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MySQL man pages license change is a bug
- MDCore 13y agoI prefer to imagine Larry Ellison wringing his hands saying "Curses! And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids!" Also he's in an abandoned fairground for some reason.
- huhtenberg 13y ago> started pulling in man pages with the wrong set of copyright headers And how has the wrong set of copyright headers ended up on said pages?
- chrisrhoden 13y agoThe non-community release, maybe?
- kryten 13y agoApplying Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- nicholassmith 13y agoI've always liked Hanlon's razor, I think it's woefully forgotten in the tech community who often reach for the pitchforks without thinking.
- huhtenberg 13y agoWitty. Now please demonstrate how it looks applied to this case.
- TallGuyShort 13y agoReplace "malice" with "conspiracy to eradicate open-source MySQL" and "stupidity" with "bugs in the packaging code".
- huhtenberg 13y agoGood, good, almost there. Now elaborate on "bugs in the packaging code" part. What does "the wrong set of copyright headers" do in a vicinity of the packaging pipeline and how it came to exist in the first place. It's easy to throw around flashy one-liners. It's a bit more work to actually try and read into the facts presented.
- TallGuyShort 13y agoAs has already been stated on this same page, there's a community edition and a commercial edition. They're likely part of the same packaging pipeline. Do not be condescending on Hacker News when someone is responding to your question. It's easy to jump to conclusions. It's a bit more to actually try and understand what happened - that is the point of Hanlon's Razor. This may have been intentional, yes. But it may also have been a bug.
- huhtenberg 13y ago> Do not be condescending on Hacker News when someone is responding to your question. Do not dispense unsolicited advice on the Internets. That wasn't a reply. It was a highbrow remark that was as generic as it was barely applicable. A proper reply was the sibling comment that pointed at two editions.
- kryten 13y agoThe context was implied and definitely applicable. This is now becoming pedantic so let's invoke Godwin's law and stop valuable electrons being pushed around for no reason. The nazis did it. Everyone happy now? :)
- darnaut 13y agoThe MySQL build team has a script that updates the license header in files that require it. Since the "different license" is actually the license of the documentation, from which the man pages are generated, it is possible that the script failed to update the licence text in the man pages. Source: Ex-Oracle MySQL engineer.
- morgo 13y agoMore official comment: http://insidemysql.com/the-mysql-man-pages-are-available-under-the-gpl/ http://insidemysql.com/the-mysql-man-pages-are-available-und...
- JonnieCache 13y agoThat is the most amazing banner image I've seen on any blog ever.
- davvolun 13y agoI think you and I differ on our definitions of 'amazing.'
- future_grad 13y agoI just wanted to verify how amazing the banner image is. Hilarious.
- mdda 13y agoIt's interesting that in order to avoid the guy's head leaning over at exactly the same angle in every picture, they flipped the image on the left horizontally.
- brey 13y agosaw that coming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
- btilly 13y agoWhen you combine Hanlon's razor (Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity) with Clarke's law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) you get Grey' corollary (Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice). Anyone who has sufficient exposure to any large bureaucracy will have examples of the last to share. Which then raises the possibility that (as is happening currently with Bank of America) the possibility of advanced stupidity is used to cover actual malice.
- diminoten 13y ago...which leads us right back to Hanlon's razor (it's probably not malice, just stupidity).
- btilly 13y agoBut this time with the "Never" somewhat qualified.
- diminoten 13y agoThe "Never" isn't literal in the original razor.
- jholman 13y agoYes, it is literal. Hanlon's razor is advice about what predictions you should make (or which hypotheses you should advocate, if you like). It says that when you don't know whether something is malice or stupidity, you should never predict/theorize the former.
- SEJeff 13y agoThis is typical Monty. He cries foul how awful $mysql_owner is and how they do such bad things. He is the one that sold MySQL to Sun. If anyone is to blame for the current state of MySQL affairs, it is undoubtedly him.
