MySQL closing off it’s source.
MySQL has quietly announced that it will no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball (see: www.linux.com/feature/118489).
After talking with Donnie (a good friend of mine) about this, his take on it was:
“HELLO! Does anyone remember SSH vs OpenSSH? First BitTorrent, and now MySQL? Maybe failure to learn from past software packages mishaps also dooms it to repeat it.”
Mistake? Seems to me like it could get them in trouble (Red Hat anyone?).
“Kaj Arnö, the company’s vice president of community relations, wrote that the Enterprise tarballs “will be removed from ftp.mysql.com. These will move to enterprise.mysql.com, and will be available for our paying subscribers only.” Customers will also be able to get the source out of the MySQL BitKeeper repository, but it will no longer be available as a source tarball.
According to Arnö, the move was made to “underline the positioning goal of ‘Community Server for community users, Enterprise Server for paying users’. And the GPL requires us (like anybody else) to hand out the code to those whom we give the binaries, which in the case of MySQL Enterprise Server is just the customers.” This does conform with the letter of the GPL, as Arnö points out on his blog, but how will it fly with the community? Some in the MySQL community aren’t too pleased. Mike Kruckenberg, whose blog is carried on Planet MySQL, called this a move away from open source for MySQL.”
I’m not so sure this is going to work very well for them….
Leave a Reply