LWN: Comments on "Ingres Database 9.3 released"

Firebird vs. Mozilla

nye — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:31:56 +0000

Not trademarks?

Shivers

ernest — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:23:22 +0000

I currently work for a company that uses Ingres still.
Since the day that I started there I hated it, but because of the way it was used, could not be
replaced.
Fortunatly I could choose the db to use in other implementations
and have sistematically choosen an other db.

Ernest.

Firebird vs. Mozilla

tzafrir — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:28:49 +0000

If so: what are:

* GRUB
* KVM
* Sparse

Classic FUD

liljencrantz — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:15:26 +0000

[Citation needed]

The only similar situations I know of are Joomla and foswiki, two projects that seem to be significantly more alive than they were before the fork.

Classic FUD

man_ls — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:50:52 +0000

A regular fork is bad enough. A hostile fork from the parent company staged by some of the core developers (with an accompanying name change) is probably disastrous. If the company is bought by its worst arch-rival -- well, I don't think the outlook is good. I also prefer postgres, but hey, MySQL has its place (and it is not as an unsupported grassroots offering IMHO).

Classic FUD

man_ls — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:45:40 +0000

Ever heard of branding? Soda drinks are all very similar, but people tend to buy the one they know.

Classic FUD

drag — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:05:59 +0000

A rose by any other name will smell as sweet.

Windows only?

kschendel — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:56:58 +0000

Linux builds will be released Real Soon Now.

Firebird vs. Mozilla

epa — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:25:46 +0000

If they had stuck with the name Phoenix,

Or Firebird, even.

Firebird vs. Mozilla

epa — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:24:15 +0000

The outcome wasn't *entirely* good: Mozilla picking a brand-new name meant that they could then trademark it, and stop people distributing modified versions unless they also change the name of the program, which may be a necessary evil but is not entirely good.

If they had stuck with the name Phoenix, we wouldn't have any of this Iceweasel/abrowser nonsense.

Firebird vs. Mozilla

sbergman27 — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:40:28 +0000

Asa was being an ass. Helen was being an ass. But it was pretty obvious that Helen was looking for a slingshot assist from the local FOSS Jupiter. I was wondering at the time if she might not go after GM next.

Personally, I think Firefox was a stupid name. But like "Oldsmobile", we get used to terrible names and don't really think of them as being terrible after a while.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

sbergman27 — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:34:30 +0000

> Hmm that is true if you assume that the person googling for your product will bother to add at least the word "database" after the name, if he tries it without and gets a plethora of hits for the browser.

Uhhh... so? You think Firebird DB is going to lose users because it's too hard to type "database"? I've found most RDBMS admins to to more tenacious than that. ;-)

Firebird vs. Mozilla

nye — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:53:07 +0000

Traditionally, as I'm sure you know, a trademark is only applicable in a certain domain. 'Using the name first' doesn't grant exclusive control over that word forever, except perhaps if the word is entirely made-up. There are plenty of companies and products which have the same name as each other, and as long as they're not competitors, or in sufficiently similar domains that there might be honest confusion between them, there's no problem.

It seems however that 'things related to computers' is one domain now.

It's silly that two entirely unrelated software products can't have the same name, as if the field of 'software' were similar in breadth to, say, 'washing machines'. I think this is going to have to change as people realise that 'software' isn't all one thing - otherwise we'll run out of words.

Classic FUD

pboddie — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:16:39 +0000

How is it "killing MySQL"? If you're using it and then a bunch of people turn out another release under a different name (and it might even be a better release with different people doing it, if the reports are accurate), and you can migrate to it without much bother, how has it gone away in any sense?

I prefer to use PostgreSQL and haven't seen much, if any, negative advocacy from the PostgreSQL community about MySQL going away, despite the remark up-thread - I'm sure most PostgreSQL advocates are comfortable advocating the technical superiority of their favourite database system rather than making up gossip about rival products - but amongst the many reasons for switching away from MySQL, the Free Software licensing really isn't one of them.

If you're using MySQL under a proprietary licence, you might be worried, but I can't say I have that much sympathy for proprietary software vendors. I'm sure Oracle will be quite happy to meet their every need at the right price.

Classic FUD

man_ls — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:49:14 +0000

So MySQL may end up as a database with a different name developed by different people. Sounds very much as "killing MySQL" to me.

Shivers

man_ls — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:47:49 +0000

A couple of years ago I had the misfortune of consulting for a company which used Ingres, the latest proprietary release before it was open-sourced. What a disgrace! Locking didn't work properly (using the Java driver), the management tools were horrid, the engine didn't scale above a few million registers.

Probably it has improved a lot, but frankly I don't see the point.

Classic FUD

drag — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:53:50 +0000

The chances of Oracle killing off MySQL is roughly equal to Novell trying to
kill off the Linux kernel.

Which is, of course, zero chance.

Despite what the Postgresql ra-ra brigade may make it seem there are a very
large of people that use Mysql for very important things and there is zero
chance that they will let Oracle or anybody else take it away from them.

Worst case is that they will end up calling it something other then MySQL.

_that_is_it_

Firebird vs. Mozilla

ncm — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:23:05 +0000

I was not "focused on Firebird", but I had met and was impressed by the Firebird developers. They were using the name first, and the Mozilla people swooped in and tried to muscle them out with no better justification than "Eff you, we're big". It doesn't matter whether you have any practical reason to care about Firebird (which I didn't, and don't). The IBPhoenix people were right, and Mozilla were wrong, full stop. In the end, Mozilla ended up using a much better name that suggested an excellent logo, and they learned something, and Firebird was able to keep their name, so the outcome was entirely good. It's not clear whether the Firebird database is used any more than it would have been, but that's incidental.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

sitaram — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:20:25 +0000

> Personally, I think that RDBMS's are RDBMS's and browsers are browsers. and that the whole thing could have been worked out politely. But that, apparently, did not suit either party's self-interest. I think less of both parties for it all.

