Mickos Says MySQL Code Better Than Ever Under Oracle 117
jbrodkin writes "Oracle hasn't done much to foster a community around open source projects, but the former CEO of MySQL said Oracle's expertise has helped boost the database to new heights from a technology perspective. 'Many in the community will ... feel that it's not as open and open source as it used to be and that's true,' Marten Mickos said. 'But the core product, the actual code, is in better shape than ever. And I think they will keep it that way.' Mickos, now head of Eucalyptus, left Sun before the Oracle merger because he correctly predicted that the company could not survive on its own."
Re:The article... (Score:2, Informative)
Oracle charges about $2,000 per server each year to use MySQL, and about $200 per user or $6,000 per processor for Oracle (perpetual licence).
With $10,000 you can get the MySQL Cluster edition (which is the highend version) for an unlimited number of users.
Re:MySQL's founder would probably dissagree (Score:5, Informative)
Couldn't be anymore obvious you're trolling, but others might like to know it does have transactions [askmonty.org], and it's ACID compliant. It wont officially replace MySQL ever because so much software depends on the actual name MySQL for linking to and Oracle would probably have a problem with a distribution keeping folders linked to the name even if it isn't using the Oracle Maintained MySQL. However, most of the main distros (debian, ubuntu, gentoo, etc) will or already do have it in their official repositories and MariaDB also has their own signed repositories for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and more listed on their downloads page.
Re:Who knows... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a PostgreSQL contributor. Oracle can't buy my copyright. There are dozens of other code contributors just like me in that regard, working for many companies. It was possible to buy MySQL because most of the code was developed by MySQL Ab, and copyright assignments required for contributions to be merged. See Some thoughts on Copyright Assignment [gnome.org] for more details. That's not the case for PostgreSQL.
Furthermore, the PostgreSQL community has already been through the process of having a single corporation "buy" many of the top contributors, when a company named Great Bridge hired many of them. The disruption to the PostgreSQL community of Great Bridge failing [open-mag.com] was such that even starting in that direction is actively rejected now. So even if a company did start gobbling up developers one at a time, they would face increasing resistance at obtaining the remaining ones.
Re:The article... (Score:4, Informative)
I thought MySQL was under the GPL? You can't charge for using GPL'd software.
MySQL has always been available under a dual license, and you can charge for GPL'd software.
Re:The article... (Score:5, Informative)
You have no idea what you're talking about, apparently. Get informed before you start whining.
The community editions of MySQL and Cluster (NDB) are still as freely downloadable as ever. If you want support, you'll have to cough up. I know, it's terribly bad form of them to not support you for free. Oh, except for the mailing lists, on which quite a few of the lead developers and some pretty good DBAs are active.
As for the Oracle licenses, you seem to be stuck in 1990 or something. Oracle pricing is way to complicated to explain here - even if I did understand all of it - but list price is one hell of a lot more expensive than what you say.