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Oracle makes move to kill open source MySQL
- accarrino 14y agothe line between what Oracle considers open and closed get fuzzier all the time. makes being a developer a pain in the ass.
- luriel 14y agoNo, it is easy: avoid anything touched by Oracle like the plague.
- mbreese 14y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- lttlrck 14y agoHow much did it cost to replace those 3 servers? >10K I bet...
- derpmeister 14y agoThis reeks of extortion. Let's sell the rejects to the customers without a support contract. That'll teach 'em.
- quesera 14y agoIn the enterprise hardware world, I don't know any vendor who will offer an answer other than "call your sales rep" to a customer who didn't buy a service contract.
- mbreese 14y agoIt was a charity donation (by Oracle) of hardware and services, and the service contract wasn't part of the donation. The initial donation was laudable, but the hardware was weak. Needless to say, the 3 dead servers were not replaced.
- fredsanford 14y agoTime to brush up on Postgres or Firebird. Let Oracle shoot off all their feet.
- Nogwater 14y agoI don't know anything about Firebird. Is it really a good replacement for MySQL?
- fredsanford 14y agoI 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.
- derpmeister 14y agoPostgres is developing a lot quicker then Firebird. Also, management and replication solutions for Postgres are far more advanced. But what matters most (for me) is documentation. I can find everything I need to know right here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/interactive/sql-commands.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/interactive/sql-commands....
- mrweasel 14y agoFirebird 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 14y agoI 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoLibreSQL, where are you? :(
- skymt 14y agoIsn't that what MariaDB is for?
- siloraptor 14y agoYes, Drizzle and MariaDB are two MySQL forks that are gaining good momentum. Let hope another OpenOffice -> LibreOffice move can be done again.
- masklinn 14y agoMariaDB 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).
- fhars 14y agoHe does no longer own the exclusive rights to the code (they are Oracle's now) and so can only publish under the GPL.
- protomyth 14y agoAn 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.
- james-skemp 14y agoFor 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 ... :)
- darklajid 14y agoThat'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.
- quesera 14y agoMySQL 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.
- taligent 14y agoWhat's happening to Solaris ? It is still open and available for download at http://opensolaris.org http://opensolaris.org. It just isn't being supported by Oracle anymore since they are focused on Oracle Linux.
- quesera 14y agoIt isn't inventing the next DTraces and ZFSes. FreeBSD is doing a great job of catching up with Solaris innovations. I love those guys! And maybe we can ride for a few more years on Sun's largesse. But who will push things forward?
- 4ad 14y agoNo, the gate has been closed about two years ago. Solaris is not open source anymore. The illumos guys forked the last available version of the code and push it forward independently.
- r00fus 14y agoLarry has always wanted to have Bill's place in the world. He's a far worse monopolist than Bill ever was.
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- ucee054 14y agoDon't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=39m25s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=39m25s
- dj2stein9 14y agoAs mentioned in the comments see MariaDB (http://mariadb.org/ http://mariadb.org/), an open source fork of MySQL from before the Oracle acquisition. Like Hudson, MySQL will live on.
- arkitaip 14y agoYeah, Maria is the fork that people should switch to. Also, it's created by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the original developer of MySQL.
- csense 14y agoOr PostgreSQL. I've been hearing good things about it lately.
- meritt 14y agoI've been using Percona for a number of years now. Are there any solid comparisons between Percona and MariaDB?
- spudlyo 14y agoMariaDB 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/about-xtradb/ http://kb.askmonty.org/en/aria-faq/ http://kb.askmonty.org/en/aria-faq/
- viraptor 14y agoIf 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.
- army 14y agoI don't think Percona sees itself as a fork: it is just MySQL + special Percona patches.
- grandalf 14y agoLet's hope someone forks it and teaches Oracle a lesson.
- ddon 14y agoMariaDB is already a fork of MySQL, and many developers from MySQL now developing MariaDB.
- fatbird 14y agoIsn'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?
- siloraptor 14y agoFour known forks so far (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#Forks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#Forks)
- mtgx 14y agoIt 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.
- masklinn 14y 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 14y agoIBM 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.
- crag 14y agoThere are other open source projects at Oracle that are still "alive". Like Netbeans.
- ibotty 14y ago"alive" :D
- spudlyo 14y agoThis 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.
- jeffdavis 14y 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?
- spudlyo 14y agoHow 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.
- army 14y agoFrom 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.
- ibotty 14y agoit 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.
- joeycfan 14y agoMySql is done. We saw this coming. PostgreSQL is wired now.
- SoapSeller 14y agoSee previous submissions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4400797 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4400797 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397124 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397124
- Sauce1971 14y agoI 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.
- crag 14y agoI 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 14y agoMy 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.
- jeffdavis 14y agoDisclaimer: 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.
- zeruch 14y 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 14y agoTC;DR.
- mikenereson 14y agoIsn'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.