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Indeed, the title is linkbait.

• wisty 17y ago
  Shameless linkbait. Summarizing the article: no, because Linus and the Apache foundation are sponsored. My opinion: if you need a tool, but can't get paid for it, then releasing it open source is a good way to get free code reviews and bug fixes. It's not ideal, but for code you can't monetize, open sourcing it is a fine idea.
• viraptor 17y ago
  It seems that it's not only linkbait, the article is slightly wrong with the answer. Sure, there's RedHat and loads of other OS projects, but I can't agree with "there is no end of suckers willing to maintain it for free"... and not because of "suckers" and "for free". MySql is a very specific project and not that many people from outside of the Monty's or Sun's team can do anything about it really. There's not much of community development, because it's not really a community project. (a bit like the official openoffice) It was always hard to get your own code inside, there was no "typical" dev community around the project - just look how dead is the "internals" mailing list. Now that Mysql has an "official" dev group outside of Sun, of course they're going to pick up the project. But these are the people who left Sun. Noone else is rushing in to "maintain it for free".