Tag Archive for 'free-software'

MySQL: Free Software but not Open Source

Published at May 14, 2008 in SQL and Commentary. 15 Comments

The title of MySQL’s website states that they are the world’s most popular open-source database. This is false; MySQL is not an open-source database. That assertion is a fact, not an opinion.

MySQL is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL. People frequently use the two phrases “Free Software” and “Open Source Software” as synonyms, but there are very large, very important differences.

The difference between Free and Open Source

Open Source is much more of a development methodology than a philosophical standpoint. The first thing on the Open Source Initiative’s website is this introduction:

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

In contrast, Free Software is not about development practices at all. You can develop Free Software any way you like; what makes it Free is the license. Free Software is about protection of rights and freedoms. It is a moral and ethical platform. The promise of Free Software is quite different from “better quality, higher reliability…” Free Software is not about quality or reliability.

So why is MySQL not Open Source? Simple. Sun/MySQL uses a closed development model. Nobody can get code in from the outside without accepting a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which requires surrendering important rights, including ownership of the code. Sun/MySQL controls the code absolutely and maintains ownership of it. And even people who have signed the CLA report their patches stagnating — often for years — and still not being accepted into the source. This is not Open Source.

Open Source software is usually maintained, owned, and controlled by a decentralized network of peers. This is exactly the opposite of MySQL. You cannot get more opposite. The differences are often summarized as the cathedral versus the bazaar. I’m not sure this analogy always holds or is always useful and accurate, but it’s a helpful piece of common vocabulary.

Why this matters

This matters because both Freedom and an open development model are necessary to an empowered, enlightened, free society. Licensing isn’t the only thing that matters: ownership matters, too. So does control.

Google’s patches to MySQL are a good example of excellent code with many simple, highly useful features that have not been included into the official MySQL distribution. And there are no signs of that changing, as far as I can see.

I’m not the only one who notices this. Here’s another quote:

With all due respect to Marten, there is a significant difference between the captive open source development model for MySQL and the community open source development model for PostgreSQL.

If this interests you, perhaps you would like to join the discussion on the oursql-sources Google group.

Technorati Tags:, , ,

You might also like:

  1. Announcement: Xaprb scripts are re-licensed

Henceforth, I dub thee GLAMP

Published at February 21, 2008 in High Performance MySQL, SQL, GNU/Linux and Commentary. 16 Comments

I’ve decided to start replacing L with GL in acronyms where L supposedly stands for Linux.

I’m not a big user of acronyms, because I think they are exclusionist and they obscure, rather than revealing. (This wouldn’t matter if I wrote for people who already knew what I meant and agreed with me, but that’s a waste of time). However, LAMP is one that I’ve probably used a few times, without thinking that it is supposed to stand for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. In fact, it doesn’t refer to Linux, it refers to GNU/Linux. Therefore, it should be GLAMP.

Why does this matter? I try not to say Linux, unless I’m referring to a kernel, because a kernel is not an operating system. I try to be pretty careful about saying GNU/Linux when I’m talking about an operating system. An exception is a recruiting event yesterday at the University of Virginia, where I compromised my principles because of the noise. Trying to explain myself at that decibel level was just beyond my willingness, so I said we use Linux. If the potential recruits hire on with us, they’ll get to hear me say GNU/Linux. And if they don’t, maybe they’ll attend Richard Stallman’s upcoming talk at the engineering school there on March 27th or 28th (sorry, it’s not listed online, so I can’t link to it).

And you’ll see GNU/Linux used conscientiously if you read the book I’m helping to write, too.

GNU matters. A lot. You may not think so, but if it ceased to exist, you’d find out. That applies equally even if you don’t think you are a Free Software user. You have no idea how much you rely on Free Software in your daily life. And the GNU project has been and continues to be a keystone in that arch of freedom.

Thanks to MySQL’s Brian Aker for snapping me out of my LAMP carelessness.

