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Remember yesterday? Well, I was reading that post again and realized that it's not entirely clear what Sun is actually doing with MySQL. Here's another article about the whole thing, MySQL Not Going Closed Source? that you can check out, but the gist of it is this:
MySQL Server is still (and always was) open source. The difference is not (as I might have implied yesterday) that the Enterprise product was going to be different. What's actually happening is that if you are an Enterprise customer (meaning, you're paying the big bucks for the Enterprise license), you get some extra "add-ons".
Somehow, calling them "add-ons" made a big difference (for me, anyway) in understanding what's going on: Sun is giving their customers another reason to pay extra for Enterprise MySQL. The add-on in question, this time, is online backup. If you want to do online backup with MySQL at this point, you have two options:
- Buy the Enterprise edition.
- Program your own online backup add-on, or hire someone else to do it.
Sun Senior VP and former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos spelled it out, pretty much in those words.
I believe in free and open software as much as the next person. I also think that companies "selling" open source software have not just the right but the obligation (to their shareholders) to find a business model that allows them to continue to publish open source software. Enterprise customers have special needs--needs that generally don't intersect with the needs of most individuals or small groups who are using the software--and that as a result, it makes sense to have enterprise customers get the extra add-ons as part of their licensing fees.
Am I wrong?
Here's some news: MySQL, Sun's still-shiny new open source database acquisition, will be adding new features to its Enterprise (that is, paid) version that won't be added to the Community (free and open) version.
Here's the story at ComputerWorld: MySQL reserves features for paying customers; open-source community up in arms.
Oddly enough, though, the story seems to have originated on Jeremy Cole’s blog:
Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise. No press releases, and the news articles I've seen so far seem to be pointing to this blog entry (and MySQL honcho Marten Mickos' response/confirmation to the entry) as their primary source.
That tells me one of two things is happening: either Sun/MySQL is trying to pull a fast one and sneak this new development under everyone's radar, or else this is just business as usual and not anything to get upset about--or at least, not be surprised about.
You can read about "user outrage" in the ComputerWorld article, as well as on Slashdot (Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL). But Sun has to find a way to make that MySQL acquisition pay off, somehow.
On the other hand, as Dana Blankenhorn points out here (Did Sun just make mySQL closed source?), MySQL started limited source code access to its Enterprise version last year--if you want to see the code, you've got to be a paying customer. That's fine: if you've paid for an Enterprise license, you get to see the source code (and do what you want with it).
It shouldn't surprise anyone when a company that runs an open source project tries to make it pay off. The good news is that there is a huge--and strong--open source MySQL community, and that (as Mickos pointed out) anyone who likes could develop their own, free and open, version of the features that aren't going to make it into the community version.
I'm sure we'll be hearing more interested news from the open source database players in days and weeks to come (including from me!). One of the exciting aspects of this development is that it illustrates and illuminates some of the most critical issues facing paying and non-paying users of open source software, as well as the vendors who are trying to build their businesses on free software.
TechCrunch reports Source: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service. Now, this is just a rumor, but:according to the article:
Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch.
For the record, BigTable is Google's "compressed, high performance, and proprietary database system" (per Wikipedia). And Amazon's SimpleDB should sound familiar: I've written about it before, here Amazon SimpleDB and here More about Amazon's SimpleDB....
So--if true--this could be very good news for anyone who wants enterprise (and I mean BIG ENTERPRISE) database systems, for minimal up-front investment, from two of the very biggest Internet database businesses.
Here are some more links to OpenID knowledge:
- Could it be? Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies? According to Michael Arrington, four big companies--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL--have all announced "support" for OpenID, but haven't put in the effort to make OpenID work to anyone's benefit but their own. Arrington suggests that maybe these Internet biggies are gaming the OpenID universe. A good read.
- Here's a nice OpenID resource: OpenID Status Check: A Guide to Getting and Using Your OpenID. Mostly, a list of links to OpenID resources, but not a bad place to start out if you want to try OpenID yourself. There are even some links to help you roll your own OpenIDs.
Any other good pointers? Let me know...
If you're into interesting new ways to visualize data, check this out: SpicyNodes. (I saw it on Metafilter).
For whatever reason, the SpicyNodes website gives me little information, but you can see a couple of implementations, here: Daylight Savings Time and here: Family Tree of the Greek Gods.
It reminds me of old-school hypertext, from back in the days before there was such a thing as an Internet protocol for hypertext (HTTP). Kind of neat, but just how likely is it to scale? Let me know what you think.
But before you do that, check this: The Best Tools for Visualization. Lots of good, creative stuff in there, with neat new ways of looking at data from all over.
