Monty’s MySQL Melee
Towards the latter part of 2009, everyone’s favorite database MySQL was embroiled in controversy as it’s co-founder Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius opened a can of Finnish whoop-ass on Oracle trying to block it’s acquisition of Sun and subsequently, MySQL. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore Monty’s approach, assess allegations of hypocrisy and discuss possible causes for Monty’s dissent of Oracle and their future stewardship of MySQL.
Of course, we are only the start of the discussion. What do you think? Was Monty hypocritical in his approach or was he genuinely acting on a possible threat to MySQL? Was differences in business culture at play, paranoia, money or something else? Let us know your thoughts in the shot comments below…
19 Comments to “Monty’s MySQL Melee”
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sorin7486 (83)
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mg (42)
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Ok well wait.. first of all this isn’t how business is done. We have anti-trust laws going back to the birth of capitalism and they are there for a reason, lets not forget that. And oracle buying the competition just to wipe it out is not as far fetched… this sort of thing happens all the time.
Now I’m not advocating Monty’s position, I’m just saying he has a very valid point business wise.
On the other hand I don’t really care about any of this to be honest… I don’t think it’s such a big deal. But there is one thing I love about the whole situation and that’s the fact that Monty showed big companies still don’t get open source… at all. Big companies fail to see an open source project as anything but an object.. a piece of intellectual property that they can just buy and use as they want. But in reality it’s the other way around: they have to adapt the way they work in order to keep that project going. And it seems to me that Sun has failed to do that and oracle is nowhere closer. I mean just compare with other companies that have switched to open source if you want to see the difference. Just think about Novel for example.
I’m in agreement with your not really caring position. As a consumer of MySQL I have no issue whatsoever with the company who owns it, as it’s open source.
However, I’m not sure that I agree about Sun seeing open source projects as another piece of IP to trade along with any others. Don’t forget that Sun bought some pretty serious projects (VirtualBox, StarOffice) and open sourced them, as well as open sourcing two of their flagship products (Solaris, Java). Oracle, however, I can see being as you describe. They now own a substantial portfolio of OSS, but I’d imagine their ownership of the products is going to be used as a more “Look, Oracle does open source” rather than a catalyst for opening Oracle products.
Well I have to admit Sun has made some big steps towards open source but there’s always been a sort of two sides to their involvement. I mean that always happens but with Sun it seems to be even stronger than with others. They managed to get bits and pieces of their business open sourced but they can’t seem to have a coherent overall stance on the matter. Or maybe is it vision ?
I’m a java developer and this is the sort of thing you can see all over. Lots of companies that do open source and java had to make the change from closed source. But they didn’t do it because they got it… they mostly did it because it was showed to work and because the best things in java are open source. And I’m not talking here about the success stories like Jboss… I’m talking about every other company…
I’m not sure how to explain this but let me put it this way: a linux user will always think an open source application is better just because it’s open source (all other factors being the same). The great majority of java developers, even if they work on OSS projects, don’t necessarily think like that. And I was amazed to learn actually how different they are.
I think the point is the entire java project was a failure as an open source project. The reason for its success overall comes from the incredible work that’s been done by other companies like Jboss and Spring Source. But if you want to find the java community online it’s almost non existent. I’ve been working with java for a few years and I still don’t know my way around all those sites that are supposed to bring people together. And that’s why I think Sun didn’t get it.
In the end the failure I refereed to is actually the failure to keep Monty on the team. When you take over an open source project you don’t take over the code you take over the team that put it all together. But Sun wasn’t really successful at that considering MySql was forked. And looking at java I can’t say I’m surprised.
But remember I’m not a Sun employee so I don’t really know how their management thinks. I might be completely wrong and in that case.. sorry for the wall of thext
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Well I dont think Oracle are the root of all evil. I think Monty is pissed that he isnt getting any money from the Sun->Oracle deal. I think the relational database market is after stagnating too much and MySQL and Oracle are the two most used in the market. So Monty is right ish. Im personally moving away from the old style relational databases because they lack some of the the functions of lets say Zope or CouchDB. So I think that there are lots of alternatives out there. Only time will tell what Oracle will do with MySQL but its not the end of the world.
The choice seems pretty clear: keep control of your company and do what you like, or sell your company and lose all control.
You can’t reasonably complain about what someone is doing to your baby when they handed you a large sack of cash money, which you gladly accepted.
But I do agree that Oracle specifically buying MySQL is a little disturbing. Buying the competition does happen all the time in business, but it’s not necessarily good. When Google snaps up small companies with cool ideas to hopefully integrate them into their own products, that’s mostly good. When a huge vendor of databases buys another huge database to get rid of it, that potentially hurts everyone but Oracle.
I can’t believe Aq admitted on air that Ubuntu One is proprietary (7:48-8:00). Slip of the tongue perhaps. Maybe he just meant commercial. But it still makes me feel uncomfortable to see the words Ubuntu and proprietary so close to each other.
Well, it is openly said that the server is. Aq is stating that he is willing to help out free implementations, and doesn’t claim that Ubuntu’s implementation is. What’s left to admit?
Whilst it’s true Monty made a lot of money from the MySQL sale, it’s also very likely true he wasn’t in a position to enforce any sort of copy-left shareholder agreement on the acquirer (due to the founders’ % ownership and what are called drag-along VC rights). Should the fact that Monty got wadded-up mean he’s lost the right to moan about where his baby ends up? Dunno – it’s a matter of personal judgement.
Regardless of all that, there’s still a pretty strong case for being worried about Oracle’s future behaviour. Think about it. Oracle now own a free product which competes directly with their core offering. And we all know it’s very hard to compete with free. The example you gave of Oracle turning away requests for commercial MySQL licenses is slightly disingenuous – surely they’d much rather talk you into buying an Oracle licence?
