Oracle commercializes MySQL, sun rises in east
I’ve never objected to someone making money from MySQL. I’ve only expressed disappointment that they weren’t doing it effectively enough. As I have predicted many times, Oracle is good at this. Oracle is the number one reason I didn’t start a new career in some other database a few years ago. Oracle is making MySQL more successful not only for Oracle, but also for the users, the community, and the competition.
I am glad that Oracle is offering more pay-only extensions to the server in a way that creates opportunities for others to do the same, and I look forward to even more of them in the future.
Hi Baron, yours is the only MySQL-centric blog I’m following at the moment so this post left me feeling a bit in the dark still.
Can you explain what the new pay-only extensions are and how they help the overall stability and quality of product in general instead of causing the same woes you describe in your earlier post?
Peter van Hardenberg
19 Sep 11 at 12:24 pm
Peter,
I neglected to link to http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQL/entry/new_commercial_extensions_for_mysql where the new extensions are listed. Oracle is basically making MySQL an Open Core product, to put it in a few words. The extensions are truly value-add bits, rather than critical core functionality, so the server as a whole is getting lots of testing and use in the real world. This is directly opposite to the earlier approach (which hasn’t been used for years) where the entire server was held back from broad public testing, and paying customers were on the bleeding edge.
Xaprb
19 Sep 11 at 4:28 pm
Thanks Baron, I suppose if Oracle Inc. is implementing these features as for-pay addons, the community can have some faith they’ll function and that they’ll have recourse if something goes bump in the night.
Still, it’s easy for me to see that the Postgres open source model is better for me to build a business around. There’s no danger of a licensor coming back to me next year saying “the deal has changed.”
Peter van Hardenberg
19 Sep 11 at 5:00 pm
Peter,
Yes, I agree that the licensing is a big hurdle for MySQL’s adoption. It doesn’t help that sometimes sales people combine people’s general fear and ignorance of the GPL with wrong advice or high pressure.
I wish that the GPL had been written as a license, instead of a manifesto. I think that a lot of problems come from it being more rant than explanation. My view on this has changed significantly over time, and if I were to start a new open source project I’d probably use BSD/Apache/MIT or similar instead of the GPL. I’m just sick of discussing what you can and can’t do with a GPLed piece of software.
Xaprb
19 Sep 11 at 5:12 pm
Hi Baron
It’s kind of funny you have this opinion – and I should stress I have no doubt it isn’t 100% genuine – given that Percona has been and surely will be a big beneficiary whenever Oracle or someone else introduces proprietary features. Xtrabackup, cacti templates, nagios checks (even pt-query-digest) are all open source software that replace various proprietary offerings, and their development was sponsored by Percona customers. So chances are these announcements will bring you more work from your customers. So you have double reason to be happy for this – both personal beliefs and professional reasons.
Henrik Ingo
21 Sep 11 at 1:33 am
Henrik, yes, absolutely. My original rant about MySQL Enterprise was back when I really didn’t make a living as a consultant. (Even though I wrote the rant to sound like I had a lot of customers. I’m being honest now; I wasn’t being totally honest then, and if I really thought then that it was beneficial to pretend, I can’t imagine why anymore.)
When Oracle makes things open-source, or includes features that obsolete those we’ve built for our customers, it benefits us because we get to look at and support the code, and we don’t have to maintain our own fork of that feature anymore, and it benefits users because they get great functionality. It benefits Oracle because they’re the ones maintaining a great database server.
When Oracle makes a closed-source extension with a well-defined API, it benefits them because it’s a powerful upsell for their customers, and a reason for non-paying users to pay. This benefits users because it means money is invested in the whole server, not just the paid-for features, and only small and well-defined portions of their database are closed-source, which is a reasonable thing to trust Oracle to do well (i.e. with good quality, and good intentions). It benefits Percona because those open APIs create opportunities to not just reimplement the same thing, but even do something better or different that serves other uses. This benefits users by providing them with more choice. If the feature weren’t a pluggable extension, but were instead built right into the server, it would be the One Way To Do It, and would be much harder to reimplement or tweak. Plugin APIs are great (one of the things I love about Drizzle). And indeed we have a very, very busy development team that is constantly building special features for customers to suit their exact needs.
I just think this is win-win-win all around and I’m very happy about it. I don’t mind anyone comparing Oracle to the “good old days” at Sun Microsystems, though. I believe in “by their fruits ye shall know them,” and although I saw a lot of good engineering during the Sun days, it wasn’t coming to fruition. Whether Oracle is riding on Sun’s coattails here or not (I suspect not), the thing that matters is that MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 are more advanced and better quality than the releases we’ve seen for a long time before that, and the extensibility of the server is hugely increased and accelerating.
Xaprb
21 Sep 11 at 7:26 am
Good points. It’s of course easy to be positive and optimistic when everything is going well for Percona, but I think you just summed up the enviable position of being an open source vendor: If your competitor produces open source features, it’s good for you (too). If your competitor produces closed source features, it’s good for you. I can’t think of a better position to be in.
Regarding what is MySQL AB, what is Sun and what is Oracle responsibility, I think people give these things too much importance. MySQL grew to be the worlds most popular database with an open source business model. They then added some closed stuff after 2006, and continued to grow. (Of course, most people weren’t aware of this. I wasn’t when I joined the company!) Sun didn’t undo that, but did halt any new closed source features, yet business continued to grow and we made the largest deals ever. As far as I know Oracle sales have continued to grow, and I’m sure they will after this day too.
Regarding the releases I think people generally give credit in wrong places: MySQL 5.5 was released by Oracle, but the work was pretty much done during Sun watch. 5.1 was released by Sun but majority of work was done at MySQL AB time. The main reason quality got better was progress in development methods, in particular a continuous integration system – the heroes of that story are people like Kristian Nielsen, Philip Stoev and countless people in many teams who just fixed hundreds of bugs found. The main reason we now see faster feature progress than before is those same reasons enabling it, and the new development process, and Tomas Ulin personally.
Henrik Ingo
22 Sep 11 at 3:38 pm
I am glad to know more of the history and people behind where the releases come from. From the outside, all I see is just a release, with no scrolling credits. But even from the outside it is clear that *something* has changed for the better.
Xaprb
26 Sep 11 at 11:45 am