MySQL: does marketing win over technology?

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 11 December 2008 03:59

Opinion and Analysis

There were other Sun employees who joined the debate, some to boot-lick, others to provide some rationale. The most illuminating statement came from the MySQL Community team lead, Giuseppe Maxia, who was quoted as saying, among other things, ""More than 3500 bugs affected MySQL 5.1, and by June we had fixed 2300 of them. There were still some outstanding critical bugs, and Marketing and Sales were pressing for a release."
And ..."the economic situation of Sun was not good, the company had just cut 2500 jobs, and we needed the new release to boost sales."

Former MySQL Australia veteran Arjen Lentz, the company's 25th employee, feels the 5.1 issue is becoming rather ridiculous, with so many Sun/MySQL people scrambling to defend things through their blogs.

"It's quite natural to defend one's colleagues and team, but that's not really relevant to the issue. Monty did not question the commitment of any developers, there's probably no-one on the planet who cares more about developers than he does! He was discussing a shipped product and mainly looking at business, marketing and sales decisions driving that. I think it's valid to discuss that, in general, and it can be valuable."

But Lentz, who has worked in community relations during his time at MySQL, also sees a downside to it. "Public (or even private) strife on this level does not benefit either business or product. Realistically, the public parts don't even make much sense for outsiders, as they don't know the people and will certainly lack knowledge of various aspects. So it just looks bad," he says.

"I don't see the overall business direction of MySQL changing, given its revenue needs even within the Sun organisation. Choices have been made and there's consequences to that, you can't suddenly change direction as the economics and structures would have to be different," he said.

"Regardless of whether one agrees with the choices, they were valid business decisions; if you don't agree, then in the end there's the freedom to go and do your own thing, either with MySQL or perhaps even do something entirely new and different! That's what innovators do."