Nice post. I have been against this since the beginning. Some people say it’s Sun’s fault that they wanted more ways to generate revenue. But the enterprise edition was created before Sun’s acquisition, and the culprit was “enterprise edition” which hid the newest versions from community edition, which is pushing it for GPL.

I have posted on the Xen board too regarding the Xen Server “Express”, “Standard”, and “enterprise” editions. Basically the same model. I doubt that model will ultimately work for Open Source.

Some people say that you could switch to PostgreSQL. I disagree because PostgreSQL is doing the same things as what MySQL just started doing. It is called “EnterpriseDB” and “Greenplum”. Another way to look at it is that MySQL started a commercial fork of MySQL within the walls of MySQL AB(SUN) and named it MySQL Enterprise. For that they “control” when and how the feature gets diluted into the community to maximize the revenue for each new feature they develop. For that, they will pay a hefty intangible price. Jon Schwartz better wake up before the revenue stream dries up because people seems other “open source” solutions and thus no longer need “support”.

MySQL on hakanud aina rohkem kommertsialiseeruma. On välja öeldud plaan osad funktsioonid ainult raha eest saadavaks teha….

The only option is to start a fork, that however is not really feasible either, since we would end up with all sorts of forks and patches flying around, that would get little QA (especially not when multiple of those patches get applied). So I guess the only way out is for the community to do a proper fork where the community pools its ressources. This will inevitably lead to incompatibilities with what the Sun/MySQL guys are doing. This would not be a “good” fork in the sense that its an opportunity, it would just lead to redundant efforts that are incompatible with eachother. That being said, it cannot be in the interest of Sun/MySQL to get to this point. And honestly if MySQL insists on going down this path, I would assume that as PostgreSQL keeps going at its current pace, while MySQL splits its development (and QA ressources) across two products, sooner or later hackers and users will start migrating over there.

However, in my experience (ironically) the proprietary code I pay for is a LOT less stable and reliable than Open Source.

SmugMug in this case is more of a web service and easier to charge for (similar to Spinn3r).

MySQL is about code…. I’m not really going to trust my company to code that I can’t audit and fix and that hasn’t been tested.

There’s a reason Open Source works and it’s not always about money.

Kevin