Ex-JBoss chief attacks Monty's 'dangerous' MySQL crusade

Former JBoss chief Marc Fleury has weighed in on MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius' campaign to stop Oracle's ownership of the open-source database. Fleury has reprimanded Widenius publicly in his blog, calling the MySQL "situation" a "disgrace" that's hurting Sun and could damage the future of open source software. Fleury …

[Wallyb132]

It seems to me that...

If the creator of MySQL wants to dictate, block or interfere with the operations or sale of MySQL then a refund to Sun of the $1bn purchase price would be in order. seems only right, if he wants to still be in control of it, then he needs to give Sun their money back...

[Anonymous Coward]

Disk crashes

MySQL is probably a good database management system; it's the license mutating at the speed of light that crashes your disks.

PostgreSQL all the way.

[David 49]

He's right

Once you sell your company, you don't have the right to criticize what happens (unless you have some funky clauses in the contracts!).

Same as the decedents of Cadbury protesting against Kraft - if you want to have control don't sell the thing off in the first place.

[alderley]

Well said Marc, sense at last.

Widenius was happy to accept Sun's money and walk away with it. Since MySQL is open source he is free to put his money where his mouth is and take it to market himself. The people he is hurting most with this ongoing vendetta/crusade are his former colleagues at Sun, some of whom joined with him from MySQL anyway. I'm sure Sun would be in a much stronger financial position today if they had never met Widenius in the first place.

[Iggle Piggle]

Confused

(as usual) but what did Sun buy? If they thought they were buying a company then great they got a company. But that company was based on OSS, why didn't Sun just take a copy for themselves?

This current confusion is one of the things that troubles me with OSS. So now there will be Sun MySQL and Monty MySQL and presumably other variations too. Perhaps soon there will be Oracle MySQL. I'm not attacking the quality just the management of the software.

Surely someone owns the name MySQL and only that person should be using that name. Anyone else using a similar sounding name should be hauled before the judge (no matter how much they paid for a company or how much they think the new owners have messed up).

[Jeremy Chappell]

Would the real MySQL please stand up...

Sun own the MySQL name. The fork is called MariaDB. I think all the wrangling is killing Sun, at this point it's Oracle or oblivion. The longer this goes on the worse Sun's situation gets.

[Adrian 10]

but Marc...

The assumption of his blog seems to be - that the aim of these projects is to eventually sell and commercialise the projects. However, when I was working on JBoss in the early days - I wasn't doing it so that he could make money. I'll go so far as to say, I didn't really have any interest in Redhat making money from it either... And the core developers who built the essence of what became popular didn't built it so he and Redhat could make money either, which is why they had the big falling out with him.

I agree with the part about Monty selling out for 1b then thinking he still has some say in it. He doesn't - but Marc's rant is based on a fundamentally flawed arguement (in my opinion anyway).

So let's hope no one like Marc gets the great idea of making millions from everyone elses work in PostgreSQL, making it no longer available to the community who actually created it. And yes - I am referring to the brand power, community, etc as much as the product / code itself.

Why a beer icon, 'cause it's all a bit sad really. I'm going to just go drink a beer instead of think about it too much more.

[tjus]

Cheap advertisement, what else?

Monty is misusing ( or rightly using from his perspective) the internet resources to his personal advantage. It is a cheap advertisement without making much effort. Just creating few website and the whole media starts looking at it because it is affecting the whole industry. This way he is getting his future customer attention (who may wrongly assume) that he'll create a new database (replacement of MYSQL) that'll be better (or as good) than MYSQL.

I also don't like Monty challenging EU and going east. Shows he is desperate. So what'll he be feeling after all the countries give a "YES" to this ORACLE-SUN merger? I tried my best, alas!

[rabidbadger]

Reality check

"A purely GPL license would not confer things like intellectual-property rights to a single company"

Not necessarily true. Some open source organisations ask that contributors transfer their rights to the organisation. A prime example being the FSF/GNU project...