’s true that deve­lop­ment did con­ti­nue, but this was more to be able to con­ti­nue using InnoDB as a pres­sure on MySQL Ab.

Note that Oracle’s deve­lop­ment on the Linux ker­nel is not com­pa­ra­ble with MySQL, because:
– Ora­cle is using Linux as the main plat­form for their pri­mary data­base pro­duct (and thus a bet­ter Linux makes Ora­cles plat­form bet­ter)
– The GPL code in the ker­nel is not affec­ting what is run­ning on top on it (because of an excep­tion in Linux).

Because we don’t have access to a data­base of MySQL cus­to­mers and users the only way we can get the word out is to use the MySQL and Open Source com­mu­nity. I would never have resor­ted to this if Ora­cle would not have bro­ken the esta­blished rules in anti­com­pe­ti­tive mer­ger cases and try to influ­ence the EC by acti­vely mobi­li­sing the customers.

This is very cri­ti­cal to this AS SOON AS POSSIBLE as EC, depen­ding on what Ora­cle is doing, needs to make a deci­sion either on Mon­day (2009–12-14) or within two weeks. Beca­sue of the strict dea­dline, every email counts!

What I want to ask you to do (until 2009-12-19):

- Forward this email to everyone that you know is using MySQL or Open Source/free soft­ware and to all email list where you know there are peo­ple pre­sent that use or care about MySQL and open source (ple­ase check first that this email hasn’t been sent there before)
– Alter­na­ti­vely send emails with infor­ma­tion about this and tell them to read http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html
– Add links on your web site to http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html with the text “We are using MySQL, help save it”, for the dura­tion of the next two week.
– Blog about this (feel free to include this text or just link to my blog)
– Call by phone (don’t con­tact by email, this is urgent) your boss or VP and ask him to read this email and send a let­ter to the EC com­mis­sion ASAP!
– If you don’t have anyone to con­tact above, send an email to the EC!

As we want the EC to get a cor­rect pic­ture of the situ­a­tion, we want you to first fill in the upper part and then cho­ose one of the pro­po­sed texts belowe that best mat­ches your view of the situ­a­tion. Feel free to sup­ply your own text and addi­ti­o­nal infor­ma­tion if you think this will help the EC to reach a bet­ter unders­tan­ding of how MySQL is used.

Send this to: comp-merger-registry@ec.europa.eu

If you have extra time to help, fill in the fol­lowing, if not, just skip to the main text.

Name:
Title:
Com­pany:
Size of com­pany:
How many MySQL ins­tal­la­ti­ons:
Total data sto­red in MySQL (megabyte):
For what type of appli­ca­ti­ons is MySQL used:
Should this email be kept con­fi­den­tial by EC: Yes/No

Copy or use one of the below texts as a base for your answer:

a)
I don’t trust that Ora­cle will take good care of MySQL and MySQL should be dives­ted to another com­pany or foun­da­tion that have everything to gain by deve­lo­ping and pro­mo­ting MySQL. One should also in the future be able to com­bine MySQL with clo­sed source appli­ca­tion (either by excep­ti­ons, a more per­mis­sive license or be able to dual license MySQL under favou­ra­ble terms)

b)

I think that Ora­cle could be a good steward of MySQL, but I would need EC to have legally bin­ding gua­ran­tees from Ora­cle that:
– All of MySQL will con­ti­nue to be fully Open Source/free soft­ware in the future (no clo­sed source modu­les)
– That deve­lop­ment will be done in com­mu­nity fri­en­dly way.
– The manual should be rele­a­sed under a per­mis­sive license (so that one can fork it, the same way one can fork the ser­ver)
– That MySQL should be rele­a­sed under a more per­mis­sive license to ensure that forks can truly com­pete with Ora­cle if Ora­cle is not a good steward after all.
Alter­na­ti­vely:
– One should be able to always buy low pri­ced com­mer­cial licen­ses for MySQL.

There should also be mecha­nism so that if Ora­cle is not doing what is expec­ted of it, forks should be able to com­pete with Oracle

c)
I trust Ora­cle and I sug­gest that EC will approve the deal unconditionally.

——————–

Let us prove to Ora­cle and EC that the Open Source com­mu­nity is a true force and we take good care of our citi­zens and we pre­fer to work with com­pa­nies that does the same!

The future of MySQL is in your hands!

Thanks for the help!
Michael Wide­nius
Cre­a­tor of MySQL