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Blog: Pete Loshin

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Clarifying the MySQL "Closed-Sourcing" brouhaha

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:

  1. Buy the Enterprise edition.
  2. 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?

  Posted by Pete Loshin on April 18, 2008 10:30 AM |

Comments

You're right. Why be restricted to just one strategy when you can use many? In any case, subscription based products (SOA) based on open source will win over license-models because subscriptions and open source are better market communication tools than license-restricted technology ever can be, and as a significant bonus you don't have to be suffer by legacy technology as the market evolve; the service layer will allow your business to switch entire platforms. Eventually everything will be open source and the companies that survive are always the ones which can adopt fast enough to outmanoeuvre the others.

Posted by: Kristofer | April 18, 2008 4:07 PM

Pete -

Thanks for the comments. Actually the new backup utility in 6.0 *can* do online backup for MVCC based engines (e.g. InnoDB, Falcon, PBXT, etc.) at this point. Note that the backup is logical in nature (create DDL with SQL insert statements). One of the Enterprise add-on's is an online backup plug-in for MyISAM that is native/physical (file-based instead of logical based), so that's one difference today between the Community and Enterprise backup.

Posted by: Robin Schumacher | April 18, 2008 4:30 PM

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