MySQL licensing brouhaha exposed

Here's a view into the company politics at MySQL from Monty Widenius, who along with with David Axmark started the MySQL project.

(Monty recently appeared on a LinuxWorld podcast, discussing questions such as What impact do advances in hardware and OS design have on the database, and what does Sun's acquisition of MySQL mean for MySQL's performance on Solaris and Linux.)

"The ugly part was of course the announcement that MySQL was planning to change the MySQL server from open source/free software to crippleware by only giving out key parts of MySQL online backup (a server component) as closed source within the Enterprise server offering."

But despite the timing, the "crippleware" plan was a pre-acquisition idea, not a Sun plan. Did Sun even know about it?

"Mårten showed at his keynote a photo of where they were burning the IPO Prospectus for MySQL AB. This was a very cool thing to do! What the MySQL management team forgot to burn, was all the plans they had of how to make more money when MySQL would be a public company. They have apparently not yet realized that when MySQL AB was acquired by Sun, things changed."

It might be worth looking at another European software acquisition by Sun: StarDivision. Sun acquired the proprietary office suite vendor in 1999, and released OpenOffice in 2000. There's still a proprietary StarOffice, but Sun took the project in a more open direction. As a bigger company that doesn't depend only on software, Sun can afford to play open source with products that the original companies kept proprietary.

On the other hand, the parts that MySQL AB intended to keep proprietary might not matter that much to real-world users. Brian Aker explains explains one place where MySQL-related software is already proprietary. Oracle's innodb has a proprietary backup tool. You can still have a working MySQL without it.

Syndicated 2008-04-21 16:51:09 from dmarti's blog