Oracle makes move to kill open source MySQL

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/oracle-makes-more-moves-to-kill-open-source-mysql/?grcc=33333Z98ZtrendingZ0Z0Z0Z0Z0&grcc2=a121e3c06bfcc5573019c68937c7183b~1345472977381~fca4fa8af1286d8a77f26033fdeed202~unknown~1345117195375~98~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~9~3~

by siloraptor • 14 years ago

136 92 14 years ago

techcrunch.com

accarrino• 14 years ago

the line between what Oracle considers open and closed get fuzzier all the time. makes being a developer a pain in the ass.

luriel2• 14 years ago

No, it is easy: avoid anything touched by Oracle like the plague.

mbreese2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, that includes hardware too... A friend had 3 out of 13 Oracle servers die with random memory errors (persistent). Of course, if they had a 10K+ service contract they'd be happy to help.

fredsanford3• 14 years ago

Time to brush up on Postgres or Firebird.

Let Oracle shoot off all their feet.

Nogwater• 14 years ago

I don't know anything about Firebird. Is it really a good replacement for MySQL?

fredsanford3• 14 years ago

I found it to be pretty solid and fast when I last used it, which was right after Borland Open-Sourced it. It was forked from Interbase.

mrweasel• 14 years ago

Firebird seems stable and fast enough, what it does lack is good client libraries. We looked at different database solution when rewriting our current webshop and Firebird was something we looked at, but because we're a Python shop we dropped it. I'm not saying that the current Python driver doesn't work, it does, but it doesn't seem to be updated very infrequently and it's still seems more like an InterBase driver than a Firebird driver. We went the Postgresql route, and why really, why wouldn't you?

Don't get me wrong, it's a great database and I know a company that use nothing else and won't switch if you paid them, ( They are use .Net ).

nobleach• 14 years ago

I wrote an accounts receivable/payable app in Borland Delphi back in 2002. At the time Interbase was the easy choice. At that time, Interbase was transitioning to Firebird. I dropped it in as a replacement and it did its job fine. If you like MySQL, you'll miss auto incrementing Primary Key Columns that MySQL seems to have made so popular. It's not too hard to setup a trigger for sequence types, but it's not built in. (or it wasn't back then) All the tools for management were the Interbase tools. Most of my stuff is either MySQL these days or Postgres when I need good spatial support. I've messed with CouchDB a bit. I just don't see Firebird going anywhere for my needs.

jlarocco• 14 years ago

Shoot their feet off how?

Most people saying "Time to switch from MySQL" (probably) aren't paying for MySQL. From a business perspective, those people are a net loss anyway. Getting them to switch to something else may actually save Oracle a little money.

Sauce19713• 14 years ago

But they could happen in the future to work for a corporation that would like to pay, but as it stands they will never suggest using MySQL. Thus MySQL will slowly disappear from the youngs mindshare and Oracle will make no money at all on it.

fredsanford3• 14 years ago

How many people use a SQL DB without some form of support contract?

To do so is not too smart if your business relies on the DB to function.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

LibreSQL, where are you? :(

skymt• 14 years ago

Isn't that what MariaDB is for?

siloraptor2• 14 years ago

Yes, Drizzle and MariaDB are two MySQL forks that are gaining good momentum. Let hope another OpenOffice -> LibreOffice move can be done again.

masklinn3• 14 years ago

MariaDB is by Monty, creator of MySQL who previously sold-then-forked it. So there's no guarantee the same thing won't happen to it (quite the opposite really).

protomyth• 14 years ago

An honest question, why support the people who caused this situation in the first place? It really seems like supporting other groups would be more appropriate.

luriel2• 14 years ago

PostgreSQL.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

That's like me saying "LibreOffice, where are you?" and you saying "AbiWord".

james-skemp• 14 years ago

For those who try to stay away from TC: "it appears that Oracle is making its revision tests and histories closed source" sums up the few paragraph link bait ... :)

adgar• 14 years ago

Linkbait indeed. The move toward "open core," shitty as it may be, has been transparently ongoing for some time now.

mykhamill• 14 years ago

Thanks for that, it is like you read my mind :)

darklajid2• 14 years ago

That's the same company that bundles much needed java security updates with the opt-out option of installing a weird browser toolbar and setting the homepage to a crappy service, right?

Seriously, I never cared about that company as long as it was just selling expensive (but supposedly feature rich?) software to the enterprise, but it seems the alternatives to Oracle's java and MySQL need some more support, market- and mindshare.

quesera6• 14 years ago

MySQL and Java don't affect me much personally, but I think the way they've handled Solaris is a real tragedy for the industry.

Larry is the new Bill. I blame Jonathan.

taligent4• 14 years ago

What's happening to Solaris ?

