Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software [LWN.net]

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 18:10 UTC (Tue) by dkg (subscriber, #55359)
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

MySQL and PostgreSQL are "two great free software databases", which have companies behind their development or providing support.

This seems to be a poor example for the case Mark is trying to make. Postgresql is an outstanding F/OSS database with no requirement for making a copyright assignment whatsoever. And MySQL is in possibly its worst position in a long time because its copyright assignment centralized control over the codebase such that it could simply be bought (first by Sun, and then subsequently) by Oracle, one of its major proprietary competitors. This acquisition triggered a number of forks precisely because of concerns over Oracle's control.

Remind me again why these examples are supposed to convince me of the merits of copyright assignment?

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Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 6:15 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

With MySQL (company) they had the ability to have tens of people developing MySQL for years as a day job, because of the dual-licensing model they were able to use. Dual-licensing is one viable way to do business with free software in addition to more service oriented business. But still that (some contributor/copyright agreement) has I guess always limited the amount of community developers gathering around - although that might be partly because whatever community people there are, are quite a lot smaller in resources usually than tens of paid people.

MySQL, Postgres and copyright assignment

Posted May 18, 2011 15:02 UTC (Wed) by dkg (subscriber, #55359) [Link]

Yep. MySQL used copyright assignment to build a company and employ people. Other people used different employment strategies and no copyright assignment to build a community around Postgres. Because of the centralized control of the copyright for MySQL, the project was bought outright by a proprietary competitor. The MySQL community now seems to be in disarray. The Postgres community seems to be moving happily forward together.

At this point, i'd rather rely on the Postgres community (though i confess i like the Postgres RDBMS itself better than i like the MySQL RDBMS, so my technical inclinations may also be coloring my perceptions).

MySQL, Postgres and copyright assignment

Posted May 19, 2011 17:48 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

This is a good point. From the view of most of the world it seems like having a company behind a program makes it reliable, but from a free software point of view having no single owner improves reliability far more. The MySQL example is quite instructive in this regard.

MySQL, Postgres and copyright assignment

Posted May 19, 2011 18:00 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

If MySQL represents the worst case scenario where a central copyright codebase gets bought out by a potentially hostile competitor then I'm not sure how bad that really is given that there are several active forks that look promising right now and the main vendor is still supporting and releasing new versions.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 8:11 UTC (Thu) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link]

On a similar level, how about OpenSolaris (which required assignment) versus Linux? Both were mature kernels - if copyright assignment makes things better, why didn't Shuttleworth choose to switch to OpenSolaris instead of Linux?

My trouble with his analogy is exactly the same as yours - I see that long term, projects with contributor agreements go proprietary. Projects without stay free. If I'm contributing to proprietary software, I expect to be paid hard cash for my code. If I'm contributing to free software, I'm happy to be paid in kind.