TAG | MySQL: the Australian connection |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 20 May 2008 | |
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Page 7 of 7 "There are two ways of getting that much money - either by winning a big lottery (floating on the stock market) or getting bought out. You need huge growth in your sales, in your revenue, to get to that point. And it puts the focus more on revenue growth rather than actual product development. First, it distracts you from getting your product to market, then it focuses on sales. I don't think it will necessarily result in a better product. In many cases I don't think it's necessary at all. People are quite capable of developing a very good product and taking it to market without the infusion of lots of money. It distracts them from what the real issue is. Lentz is of the view that Microsoft has made quite a good fist of the open source model of development. "They do quite a bit of open source stuff now and they are quite open in many respects. Open source is not just about the licence for the software, it's a whole development environment. It is giving developers access to code in a project early on and getting feedback to make for a better end product. Microsoft actually does this extremely well. I'm using Microsoft as an example because everybody uses them as an example of the company that does not do open source. But in terms of product development, they are actually highly successful. They interact with their customers extremely well." The licence, he feels, does not always fully reflect the development model. "MySQL publishes a product under an open source licence, the GPL. But product development is done in a closed situation. You can grab sources but I'm not sure whether, at the moment, there are nightly snapshots which people can try. These snapshots may break - which sounds scary from a corporate perspective - but developers love things that break, that are new, that have interesting things to look at. And if it breaks, you can do a bug report and the report will find its way into the software in a couple of days instead of in a few months or half a year when you release a binary. "In some cases, MySQL, for example, has produced new features, which, to put it bluntly, were rather badly designed. And if they had been put out there in a different way earlier, really accessible for people to try, such design problems would probably have been fixed up before they were too far along for people to actually change them. In that sense, Microsoft may be a better player at this aspect than MySQL." He says that that is just a smart development mode, interacting with your ecosystem. "I don't care in that context whether it's open source or not. Microsoft has done a better job in this particular scenario. Overall, open source development is ideally suited to the rapid development cycle as it allows people to have a look at the code and, if they are able, to not merely provide bug reports but to even provide fixes. In the past MySQL has also benefitted from this. At the moment, they are not using this process very much, they have actually made it rather awkward and difficult to contribute back into MySQL. At the moment it is like a cathedral in a big bazaar, they are like a publishing company; they develop in-house and then publish. and then people can contribute. "Now this may be playing with semantics but I don't want to contribute, I want to participate. And that is a fundamental difference. Open source is about participation, not contribution. It differs from project to project how this is managed and at the moment, in the case of MySQL, this has diminished over the last few years. As MySQL has been chasing more profits, it has lost some of the other aspects along the way. It has tried to streamline some aspects and lost some aspects of the open development cycle along the way. I think it's also lost some quality because of that. Of course, it can regain all it has lost but it needs to work on that." Lentz says one does not need to be open source per se to produce good software. "However, having the code out there tends to produce better software because people, either in their spare time, or professionally, do look over it and just try to see how it works. Sometimes it works badly and that needs to be pointed out; potentially that makes for a better product but that only works if the feedback is then picked up. Just the fact that code is out there doesn't make it a better product."
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