- daleharvey 13y agoThis report has nothing to do with Monty And if you watch his presentations about MySQL you can see he fully accepts that he made a mistake with the way MySQL grew and he is rectifying that with MariaDB in which he has invested a significant amount personally
- mdip 13y agoI found the jump to assume that Oracle decided to stick it to the MySql community telling of the community's trust of Oracle's commitment to MySql as an open source database (and not just from the echo chamber that Hacker News can be sometimes ... I was greeted with this news upon starting work this morning from two different colleagues, neither of which frequent this site). My sense is this originates from a few perceptions of Larry Ellison and Oracle: (1) Oracle does give a whip about Open Source software. (2) Oracle charges so much for their primary RDBMS technology that it would only be natural for them to undermine MySql as an open source database technology (a view I, personally, share despite evidence to the contrary). (3) As a tech, in a past life, I've had to support Java on the client side for some really poorly written Java apps. Aside from the experience being utterly awful due to this horrible app, I have little trust for a company that installs toolbars alongside critical patches and then defends the practice when called out. I'm finding my view of Oracle is so negative (maybe I've been supporting Oracle software for way too long?) that I'm not going to be fully convinced this was a bug until the "wrong set of copyright headers" is fixed. That's pretty sad since it makes little sense that Oracle would relicense just the man pages in some sort of conspiracy to squeeze a dime out of its customers. Either way, it's always a good reminder of my personal favorite variation of Hanlon's razor: Where there are gaps of understanding, people jump to the worst possible conclusion.
- zimpenfish 13y agoSeverity: OHBUGGERTHEYNOTICED
- maskedinvader 13y agohaha, that was a good one :). I guess everyone on HN can keep away the swords and pitch forks now !
- darnaut 13y agoNo word yet on why the source code for the MySQL documentation is no longer publicly available. Was recently and silently made unavailable. This is much worse than a few man pages.
- inigoesdr 13y agoYou can download the documentation here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ Or are you referring to the scripts that generate it?
- darnaut 13y agoI'm referring to the source code that is used to build and generate the documentation available in that link. The MySQL documentation is written using the DocBook XML format. Here is a link to an older version of the page where the documentation was available: http://web.archive.org/web/20121030130559/http://dev.mysql.com/doc/index-other.html http://web.archive.org/web/20121030130559/http://dev.mysql.c... See "Documentation Repositories".
- freehunter 13y agoWe've seen this twice in two days now. Facebook is blocking Tor except that maybe they're not. MySQL is now under a new license, except it's not. The alarmist headlines not waiting for a response from the newly-damned organization, instead issuing a retraction after everyone has freaked out. Will the tech community ever get past the manufactured controversy and knee-jerk reaction we lambast the mainstream media for?
- kbenson 13y agoNews at 11, citizen journalists begin acting more like real journalists by jumping the gun on stories! You heard it here first!
- tedivm 13y agoYou're completely right on the tor thing, but I think this MySQL one is different. I don't think this would have been considered a bug if there hadn't been negative backlash- if it had gone unnoticed or if no one had created a stink about it, then I don't think Oracle would have been nearly as eager to revert the change. Claiming it was just a build bug (that rearranged, and rewrote, their copyright and licensing info) seems more like a good way to back down from a bad change than anything else.
- freehunter 13y agoI would be willing to believe that they are planning on this change and just happened to accidentally release the change too early (and therefore can legitimately call it a bug). I would doubt they would go through all of the legal and organizational red tape just to revert the change when a couple hundred customers complained. Oracle can't and wouldn't back down that quickly.
- pessimizer 13y agoMore like Facebook is blocking Tor except it was an accident, and MySQL is now under a new license except it was an accident. The idea of shaming people away from pointing out, and yes, speculating on the motives for these changes is a terrible idea for a forum. And if these things hadn't surfaced on HN, do you think they would have been corrected so quickly? What would the the "newly-damned organizations" be posting a response to? Will HN ever get past all of the whiny meta about what other people are posting or upvoting?
- mathnode 13y agothe only thing any mysql/mariadb news does for me is highlight how the average (and depressingly top voted) hacker news/proggit/slashdot commenter knows fuck all about either of them.
- mathnode 13y agoI made that comment on a phone. I mostly wish I had not.
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoAt least this served as a reminder of the possibility of such action from Oracle.