Comparison of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, MySQL 5, and PostgreSQL 8.3
The below is by no means an exhaustive comparison of these 3 databases and functionality may not
be necessarily ordered in order of importance. These are just our experiences with…

James Dixon

Why are other projects able to incorporate patches within a reasonable timeframe? Is the MySQL source really so unwieldy, that community patches are so dangerous to break stuff? Or does it just take so long to determine if any patch from anyone does not break stuff? Or what is really the problem here?

This post and its comments have been on my mind over the last few days. I apologize for the way I’ve approached this topic, and how I’ve rejected your points of view without really listening. I’m going to try to be less divisive and less “right” in the future.

I like to say “in my opinion” to avoid being obnoxious. As I said before, I was deliberately obnoxious in the title and introduction of this post to make my point. What I said is easily and independently verifiable: access to the source code, and the right to change it, is not sufficient for a product’s _development methodology_ to be Open Source. There is no question that MySQL’s development is the reverse of Open Source: it is closed, monopolistic, tightly guarded and even exclusionist at times.

We could go round and round on this for days, and I’m afraid we will not see eye to eye.

When talking about opinions, for me MySQL is open source, because the sources a, not surprisingly, open - one can download them, read and modify them. That was the reason why I chose MySQL in the first place when I needed to implement a fulltext search solution but was too lazy to code i/o, client-server protocol, storage, and all other stuff. It was in 1998 and MySQL wasn’t even GPL back then, but the sources were open.

Again, this document is quite narrowly focused and incomplete IMO. (And I did know about it before you mentioned it, by the way).

Sergei, that’s a partial, very narrow definition: it’s the necessary but not sufficient conditions of distribution and so on. That document doesn’t address the breadth of scope introduced in the OSI website (including the intro paragraph on the front page), key books from key Open Source figures (including the ones who invented the movement), and the general public’s concept of Open Source. If that document is the sum total of Open Source, a lot of leaders of the Open Source movement are spreading misinformation. But I don’t think so. I think the spirit of Open Source is much more relevant than the letter of that definition.

Kevin, I did know all the things you mentioned, and I left them out intentionally. I might have profitably omitted mention of the CLA, too; it is a hot-button issue (as proven by the other comments on this post — why is it a hot-button issue, BTW?) and that distracted from the focus of the post. And yes, I would absolutely say that a project that accepts no outside contributions is not Open Source.

Jo, I think if I had not mentioned the CLA prominently you and I would find we have a lot in common. However, in general I would say that to get code into the server is much harder than signing a piece of paper, and much harder than it should be. I also don’t think lack of transparency is the problem. Just telling people what is going on is not the same as giving them a say in the process. MySQL has focused pretty hard on being more transparent, but I think this effort is not the end of the road. (It is definitely a precondition to more truly opening up the server, and I applaud it even though I don’t think it’s all that’s needed). I do look forward to seeing what changes Sun makes.

Zach, I appreciate your comments on the CLA; I will write more on what I think about the CLA another time. I’m not sure that the quality bar is really the issue here, either. Community code is sometimes higher quality even than internal code. I’d name some bug reports, but I don’t want to make personal enemies out of the associated developers. However you look at it, I think the… ummmm… not-so-good release and development model is responsible for the fear of poor quality code, and putting restrictions on the contribution pipeline is a symptom of something deeper. I and many others have pointed out that there is a much better way to vet code for quality: let the community do it. Finally, your point about ‘different models’ is very much along the lines of what I meant to say with this post.

To wrap up: I knew this post would generate strong reactions, and I intentionally wrote the headline and first few sentences to bring my view into sharp focus. I felt it was very important to say what I’ve tried to say in this post, regardless of differences of opinion. I’m actually happy that dissenting voices are appearing here. It shows that you care. Thanks for writing in.