MySQL no longer fully open source database

Just in case anybody missed it: http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQL/entry/new_commercial_extensions_for_mysql

MySQL has long been an open source product, not an open source project…. and this really is the final nail in that.

To me, this was expected, but it’s still sad to see it.

I am very, very glad we have diverse copyright ownership in Drizzle so that this could not happen easily at all.

17 thoughts on “MySQL no longer fully open source database

  1. I can write commercial extensions for Drizzle and there is noting in the diverse copyright ownership in Drizzle that is blocking that. So what’s the point?

  2. The Linux Kernel has shown how it works, with all its pros and cons.

  3. There are of course many ways of looking at this. Giuseppe, I agree with your points, and the drivers of change behind MySQL need to make money. Monty proposed the “Business Source” Alternative, which stipulates that initially the commercial version remains limited to paying customers, and after a predefined timeframe (maybe 1 to 3 years) the code will then be published under an Open Source license.

    Personally, I am wondering why so many people running commercial websites have a problem with MySQL offering features that are available to paying customers. That is the common Internet business model – give some for free, charge for premium.

  4. I hate Oracle! They take over opens source projects. Then make add-ons closed source but givie them free to public. So there’s no need for open source programmers to programm the same add ons. Then after time goes by a year or two oracle starts commercializing the closed source part and is only willing to sell add ons. By this time oracle has put patents on closed source so that no one, not even the willing open source community can pragram alike. As gtime goes even further the open source programming comminity for that product dies out and oracles share holders get richer.

    just my lone opinion.

  5. Re Jan Kneschke: Linux is not pure GPL 2, it has exception for userland programs. You cannot distribute for example Drizzle with commercial extension, but you can do it with Linux.

  6. There always were commercial extensions for MySQL. It’s just that now Oracle have some too. Not sure how is this “problematic”.

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  9. I am absolutely thrilled at how MySQL has been under Oracle. Undoubtedly if the leadership and direction was not changed it would be a very different (and dead) project.

    I’m disappointed there’s going to be closed bits as this promotes others writing open replacements (thus duplicating effort), is vendor lock-in for those using them and with the expansion of closed parts (and open replacements) the broader community could look to another provider as the upstream provider.

  10. Well, at least thread pool optimization is also present on MariaDB and maybe in futyre versions on Perconna’s XtraDB.

    The big Issue is that 20 fold performance improvements on OLTP loads. This kind of optimization closed source locked-in could hurt mysql’s opensource.

  11. To Hander:

    The 20 fold performance improvements comes largely from fixing that the thread does not use Libevent (which has a global mutex lock over the events) . The original design of the thread pool for MySQL 5.0 did not have it, but it was added when porting the thread pool code to 5.1 in an effort to make it work on more platforms.

    In MariaDB 5.1 – 5.3 there is the old thread pool with libevent but in 5.5 we will have a new thread pool that will give the same kind of performance increase as MySQL enterprise has (we already have a working proof of concept for this)

    Note that the 20 x performance increase comes when:
    – You are not using replication
    – You are doing mostly very short read queries.

    If you are using replication, MariaDB 5.3 is much faster than MySQL Enterprise, with or without the thread pool, thanks to the new group commit code.

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