On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 19:27:42 -0500,
Tom Lane <tgl(a)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.