Technorati Tags:, , , , ,

You might also like:

  1. How to use Linux’s CONFIG_IKCONFIG_PROC feature
  2. Why I write Free Software
  3. Announcement: Xaprb scripts are re-licensed

Why I write Free Software

Published at June 19, 2007 in SQL, Coding and Commentary. 7 Comments

Brian Aker was a recent guest on the LinuxCast podcast with Don Marti. Brian has some interesting thoughts in this podcast and elsewhere on his blog, on motivations for writing Free and/or Open Source software. Here’s why I do it myself.

First an overview of the podcast, for context: the topics were storage engines, distributed version control, and motivation for open-source. (You should listen to it, if you haven’t — it’s short and Brian is a great speaker. I listened to it twice.)

I’ve been thinking for a while about why I write the MySQL Toolkit and innotop InnoDB and MySQL monitor for free. Some people have even tried to convince me to sell them. Brian’s comments gave me some things to think about.

The simplest — but incomplete — reason I is I like doing it, I have a lot of unfinished things I can’t finish fast enough to keep up with my new ideas as it is, and I don’t want to divert effort into making it a business. My feeling is that would add a lot to my list of things I need to learn and do.

But there are many more reasons, in fact.

  • It helps me avoid commitment and the guilt of not meeting commitments — if I don’t get something done, that’s fine. What I do is more than nothing, and nobody should complain. And I know if I lose interest or for some other reason stop doing this, others can take it over. That’s why I made such an effort to put it on Sourceforge (and yes, it is more work to put it on Sourceforge than to do it myself. They don’t even back up your files for you).
  • It builds my personal brand, helps me network, and opens doors for me. People know me through my work who wouldn’t know me otherwise, and vice versa. I get a lot of opportunities I suspect I wouldn’t have if I were trying to make a business out of these tools.
  • My employer uses these tools. I build them to solve my own problems. 25% of the work is done anyway; why not release it? Releasing it also gives me the incentive to turn the tools into much more finished products, with real documentation and test suites and decent command-line behavior that conforms to expectations.
  • My employer gets community improvements sometimes. Brian mentions the pervasive myth that when you open the source code for something you get a flood of improvements, feedback, and patches. As he says, this doesn’t happen. But it occasionally does, and seldom is better than never. This is probably one of the biggest reasons my employer lets me release things, under my name with my copyright, that I sometimes even work on while I’m at work. That, and we have a great company culture and my boss knows I believe deeply in Freedom, and what’s important to me is important to him too.
  • I’m being of service, and that feels good. Brian is probably right that this is a fairly small factor for most people who develop Free Software, in my opinion.
  • I’m learning and having fun.
  • Brian comments on people who want to fill missing functions in a commercial product, and make money from that. I do provide missing functions, and that’s intentional, but it’s not to make money — it’s because I need it. Providing missing functionality is not an obvious and inevitable reason to write something, by the way. If I wanted to make a business out of some product, I could just as easily try to duplicate someone’s work but compete with them on quality or convenience. Or marketing and packaging, for that matter; we all know which very large company has made a lot of money doing that. There are many good business models.

There’s another element Brian didn’t mention: selling these tools would put me in a totally different frame of mind, one I don’t think I would enjoy. I can’t say for sure, but I think it would become a chore and I’d get burned out and resent it. Sometimes that happens anyway — but when it does I can take a break. I do spend quite a bit of free time on these things, as Brian says. Evenings, weekends, and so on. If you’re not willing to do that, I suggest you do it for a business.

Speaking of all this, just today I got an email offering me a bounty for fixing a bug in my Javascript number-formatting library. This is the first time this has ever happened, I think. If you want to support me too, how about you send me something from my wish list?

Technorati Tags:, , , , , ,

You might also like:

  1. MySQL: Free Software but not Open Source
  2. Four companies to sponsor Maatkit development
  3. Like it or not, it is the MySQL Conference and Expo