[Liverpool] Open war: MySQL community vs. Oracle/Sun's mobilization campaign

[Dave Love]

aidan mcguire <aidan at scraperwiki.com> writes:

> In light of this aggressive campaigning by Oracle, Monty made the
> following call on the open source community a few hours ago:
> http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html

It seems people are being conned by the `open source' business.  MySQL
is under copyleft and (derivatives of it, if necessary) will stay free,
short of pretty strange legal precedent.  (Read what Eben Moglen has to
say on the matter.)  The idea that the copyright owners should be forced
to change the licence is odd, and clearly motivated by proprietary
business aims, not the good of the community.  Where does it stop?

I'm not a database expert, but there appear to be at least three free
alternatives to MySQL which are actually industrial strength (Postgres,
Ingres, and Firebird) and which are mostly being ignored in the
`competition' argument by people convinced Oracle will stuff MySQL; they
may do, but it's far from clear they will, and it seems moot to me.

Screwing the Sun deal can only be bad for the community as far as I can
tell (and I talk to people in Sun, with whom I have better relationships
than I've had with people from any other computer company).  Those of us
in the HPC game, particularly, don't want to see things go further down
the pan and -- apart from the hardware -- we depend on Sun free software
which is not MySQL, or even Java, and unfortunately isn't generally
copyleft.