Hmm that is true if you assume that the person googling for your product will bother to add at least the word "database" after the name, if he tries it without and gets a plethora of hits for the browser.

Marketing droid or not, I wouldn't make that assumption.

I'm the author of a little known piece of software called "gitolite", and one of the reasons I chose this name among all the other alternatives I could think of (gitman, gitadmin, gitamin, and a dozen other combinations) was that this word got me exactly 3 results, and none of them in English.

I'm not selling anything, it's GPL, and the whole thing is less than a few hundred lines and expected to remain that way -- it's pretty much feature complete and "done" now, yet I bothered to do that.

That's the world we live in I guess :-)

Ingres Database 9.3 released

csamuel — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:45:43 +0000

The other publicity that helped people notice Firebird (though perhaps not
in the way that was intended) was the fact that in 2001 someone spotted
that both it and the earlier Borland/Inprise Interbase (v4.x, v5.x and
6.x) databases had a compiled in back door account. :-(

http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2001-01.html

Classic FUD

JoeBuck — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:42:57 +0000

It is deceptive to claim that "... the fate of MySQL is currently in the hands of the European Commission". The EU is investigating Oracle's acquisition of Sun because of Oracle's history of buying and discontinuing competing products; there were concerns expressed that they might want to do this to MySQL. Oracle insists that they have no such intentions, and the EU intervention is intended to protect MySQL. So either Oracle will satisfy the regulators' concerns or else MySQL will have to be spun off, but either way, MySQL is in no danger.

If we interpret "the fate of MySQL" to imply that there's a chance that MySQL will be killed off, there's no chance of that at least in the near term, since the EU is intervening to protect it. If the marketing droid merely meant that there's uncertainty about which corporate structure will wind up running MySQL, it's unlikely that users should care.

Windows only?

alvherre — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:25:09 +0000

Funny how they neglected to mention that they are releasing it for Windows only at this time.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

sbergman27 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:57:45 +0000

> you're off-base talking about Firebird this way. You didn't know about it before, but I did.

Well... wasn't that integral to the point I was making? You and a few other people were focused upon Firebird. The rest of us weren't. I think I was aware of it, peripherally, back before. But after the fracas... everyone paying any attention in this neck of the woods knew what Firebird was, whether we respected their actions or not. And whether we respected Mozilla Corp's actions or not.

Personally, I think that RDBMS's are RDBMS's and browsers are browsers. and that the whole thing could have been worked out politely. But that, apparently, did not suit either party's self-interest. I think less of both parties for it all.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

sbergman27 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:40:22 +0000

Well... I'm not exactly a fan of Mozilla Corp when it comes to heavy-handed trademark issues. But in that case, it was IBPhoenix acting in a heavy handed way.

Even in retrospect, it is hard to know who to root for. But none of that changes the fact that IBPhoenix's marketing department managed to pull off a major publicity coup, relatively speaking, by exploiting the situation. And I have no doubt that they knew exactly what they were doing at the time.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

allesfresser — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:31:02 +0000

>the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT

Why does this sort of remind me of Baghdad Bob? Someone's at least got the Hubris part of Larry Wall's Three Virtues down cold.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

ncm — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:13:30 +0000

Yes, you're off-base talking about Firebird this way. You didn't know about it before, but I did. The Mozilla crew's behavior and attitude were disgraceful. They seem to have learned from the experience, though.

Me, I'm a little bit surprised to learn Ingres still exists.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

stumbles — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:12:51 +0000

Thank you for the disclosure, and not it does not seem relevant to me. But I do agree with your observation about the um, stubbornness of Mozilla and how a simple google could have avoided the whole issue.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

hingo — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:59:54 +0000

Firebird (the database) existed well before Mozilla wanted to use the same name, and just because you didn't know about it doesn't make it unknown. Mozilla's stubborness in the case to insist on using a name that was already in use was surprising to watch. (And the lack of research when picking the name: google "firebird open source")

(Should I put a disclaimer here that I used to work for Sun/MySQL and now work with MariaDB? Doesn't seem to have any relevance with my comment :-)

Ingres Database 9.3 released

deltaray — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:39:31 +0000

But it is interesting to note that the press release does not mention PostgreSQL at all.

I wouldn't mention it either if I were them. They are trying to keep their customers and potential customers from knowing about PostgreSQL.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

sbergman27 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:19:07 +0000

> "As the fate of MySQL is currently in the hands of the European
> Commission, open source community developers and our global business
> customers and partners are seeking a more stable, reliable open source
> database," said Deb Woods, vice president of product management,

Is that a typo? Shouldn't it be "Deb Woods, Queen of Marketing Droids at Ingres Corp"?

Seriously, though, despite MySQL's status as FOSS Database poster child, PostgreSQL, Ingres' kindred competitor, is the one to beat. The MySQL *projects* handle their user base very nicely and are in no immediate danger. Certainly not from the EC. And, in fact, the EC is looking out for MySQL's welfare. Perhaps a little too enthusiastically, regarding the official Sun branch.

This reminds me a bit of IBPhoenix's publicity stunt when they attacked Mozilla some years ago. Sometimes this sort of nonsensical stunt actually works. Firebird Database was unknown before. But after their Mozilla attack, the articles about Firebird DB really started flowing. Though to this day I still turn a jaundiced eye to that bunch, and to the then Queen of their Marketing Droids of the time.

But it is interesting to note that the press release does not mention PostgreSQL at all.