An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 6, 2010 5:40 UTC (Wed) by mikov (guest, #33179)
In reply to: An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles. by hingo
Parent article: The ongoing MySQL campaign

You keep trying to present clear information, but the truth is most people haven't really bothered to study the situation in detail (or read Monty's blog) and have made their conclusions in advance:
* Monty personally got the whole billion from the sale of MySQL. Now he wants more, the greedy bastard!
* He wants to buy MySQL back on the cheap in order to continue to rob the open source movement
* Closed-source software is evil and must die, as well as everybody who profits from it.
* Who needs MySQL anyway?

Perhaps I am very cynical, but I suspect that what bugs most people is the impression they got that Monty personally sold MySQL and received the fat check. Perhaps you guys should publicize more that it wasn't his decision and, as you noted elsewhere, he got only about 5%.

For me the crux of the matter is very simple: Oracle should not be allowed to buy a major competitor to their database. Yes, MySQL is definitely such a competitor, and people who do not see that are kidding themselves (if not literally today, but in a few years). This definitely will decrease competition, and definitely will affect ant GPL-licensed fork of MySQL. (Why kid ourselves, MySQL was so successful, despite being technically inferior to some alternatives, precisely because of its dual-license model).

This has nothing to do with Monty.

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An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 6, 2010 7:57 UTC (Wed) by sitaram (guest, #5959) [Link]

I wasn't going to get into this thread again, but now I have to...

> You keep trying to present clear information, but the truth is most people haven't really bothered to study the situation in detail (or read Monty's blog) and have made their conclusions in advance:

[snip]

> Perhaps I am very cynical, but I suspect that what bugs most people is the impression they got that Monty personally sold MySQL and received the fat check. Perhaps you guys should publicize more that it wasn't his decision and, as you noted elsewhere, he got only about 5%.

What bugs most people is the mis-representation. Even MPAB folk will agree that this is basically about protecting the current users of the proprietary version, and yet Monty keeps saying that the OSS world is affected.

> For me the crux of the matter is very simple: Oracle should not be allowed to buy a major competitor to their database. Yes, MySQL is definitely such a competitor, and people who do not see that are kidding themselves (if not literally today, but in a few years). This definitely will decrease competition, and definitely will affect ant GPL-licensed fork of MySQL. (Why kid ourselves, MySQL was so successful, despite being technically inferior to some alternatives, precisely because of its dual-license model).

"Technically inferior" coupled with "successful" usually means "good marketing/PR". However, in this case, it was also because they used the GPL as a weapon, which is easy when you combine GPL with copyright assignment and a single *commercial* owner (aka, not like ASF, FSF, etc).

Either way, I don't see a need for the open source community to help perpetuate that state of affairs, and I definitely don't see how Oracle can harm the open source version. I still have an open question on that: show me one purely open source project that is currently using MySQL, and cannot switch to something else for *technical* reasons, that would be badly affected by this purchase, and explain how precisely it would be affected.

> This has nothing to do with Monty.

This has *everything* to do with him, sadly, but I'm not in a name-calling mood today. Or at least not to *repeat* what I have already said.