And, just in case I haven't pointed to it yet, there's IBM's Many Eyes, which has plenty of visualizations as well as plenty of data sets to play with.
Enjoy!
Here's one reason why Microsoft has such a stranglehold on the OS market: Why Linux will not displace Windows.
Sure, it's comment on a long-forgotten thread on a ZDNet blog (Why Linux will not displace Windows). The comment is a stunning illustration of how "common sense" fails to account for those things the individual is incapable of imagining. Consider:
You are kidding arent you?
Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services?
That sounds preposterous to me.
The comment goes on, but I can't. You'll have to read it yourself, if you must, to get the rest.
And then, there's this: They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know. Not everyone who likes Microsoft is happy with Vista. Go ahead, read the article. It's about Microsoft honchos who got burned with the upgrade.
You may remember reading about OpenID last November, here (OpenID: Another Approach to Identities), but back then there was significant uncertainty over whether it would catch on.
No longer, though. As reported recently on Slashdot (OpenID Foundation Embraced by Big Players), the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! all joined the OpenID Foundation board.
Seems like a big "game over" for the other contenders for the OpenID niche. Not sure that anyone else was contending for that niche, other than Microsoft, but now they're on board with OpenID, expect to see a Redmonized version of OpenID that's been embraced and extended.
I'm fascinated by the physics of time travel, but the type "time travel" instead of "travel time" caught my eye in the link I clicked on to get to Travel-time Maps and their Uses and this More travel-time maps and their uses. Not maps for time travelers, but maps that illustrate the amount of time it takes to travel.
Very interesting and even helpful if you're in the UK: you can use these maps, for example, to figure out whether it's quicker to drive or take a train to a destination, or the fastest mode of transportation for rush hour commuting. But it's also a very neat illustration of how big piles of data can be turned into intelligence. And you don't need me to explain how that kind of intelligence can become "business intelligence" for any business that needs to allocate resources to get people or things from one place to another.
It's all brought to you by mySociety, a charitable project that develops their software as open source; if you're interested in having them do custom mapping for your business, they seem to be willing to do that for a fee (or a donation, I'm not sure how that works in the UK).
Unless you've been under a rock, you know Sun is buying MySQL AB. That was news, last week. But it was also rather puzzling news, in many ways, and worth taking some time out to consider the implications.
So, for Part One of my coverage of the Sun/MySQL deal, I'm mostly going to offer a bunch of links. For example, the Yahoo! News breaking news story: Sun to buy MySQL for $1 billion. You get the basics of the deal here, but you also get some of the issues spelled out for you: Sun is a "server maker"; meaning, they're a hardware company. Other key points to consider:
- Sun expects to spread MySQL into big corporations, who already buy Sun hardware, as well as bolster existing Sun partnerships such as those with IBM and Dell.
- Sun is a software company, too, and an open source software company at that. They, like IBM, see offering open source software as a selling point for their hardware.
- MySQL is dwarfed by the competition from Oracle and Microsoft who dominate in the traditional database market, but MySQL owns the web database market, which is growing (while the more traditional market may be stagnating).
The Yahoo! article gives a pretty good precis of the situation, but you need to dig a little deeper to figure out what exactly is going on. For example, they don't say much about the extent to which Sun controls some very important pieces of software already, including Java, OpenSolaris, StarOffice, NetBeans, and more. Nor do they mention Sun's existing relationship with the other star open source DBMS project, PostgreSQL. For more about Sun, MySQL and PostgreSQL, check out Sun buys MySQL - what about PostgreSQL?, and Sun Purchasing MySQL and PostgreSQL advances from PostgreSQL.
Check back next week for my take on the implications and impact this deal with ultimately have, but in the meantime, here are some of the more interesting articles/blog entries I've found in the past few days about it:
For the record, the official press releases here:
YouTube, it turns out, uses MySQL as its backend.
Paul Tuckfield, the YouTube DBA, speaks about using MySQL at YouTube.
Before I even finished listening to the whole presentation, I got several key points:
- Paul Tuckfield started out at YouTube with a lot of database experience under his belt as an Oracle DBA--but no MySQL experience. Which tells me that switching from Oracle to MySQL, while retaining people, should not be an obstacle.
- MySQL scales, nicely. YouTube has three DBAs. They served 100 million videos a day, back in mid-2006. Without DB2 or Oracle.
- Scaling MySQL to YouTube-scale is non-trivial. Tuckfield talks about using master/slave architecture and doing clever things with replication, to make MySQL work for such a huge database. Which tells me that you're not going to scale anywhere unless you have people who are smart enough to make it work.
The talk, recorded last year at the 2007 MySQL Conference, is only about 40 minutes long, so it's the perfect length for listening during your commute--and Paul is an engaging and funny speaker!
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