It is still open and available for download at http://opensolaris.org. It just isn't being supported by Oracle anymore since they are focused on Oracle Linux.

r00fus• 14 years ago

Larry has always wanted to have Bill's place in the world. He's a far worse monopolist than Bill ever was.

darklajid2• 14 years ago

I personally stopped using MySQL quite a while ago as well. Java, on the other hand, got resurrected for me with Groovy first, then Clojure (and a passing interest in Scala).

Yeah, I know about openjdk. But they don't provide official binaries for all I know (and certainly not for Windows, linking back to the Oracle distribution).

ucee054• 14 years ago

Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=39m25s

dj2stein9• 14 years ago

As mentioned in the comments see MariaDB (http://mariadb.org/), an open source fork of MySQL from before the Oracle acquisition. Like Hudson, MySQL will live on.

arkitaip• 14 years ago

Yeah, Maria is the fork that people should switch to. Also, it's created by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the original developer of MySQL.

csense• 14 years ago

Or PostgreSQL. I've been hearing good things about it lately.

meritt• 14 years ago

I've been using Percona for a number of years now. Are there any solid comparisons between Percona and MariaDB?

spudlyo3• 14 years ago

MariaDB ships with XtraDB, Percona's modified InnoDB engine. If you're planning on using InnoDB (which just about everyone is) the differences are pretty minor.

The big difference is that MariaDB comes with the Aria storage engine, which is a crash safe alternative to MyISAM.

http://kb.askmonty.org/en/about-xtradb/

http://kb.askmonty.org/en/aria-faq/

viraptor• 14 years ago

If you're using mainly InnoDB and want more reliability / performance / less variance in execution time - go for Percona, that's what they're specialising in. Also you can use the company for support when needed.

army2• 14 years ago

I don't think Percona sees itself as a fork: it is just MySQL + special Percona patches.

grandalf• 14 years ago

Let's hope someone forks it and teaches Oracle a lesson.

ddon• 14 years ago

MariaDB is already a fork of MySQL, and many developers from MySQL now developing MariaDB.

fatbird• 14 years ago

Isn't MariaDB the fork by Monty, the original developer of MySQL who sold it to Sun in the first place, setting off multiple rounds of cashing out?

siloraptor2• 14 years ago

Four known forks so far (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#Forks)

mtgx• 14 years ago

It seems Oracle is on a trend to kill everything open source they've acquired from Sun. Java seems to be the only one left, and it would've happened already if they won the trial with Google, but I'm sure they'll do something equally dumb in the future to kill finally Java, too.

masklinn3• 14 years ago

> It seems Oracle is on a trend to kill everything open source they've acquired from Sun.

Oracle is, above everything else, about monetization. If they can't make money out of it, they will either change it so they can make money out of it, or they'll kill it.

Sun was generally good at open-source (though not perfect by a long shot, OpenSolaris was not exactly a slam dunk and the CDDL was rather weird — and explicitly and expressedly made incompatible with the GPL), but they were rather bad at monetizing. Oracle's the exact opposite.

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

IBM is also about monetization.

It also realizes that most of its monetization comes from professional services, and saw that 1) software subscription revenues were declining across the board, proprietary or Open Source, and 2) Open Source created (to IBM's lawyer's eyes) a possible threat to its patent holdings (a considerable revenue stream / business value themselves) which was best addressed by keeping core development outside the organization (Red Hat, Novell/Suse, Kernel.org, Apache.org).

Oracle's direction (as was Sun's somewhat schizoid approach to Free Software / Open Source before as noted by its supporting the Caldera/SCO Group attacks against Linux) are making it a non-credible source. Hence the forking of projects (Lumina, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, MariaDB, etc.) it had inherited.

crag5• 14 years ago

There are other open source projects at Oracle that are still "alive". Like Netbeans.

ibotty2• 14 years ago

"alive" :D

dexterchief• 14 years ago

Why the quotes around "alive"? What has been happening with the Netbeans project?

Legion• 14 years ago

Well, there are some projects still going. But the joke is:

Q: Why hasn't Oracle ruined Virtualbox yet?

A: Because they're going in alphabetical order.

spudlyo3• 14 years ago

This test-case controversy was both discovered and ginned up by Monty and the MariaDB folks, who have much to gain by the rejection of Oracle's brand of MySQL and the promotion of MariaDB. While it may be part of some larger and sinister plan to "kill" open source MySQL as the article suggests, it seems more likely to me that it was simply a mistake, and one they'll walk back at some point.

If it is an anti-competitive move, it reminds me of the recent move by RedHat, who have started shipping their new kernels as one big source tarball, without patches, which undoubtedly pissed off both Oracle and the CentOS folks.

jeffdavis3• 14 years ago

"it seems more likely to me that it was simply a mistake, and one they'll walk back at some point."

