Sam Varghese
Thursday, 29 January 2009 04:45
Opinion and Analysis
Page 4 of 5
iTWire: What kind of a role do you have at Sun?
Monty: Currently I'm between jobs, so my only real responsibility just now is to work on the Maria storage engine. That is... trying to design a transactional storage engine that can function as the default non-transactional and the default transactional storage engine for MySQL. So that when you download something, normal MySQL version, by default, it will work for 80 percent of the people. That's quite an important project, it has got some of the best MySQL developers, and we have been doing that for some time.
I'm also trying to help Sun understand the problem with the MySQL development model, because they thought that when they bought us, everything would be perfect. We had some things that were really, really good, but there were also some things, especially the development model, that is pretty horrible. It has taken Sun a long time to realise that. But we have clear indications that they are going to fix it. I would like to see a model more like PostgreSQL, where the external community is much bigger, and contributing more code than we do ourselves. And that's what I would like to see happen.
iTWire: Despite all the problems that you've told me about, MySQL is still the most popular open source database, isn't it?
Monty: Because we had good foundations, and what we have done is that instead of using a big community to help us, instead we have to hire hundreds of engineers that would do the work, when we could do it much smarter and better. Basically we have just wasted money, for something that you could do in a more efficient manner.
iTWire: Why do you feel that came about?
Monty: That came about because of the rush of the MySQL managers to go public. They wanted to ensure that when we went public, during the first half year, you need to generate a lot of profit. Because by showing things when you go public, and generating profit, you can get good valuation for your stock. What I was afraid of in going public was that we would then have to have commercial modules and basically go back to a closed environment, even more than before.
That was why I was so happy with Sun buying us - because that basically would ensure a change from the wrong path which we have been going on, just making profit and not thinking about long-term solutions. Sun is thinking long-term.
iTWire: Do you have an objection to somebody selling MySQL as an open source package and adding proprietary modules?
Monty: I don't mind if a partner does that. But I believe that what we produce should be something that will fulfill all the requirements of normal people. Because we live by spreading MySQL. If we have a commercial model for something critical like back-up - that was tried, everybody needs back-up - that means that to be able to use the product, you need to have a commercial licence.
That means that all the benefits of open source disappear. You have a lock-in to one proprietary organisation. You can't make changes yourself because you don't have this one package. If something happens to the distributor, you can't use the product anymore. For me, if you have one critical closed source module, the code is not open source and cannot be used by anyone as open source. You need to treat it as a commercial program, a commercial closed source program.
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