Monty's 'Save MySQL' mudsling gets 15,000 backers

A petition to stop Oracle taking over MySQL has garnered support from more than 15,000 people, after Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius launched his last gasp web campaign in December. The MySQL co-creator, who walked away from the database just seven months after Sun Microsystems bought it in September 2008 for $1bn, cobbled together a …

[GloomyTrousers]

Spam from Monty

I recently received an email invite from Monty to sign this petition - quite obviously a bulk mailshot. Not sure why, as the only time I recall providing my e-mail address for anything MySQL-related would be many years ago in a comment on the documentation, so presumably I have a mysql.com "account".

I was pretty pissed off TBH - if Monty is no longer part of MySQL, how is he able to get hold of this data? No unsubscribe info, unsolicited, bulk, so in my book it ticks all the boxes for being spam.

Not a great way to go about garnering support...

[Anonymous Coward]

Breach of confidentiality ?

Do i smell law suit ? He might have crossed the line, in an effort to stay relevant.

[Tom 7]

Save it? Who from?

The source code with my copy of MySQL is GPL.

Is this some ruse by MS to make the GPL look unsafe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another reason...

...to avoid open source and go with enterprise capable, professional systems. Leave the cottage software in the cottage.

[Tim Bates]

Broken Logic

So you're saying that the actions of a single person who sold off his one project's name are a reason to avoid all open source projects?

I beleive stereotyping is generally considered a bad move... Can I have your resume so I know who never to employ?

[phoenix]

Doh

Because of course buying closed guarantees what exactly ? Unless you are big customer bog all - I'll keep my company's hard earned cash thanks and use open source.

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

title says it all

[Tim99]

Monty - Cheeky

I had an e-mail invitating me to sign the petition. I believe the only way that Monty could have obtained my e-mail address was from when I signed up for a newsletter from mysql.com in August 2006.

We did not do anything with MySQL from this time onwards as we went with SQL Server and SQLite - If we wanted a 'free' server database we would have gone with PostgreSQL as the licencing was much more favourable.

So did Monty have a copy of the mailing list when MySQL was sold to Sun?

Disclaimer: A long time ago I was an Oracle developer. It seems to me that the GPL protects almost anyone who wants to fork MySQL - Even Monty's MariaDB. I did NOT sign the petition.

[Cazzo Enorme]

I wish ...

... that someone would start a "I don't give a fig about MySQL" website. Apathy prevents me from doing so.

[DrXym]

Why does it have to be saved?

Surely MySQL is sufficiently open source that someone with sufficient community standing (i.e. this guy) could just fork the thing. Let the community form a new product which is all but MySQL in name and leave Oracle holding a very expensive trademark.

It isn't the first time a major project has been forked leaving the original to wither and die, e.g. xfree86 was forked following dissent at its glacial development process and a disagreeable licence change.

[Tim Bates]

Yep.

Fork and call it something else - "YourSQL" anyone? It's not like the name is important.

I'm not worried about what happens. If Oracle mangle it all into a useless blob, then something else will take it's place and popular systems like "MediaWiki", "Joomla", etc will all be adjusted to suite.

[Victor 2]

so...

Out of the millions of users of MySQL, he only got 15000 to support him?

Laughable.

I want to start a petition "Go away Mr Wideanus", who's with me?...

[Tim Bates]

To be fair...

To be fair, this is the first I've heard of it, so I guess 15,000 is an OK number.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I want free food and free rent

I want Mysql to be free to, but then again I wasn't Sun who paid a billion dollars for it. Is Monty offering to buy Mysql back from Sun, or does he just expect Sun or Oracle to write off a billion bucks in goodwill

[Jacqui]

Spam

Same here - The only contribution I made with the email acount was in the documentation. As it took the support team four **years** to respond (an automated response!) I can say that MySQL is a lot safer out of this backsliding, money grubbers hands.

And yes I did report the mail as spam.

[Jamie Jones]

If he wanted it, he shouldn't have sold it

title says it all (i got the email too)

[Rob Moir]

Whose SQL?

I don't understand, what needs saving and from whom? I thought one of the benefits of open source software was that this kind of thing simply couldn't happen because the open source community simply routed around attempts to take over and kill a project by simply forking to a "new" project and carrying on.

So either the open source advocates have been telling lies about that all along, or the "creator" of baby's first sql is a money-grabbing self serving jerk who simply wants to push his face into the spotlight for his own benefit now that he's finally trousered his big payoff from Sun and things are going a bit quiet for him again..

[Stevie]

Bah!

When is The Register, lesbian webvert peddler to the masses, going to man-up and start a petition asking Monty to STFU?

[Bob Gateaux]

All is madness

Why he want Jav database anyway? C one will be always faster and with JBDC we can still use it from Javs if we need.

[markfiend]

Fork It!

'Nuff said.

Mine's the one with the Withnail script in the pocket.

[disgruntled yank]

single company

"[Postgres] doesn’t have a single strong company backing that MySQL has to deliver high class support globally."

And that single strong company would be Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually...

The problem with Postgres is that many web apps I know of does not support it. For some reason, a lot of developers prefer supporting MySQL over Postgres. Also, a lot of webhosting solutions offer support for MySQL, but not PostgreSQL. This is changing tho, and will probably cause migration en masse to Postgres if Oracle does mung up MySQL.

I personally am a Postgres user at home, but I signed the petition anyway because I am a moderator at a forum that uses MySQL as it's storage backend. A move to Postgres will probably require us to hunt for a new host (one that supports Postgres) and migrate the database, which my experience tell me is no easy task.

[Sitaram Chamarty]

what amazes me...

...is how many sheeple there must be if he got 15,000 petitions.

Anyone who thinks for 2 seconds can see this guy's cries of "oh no the sky is about to fall on our open source heads" are all bull. A few more seconds and you can even guess why he's doing it (hint: if you force Oracle to sell it, who would buy?)

There *may* be damage from Oracle, but it will only be to commercial licensees. Not to open source.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bizarre

it is not that hard to make a database from scratch, it is normally just a bunch of B-Trees and some Lex and YACC. Awe inspiring it ain't.

The world has gone potty, it is more fun to build from scratch than scratch around in MyBloodySQL's code base.

And yes, PostgreSQL and SQLite are the two databases of choice anyhow. Enough with the cockamamie MySQL database, let it die.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there some small, childish, part...

... of me, that really wants to call him 'Monty Weenus'?

[Matthew Barker]

"Putz"

That's the only word that comes to mind when I read the blog and petition. I dunno why.

[Fuzzysteve]

Licensing

One downside of just forking it, is that you wouldn't be able to buy a commercial license for the forked version. It'd be GPL or nothing. Only reason they can sell the commercial licensing, is that they own the copyrights. (I'd assume there's an implicit transfer, when you submit a patch.)

Which isn't quite so good, if you're embedding it.

[Matt Bryant]

Oops!

I thought Monty was a Nigerian 419er and sent his email to the spam bin! Mind you, the email did come in on one of my private accounts I don't use for techie stuff, and I'm certain I never used to subscribe to any MySQL, Sun or Oracle mailing lists. I wonder if old Monty spent some of his buyout cash on buying an email list....?

[tiggertaebo]

I really wish Monty would go away

I've gone into great detail on this on other outlets and frankly I can't be arsed to repeat myself. The upshot really is that Monty has no say in MySQL's future any more - he sold that right and was well compensated for it.

At best this is a sad little man who needs to learn to let go of what is no longer his and at worst it is someone with a vested interest trying to promote their own agenda while pretending that he's not. Either way I don't want to hear it.

And as for the dubious e-mailing tactics? I have two words for that... and the second is off!