How do you explain removing access to the source repository then? Or the fact that the documentation is not free to redistribute?

spudlyo3• 14 years ago

How do you explain removing access to the source repository then?

I can easily explain it, because it never happened. Access to the MySQL source repository on launchpad is available for anyone to browse. Oracle is occasionally lazy about updating it, but they've never removed access AFAIK.

Or the fact that the documentation is not free to redistribute?

The documentation has never been free to redistribute, it was that way under Monty, it was that way under Sun, and it remains that way under Oracle.

army2• 14 years ago

From what I've heard withholding test cases is actually official Oracle policy, unlike, for example, the lack of updates to the launchpad repository. There wasn't any deliberate attempt to without commit history from launchpad - they were just slow in updating it.

ibotty2• 14 years ago

it does not matter to simple rhel rebuilds like centos or scientific linux. it is unfortunate for the linux stable kernel maintainers. that's for sure though.

it is very different from this case. that it's a simple mistake is not very probable. see the java sec update controversy a few days ago.

SoapSeller• 14 years ago

See previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4400797 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397124

Sauce19713• 14 years ago

I used to enjoy working with Oracle databases, but the horrible pricing and high need for dba maintenance was always discomforting. Switch for a while to MSSQL, but then the market for Windows apps disappeared. Have been using mySQL with very little sort of DB satisfaction. Now I don't know why anyone would not choose PostgreSQL for almost any project. Oracle is a bad apple, making money with methods aking to extortion.

crag5• 14 years ago

I still wonder why SQLite isn't used more. Granted for busy large sites/applications SQLite is the wrong tool. But most sites using MySQL are small.

paulgb• 14 years ago

My experience with SQLite is that if you're using it as more than an object-store, you'll be disappointed by the limited subset of SQL it supports. And if you do just need an object store, Mongo is often a better fit and gives you flexible schema.

That said, as an embedded DB I would use SQLite.

jeffdavis3• 14 years ago

Disclaimer: It's been a while since I tried to use SQLite for anything.

I've never really felt that it was actually easier to use than a client/server DBMS. I can imagine that it's good for some kinds of embedded applications, but for normal web applications I don't see any improvement in usability. Juggling files is not any easier than setting up a connection.

And there were always annoyances associated with the simplicity. All those "complex features" in a real DBMS turn out to be useful sooner than you think (and I don't mean "once in production" I mean while still in development). Even the simplest applications can usually benefit from good support for dates and times.

I think SQLite just drew the line in the wrong place for most applications (although it may serve a niche quite well). Oversimplification requires the developer to reinvent, which results in a much more complex system overall (or one that at least requires more work to develop and maintain). Key/value stores have similar problems for general-purpose application development.

nahname• 14 years ago

SQLite is not a real solution for anything needing to support more than one user at a time. It's fine for things like managing bookmarks within firefox, but not for a full relational database replacement. The write access is single threaded (at least last time I used it).

Sauce19713• 14 years ago

SQLite is very nice for simple single user apps :-)

taligent4• 14 years ago

>Now I don't know why anyone would not choose PostgreSQL for almost any project.

No offense but people who make statements like this clearly don't know much about the current state of databases. PostgreSQL is pretty bad in many areas compared to the newer databases e.g. ease of clustering and sharding, developer friendliness, JSON support, tool support etc.

It's great as a replacement for a typical RDBMS but if you're working on a new startup project I would see no reason to use it.

killedbydeath2• 14 years ago

Not sure what you mean by lack of developer friendliness and what specific tools you find it lacking. Postgres is a great choice for new startups that need an RDBMS and like having schema for their data. There is built-in JSON support in upcoming 9.2 release and most JSON-to-schema mapping should be done in application anyway. Sharding is easy to do at application level; you would lose ability to do certain queries across shards but most solutions offering automatic sharding are designed specifically not to allow most types inter-shard querying and instead offer map-reduce.

fooyc• 14 years ago

> ease of clustering and sharding, developer friendliness, JSON support, tool support etc.

Which RDBMS do you have in mind ?

xradionut• 14 years ago

MS SQL Server is mainly used by corporations for corporations, so there is a market and good money for apps and expertise in those circles if you have the expertise in the MS stack.

For OSS projects that require a RDBMS, PostgreSQL is a good choice. I instinctively choose it over MySQL years ago and have been pleased.

zeruch• 14 years ago

...and in the process opens the floodgates of possibilities for Drizzle, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and everyone else. Oracle has already shown fairly conclusively it can do little else but mismanage its acquired Sun assets.

jorisw• 14 years ago

TC;DR.

mikenereson• 14 years ago

Isn't saying that MySQL and Java doesn't affect you like saying that Linux doesn't affect you because you use Windows?

These open technologies make the world turn.

Oracle makes move to kill open source MySQL

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