On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 8:48 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to> wrote:
On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 19:27:42 -0500,
 Tom Lane <tgl@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Monty thinks it's impossible to make money off open source unless he
> can dual-license it.  Setting aside various existence proofs to the
> contrary, the fact remains that he already SOLD the rights to
> dual-license MySQL, when he sold MySQL AB to Sun; and he made a pretty
> hefty amount of money doing so.  Now he'd like the EU to force Oracle to
> give him back that right for free.  This isn't so much about "let's help
> save MySQL" as it is about "let's help Monty get a second bite of the
> apple".
>
> (FWIW, I completely agree with Monty that Oracle is likely to do their
> best to kill MySQL once they have it.  But they can't kill the GPL'd
> version as long as people are willing to work on that.  Evidently
> Monty isn't.)

I pretty much agree with all of the above. I don't feel sorry for Monty.
With all of the money he got I wouldn't have expected money to be an issue.
If he wants to work on a fork he can afford to, and if he doesn't want to
work on one, money is unlikely to provide enough incentive to make him
want to either.

I don't really see a downside if Oracle does kill off new MySQL development,
as Postgres has been better for a very long while and Postgres might get
more / better out of the box support (and proper use) from open source
applications.


I dunno. While I did push for the CMS project I work on to support PostgreSQL, I personally think that Postgres is huge overkill for most things. It can also be a huge PITA to set up. Whenever I have to test Postgres stuff, I usually grab EnterpriseDB's distribution because I don't want to suffer hell setting it up on the various platforms I have to test on.