Monty on broken MySQL promises: Oracle's going to fork it up Oracle will break the promises it made to European regulators on MySQL nearly three years ago, according to the open-source database's co-creator Monty Widenius. In fact, he says, it has already broken a few. Widenius told The Reg he's scared about the future of MySQL. He said he is concerned that if the database giant further …
Why?? Regulators should just make sure that MySQL Free cannot be hindered via patents or other shenanigans (in other words: patent lawyers and EPO employees should be made unemployed and "respect mah IP" should be a demand emitted only by backward rednecks).
Then let CAPITALISM reign.
Why is Monty surprised? You get to sun yourself on your multi-million pound boat in exotic locations by giving your competitiors an edeg they can beat you with. You dance with the devil expect to find your corpse to be found slung over a fence with various musical instruments protruding from your nethers!
Poor Monty, indeed, but why this envy. Monty did make some money out of MySQL, but he was also the programmer behind it. A bit like the laughable fatty behind Apple. So how come we do not envy guys like Gates and Jobs but guys like Monty and similar. Are they just closer to what we could have been and thus more easier to envy.
> but why this envy
It's not envy.
Monty was the guy behind MySQL, sure. But he sold his interest.
Since then, he seems to have spent all his time bemoaning the fact that he no longer gets to decide what happens to MySQL. But that's kinda what happens when you sell something - the new owner tends to get to decide where it's going...
Vic.
True...
If only most webapps would have been written a lot better.. I'd rather have seen a global PHP SQL "layer" where the admin gets to chose the eventual backend which provides the database functionality than the specific per-engine support we have now.
Because then I would have replaced MySQL on all my webserver months ago, yet I can't.
Monty is afraid Oracle is adding some high-end features that will make MySQL far more compelling in the high-end markets - where real money is made, not the "hey I use MySQL because it's free" low-end ones - than its forks. I can't see why advanced authentication features and clustering should be offered to competitors as well, many open source projects are just the core part of far more complex (and expensive products), for example Eclipse.
Monty would like to get them for free, of course, because they're not so simple to develop. AFAIK the GPL covers only the product code, not its tests - MariaDB & C. are free to write them own, of course, without releasing them.
None is asking Monty why he did sell MySQL instead of running its own company and making money from it? He can't now blame Oracle if it's trying to make money from MySQL.
I can't understand the level of hostility towards Monty here (and on any prior article of late when he's voiced concern over MySQL). Selling the property off has been condemned by many, but remember it was Sun he sold it to, not Oracle. Perhaps memories are short around here, but back then, even when its overall health was far from peachy, Sun was one of the pre-eminent champions of Open Source, having (albeit tortuously slowly) rendered up a couple of its crown jewels in Java and Solaris, while fostering a number of other interesting and complementary projects (Java, OpenOffice, GlassFish, Hudson, Kenai etc). Unlike IBM it didn't have a serious database product as part of that stable, though.
If I were Monty at that time, wanting to sell up for whatever his reasons may have been (anyone ask? Oh right, big yacht made of tenners, that must be it) I'd want to leave my baby entrusted to someone who I thought would help it grow (perhaps beyond what I felt could personally offer it), keep it honest, and keep it in with a good crowd to help it thrive and diversify. I can't think of a better candidate at that time -- certainly not one so apt to be revered by a generation of geeks -- than Sun.
In those terms, and as I think many here may agree, I can't think of many worse candidates than Oracle. That he's been shitting the bed ever since seems not unreasonable to me.
If you hadn't been born yesterday, you would know at least two things about how the world turns:
1. When you have a successful start-up in your hands and it grows up, you are not the owner, just a guy with a participation option if there is anything left after bankruptcy. The real owners are the Venture Capital Vultures and the banks you've mortgaged your ownership to, in order to pay the salaries of your employees and, oh!, equipment and basic monthly utilities. As if electricity, internet access and office space were free. Oi vai iz mir!
2. As far as memory serves, Monty and Lars barely owned 30% of the company at the time of sale, and it was the board, bunch of investors, who got cold feet and pressured to cash out whatever the cost. Yes, Monty got a lot of schamoleans in the process but he has to pay taxes. So, no. No America Cup yachts for Monty.
And on the personal side of things... If you have ever created something worth zilch where you have invested a lot of you life and your cred, the last thing you want to happen to it is to see it thrown to the ground and destroyed and that is precisely what Larry "L'Estat" Ellison and his minions are doing to MySQL.
We should be using real databases like PostgreSQL and Firebird anyway.
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