Sam Varghese
Thursday, 29 January 2009 04:45
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 5
iTWire: Did the involvement of other outside developers pick up after that?
Monty: No, because we had some restrictions on the licence under which you could contribute - you basically had to give us the code and then we assigned the code back. As a developer I would never accept this. But I was overruled by decision-makers in MySQL and the effect was that since 2005, I don't think we have added more than 20 patches to MySQL.
iTWire: What you're saying is, at that stage, the developer was told, "if you want your code included, you have to assign copyright to us"?
Monty: Yeah, and we will give it back then. But the problem is that that code cannot then be used by any other project. Because if another project also wants copyright, that means if you give it to us, you can't give it to them, which I think is really, really bad. One of the things that I'm really happy with Sun is Sun's contributor agreement - in effect, it's shared copyright, you still keep all rights to your code. Recently MySQL switched to using Sun's contributor licence. Now the licence shouldn't be a problem anymore. But it was a problem for many years.
iTWire: Do you feel that you can regain the ground which you have lost?
Monty: If we change the way we do distribution, (we can). The other thing that stops contributions to MySQL is that we don't release the binaries and the code as often to the open source community as we do to the customers, which basically means that if somebody contributes code to us, first it takes very long to get the code in, and also you don't get access to newest code, which I personally think is really, really disgusting.
iTWire: Would you prefer that the daily build is put up on an FTP site for people to download and play with it?
Monty: Daily builds are a problem because sometimes in development, somebody puts in code that we haven't fully tested. We only notice this during the build. That means that from day to day you have something that's broken. I like the method that we had before - we started differentiation of the code, where we do a monthly build. Anybody can access source code. You can still do it today.
But then we have snapshots when the tree happens to be green - which basically means that we don't know of any bugs. Then we also do a recommended monthly build that people can download. And the same build is recommended for community and customers. That's the way I would like to have it, and as far as I understand, that's also how Sun would like to have it.
iTWire: You feel there has been an improvement after MySQL was bought by Sun.
Monty: Yes, I'm really happy about us getting bought, especially by Sun. Many of the things that I feel have gone wrong with MySQL over the last four years, Sun has the notion that what we did before was much better than what we do today. And I have seen clear indications that they want to change - to do things properly again. If you do that, then we can have a chance to get back to being active in the community.
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