Excellent post and I would agree with you on everything I think. To give a bit more insight…

The state of affairs as you describe it is correct. However, some of it is purely unintentional. For instance, I know MySQL management would love to have the “free workforce” benefit of Open Source, who wouldn’t! But maybe at some point in time this was less of a priority, and maybe all managers failed to prioritize it due to not understanding it fully. (Understanding it sure, but not *fully*.)

For instance, historically MySQL had an active external community, developing complete (and important) modules like the JDBC driver. At MySQL AB, the strategy seems to have been to hire as many community developers as possible, to have them work full time on MySQL. (I have no idea what the strategy actually was, I’m a rather recent employee.) Unfortunately this strategy and MySQL’s business in general was so successful, that the company hired basically most of its own community and then the community was mainly a bunch of bloggers left, not contributing any code. Right now the tide is changing, and some of the brightest minds in the MySQL community external to Sun are former employees – like yourself. Unfortunately however, in the meantime we’ve lost the capability of actually working with the community. Now there are people doing great work out there, but we are not really good at working with them. A lot of information (simply like mailing lists, say) isn’t public, so a non-employee is an outsider. Even if you come up with a great patch, there isn’t somebody at Sun assigned that *must* review it and help you with it. (Someone might do it, but it is always not his first priority.)

The good news is that this is likely going to change for the better. I don’t know details yet, but early 2009 you might actually hear about some initiatives. (And mind you, some steps have already been taken, as noted earlier in Kaj’s and Giuseppes blogs: We stopped using bitkeeper and use bzr/launchpad instead, also the Sun Contributor Agreement is better liked than the old MySQL one, etc… All these steps serve the ultimate goal of getting to a more open development process and it is very intentional, only slow.)

Personally I believe that once our development resembles more a healthy Open Source ecosystem than today, the business may start to gravitate towards something like that too. (Whereas currently, our open-in-license-only development resembles closed source practices and sales thinking easily slips down that route too.) It is kind of like the European Union approach to making peace: Once you have enough mutual trade arrangements, you are so dependent on each other that you have to work together and can never go to war again.