Monty got millions when he sold MySQL. Then he left Sun, forked the project (which is fine, it’s Open Source). But he has some serious issues. Apparently he just can’t let his baby go.
What he doesn’t get or maybe just doesn’t care about is that a lot of people from Sun has lost their jobs because of huge delays which were caused partially because of his campaigning.
Monty should move on with his life, create something new.
It also has to be said that the track record of Sun and Oracle with FOSS is very different. Sun, for example, has actually contributed code, ideas, X11 and Java. Oracle has contributed very little, and has attempted to FUD MySQL at every turn.
You see the issue.
I’ll be the first to admit that I love MySQL and am not a fan of Oracle either as a database nor a company. But come on Monty, the GPL assures that Oracle can’t kill of MySQL as code. True, Monty A.B. can’t use proprietary extensions as a business model. But honestly, they can use other business models. Maybe those business models won’t billion dollar valuations but so what.
Also Oracle probably won’t kill MySQL. They need it to compete against Microsoft’s SQL Server. And the paranoid should look into Postgresql. It is an excellent free software alternative to Oracle DB.
In short, Monty and co, we love the work you do, MySQL is an awesome database but stop whinging. And no you aren’t a special little butterfly.
I think that MySQL’s fate was sealed back when outside investors were brought in. All they would ever have been interested in was how much money they could eventually sell MySQL to some bigger company for.
I think that Oracle will kill (their version of) MySQL, but I think it probably won’t be due to some nefarious plan. Rather, I think they will smother it with incompetence and lethargy. The Oracle salesmen will be doing everything they can to steer customers away from MySQL because a MySQL sale just won’t have the same level of commission that an Oracle DB sale would.
There is still a long term licencing problem however. Unless I am mistaken, I believe that MySQL is “GPLv2 only” (rather than GPLv2 or later), plus a list of other specific licenses (and license versions) which are granted a “FOSS exception”. All Oracle has to do to cause problems is to stop updating this list and over time as other software projects move to newer versions of their licenses (due to a changing legal environment) there will be a narrower and narrower list of current projects that will be compatible with MySQL. That by itself won’t kill MySQL directly, but it would slowly strangle it.
I think we all need to take this as a learning experience. MySQL is not a “community” project. It is and always was a “corporate” project where outsiders were allowed a look in. If you are building your own project on top of another open source project, that is something to keep in mind.
Well said mg, I think in terms of the possible decline of MySQL in commercial use, where moving to a fork not supported by a ‘big business backer’ won’t be a considered option, you areright on the possiblities. Also on this being a salutary lesson for other projects. Back to the issue of Monty’s outbursts, however, my opinion is that he has the right to express an opinion of sadness, and warn people of what might happen, but I don’t think that should go as far as trying to convince a national, or in this case supra-national body to block a reasonable commercial transaction between Sun and Oracle. Imagine if Ubuntu was put up for sale, and Microsoft bought it. Now ‘m sure there are stong impediments for this happening, but in such a situation, we would all complain very loudly, but I don’t think we would have much hope of convincing a compatition commisssioner that it was seriously anti-competitive given the state of the linux market. (It’s just an ilustration, don’t waste time picking holes in my analogy, I’m aware that it already has more holes than a Cornish fisherman’s trawler net after it recenly snagged on a large sunken wreck, holes I can see from here, 6000 miles away on a ferry in Hong Kong)… So I’ll listen to Monty, and sympathise, but I can’t say I’ll support him
Well said mg, I think in terms of the possible decline of MySQL in commercial use, where moving to a fork not supported by a ‘big business backer’ won’t be a considered option, you are right on the possiblities. Oracle could easily put a potential paying customer off MySql. Also on this being a salutary lesson for other projects. Back to the issue of Monty’s outbursts, however, my opinion is that he has the right to express an opinion of sadness, and warn people of what might happen, but I don’t think that should go as far as trying to convince a national, or in this case supra-national body to block a reasonable commercial transaction between Sun and Oracle. Imagine if Ubuntu was put up for sale, and Microsoft bought it. Now ‘m sure there are stong impediments for this happening, but in such a situation, we would all complain very loudly, but I don’t think we would have much hope of convincing a compatition commisssioner that it was seriously anti-competitive given the state of the linux market. (It’s just an illustration, don’t waste time picking holes in my analogy, I’m aware that it already has more holes than a Cornish fisherman’s trawler net after it recently snagged on a large sunken wreck, holes I can see from here, 6000 miles away on a ferry in Hong Kong)… So I’ll listen to Monty, and sympathise, but I can’t say I’ll support him
I cant help being reminded of a guy breaking up with a girl. You know the story, He doesnt realise how lucky he was till he sees her with another guy. The mature thing to do is realise you fucked up and walk away, the retarded thing to do is hang aroung throwing wobblys every which way and making a complete arse of yourself.
I can see how this might give some folk who’s world revolves around MySQL some pause for thought. But seriously what exactly have Oracle done wrong? If they start hawking MySQL in a way that violates the GPL, then it will be time to saddle up a posse. But aren’t there already enough companies who have actually done bad things to worry about the ones who might or might not do something?
It’s not a concern about Oracle shutting down MySQL. They’re concerned about Oracle fixing prices.
Just wanted to mention that there was a little too much breathing captured in the audio of this podcast. Otherwise great job as usual!
Oracle are one of the major contributors to the linux kernel: http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/026042.htm
So they can’t be all bad, I think we just need to wait and see. I am sure another company will emerge that supports mySQL if Oracle drop the ball.