David M Williams
Wednesday, 25 February 2009 18:38
IT Industry -
Market
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Sometimes open source projects "fork." Disagreements over direction cause a splinter group to hive off and maintain their own separate code base. This is going to happen with well-known heavyweight FOSS staple, MySQL, after the original author quit Sun Microsystems earlier this month.
MySQL is a major piece of open source software. Sure, Linux gets most of the attention but MySQL is no less than the “M” in “LAMP” – the acronym given to the powerful and productive free web-oriented application platform that consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
The MySQL AB company was famously purchased for $USD 1 billion last year by Sun Microsystems – of Solaris UNIX and Java fame. The company had been founded in 1995 and up to the time of its acquisition MySQL AB was one of the largest open source companies in the world with 400 employees in 25 countries. Remarkably, around 70% of these employees worked from their own home offices.
MySQL AB was considered a champion of “second generation” open source companies. Like the so-called first gen companies, MySQL derived revenue from selling support, consulting services and training for their products.
Where second gen companies differ, however, is in dual licensing their software. MySQL – the product – is available under the GNU Public License (GPL) for any person to use without cost or restriction, as usual. Simultaneously, it is also available under a traditional paid license to clients who do not find the GPL suitable for their purposes; this is most typically companies who wish to include MySQL technology in a closed source product.
One of the original authors of MySQL is Michael Widenius, commonly known simply as Monty. Not even a month since the Sun acquisition Monty announced this month he had quit the company, citing dissatisfaction with the release of MySQL 5.1 being of perceived insufficient quality.
Late last year Monty
blogged that there were crashing bugs in MySQL 5.1 despite having being released as GA (“General Availability”.)
He listed a series of expectations users should keep in mind when using version 5.1. His list included several damning comments.
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