Patrick Galbraith has initiated a fascinating discussion with his post, "What is the official branch of MySQL?" I did a double-take when I first saw it, and I can't quite shake the question from my mind. It implies much of the power, and peril, of open source.
The question is critical because it implies that open source can become much bigger than the developer--whether an individual or a company--that created it. While Linus Torvalds, for example, remains central to Linux kernel development, Linux has become much, much bigger than Torvalds. Companies and foundations have been set up to guide and monetize it. Billions of dollars are earned and lost each year because of Linux.
In the case of MySQL, it has sprouted forks and iterations/distributions on the popular open-source database. OurDelta (a superset of MySQL started by ex-MySQL employee Arjen Lentz), Drizzle (belatedly recognized as an "official" Sun/MySQL fork), and MariaDB (created by MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius) are just a few of MySQL's off-shoots, but a few is enough to prompt Galbraith's legitimate question, particularly if you're an enterprise looking to buy into the "true" MySQL code branch.
For Sun, the forks arguably both enhance and diminish the company's ability to recoup its $1 billion investment in MySQL. Forks siphon off development that could be focused on the main code branch, and could also redirect dollars to these branches.
On the positive side, however, the greater the proliferation of MySQL forks in the marketplace, the more salient and powerful the MySQL brand becomes, and hence the better able to command support subscription revenue. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example, becomes increasingly valuable as Linux variants multiply: RHEL becomes the safe, grounded choice for ISVs and enterprises.
Identifying the "official" branch of MySQL depends largely upon what you want. If you're an enterprise looking for the safe, standard build, Sun/MySQL is what you want. But if you're looking to build a Web-enabled business, Drizzle may be the right choice. Or if you're on the cutting edge and feel that Sun's support is too slow, OurDelta may offer the best sanctuary.
In short, figure out what you really want from MySQL before deciding what "official" means.
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For anyone interested in seeing just how different and game-changing open source can be, there's really no need to look beyond MySQL, the open-source database leader. Jeremy Zawodny, formerly of Yahoo, and now of Craigslist, takes a hard look at the changing face of MySQL, reaching some surprising conclusions about MySQL in the process:
Nowadays MySQL has a much slower release cycle than it used to. It's still available in "commercial" and free ("community") releases. There's still a company behind it--a much larger one in fact. But one that also has a vested interest in showing how it works better on their storage appliances or 256 "core" computers and whatnot...
Meanwhile, all the cutting edge stuff (at least from the point of view of scaling) is happening outside Sun/MySQL and being integrated by OurDelta and even Drizzle.
Zawodny details the importance of these forks to MySQL ("The single most interesting and surprising thing to me is both the number and necessity of third-party patches for enhancing various aspects of MySQL and InnoDB"), and it's here that one sees the strength of the open-source model, but also the potential fragility of open source as a business, as I've written before. These forks provide a robust MySQL database...for free.
This is good, right? Well, it is, but perhaps not if you're MySQL (or, rather, Sun), the company. For all the benefits such forks and additions provide to MySQL, they absolutely depend on Sun doing the core development on the MySQL database, core development which becomes ever more difficult to fund if such peripheral projects siphon away Sun's return on the MySQL investment.
It would seem to me that the best way for this vibrant community around MySQL to become good for the corporate MySQL would be for the community to become so active and diverse that the MySQL database begs for standardization at the core again. Sun can provide that, making enterprise customers happy and, in turn, making Sun happy.
One thing is clear: Sun needs to immediately start releasing its own "fork" of the MySQL database, one that is tuned to enterprise requirements, and one that includes functionality/tools that customers can't find elsewhere. If it's fair for Drizzle, OurDelta, Percona, etc. to enhance and extend the MySQL experience, then it's fair that Sun do this, too. Only as Sun creates differentiated value will it ensure an ongoing, rising revenue stream that will enable it to fund MySQL development, development upon which these forks critically depend.
As American soap operas go, All My Children has been one of the best and most popular since it first aired in 1970. The ABC soap, which aimed to be highly topical, has long tackled difficult social issues like abortion and homosexuality when most other shows held back.
MySQL, the premier open-source database, has decided to steal the script from All My Children, addressing some of the most challenging issues in open-source software, like commercial extensions and now, in lurid detail, the fork with Drizzle, as well as an alternative patch community, OurDelta.
First, the Drizzle fork. Announced last year (likely through gritted MySQL teeth, though a brave face was put on it), Drizzle has quickly gained a following, with Stephen O'Grady recently celebrating its development:
...(T)hose who would dismiss Drizzle as merely a stripped down MySQL miss the point entirely; the project is, if anything, a fundamental rethinking of what a database should be and the deployment context for it. Drizzle is emphatically more than a refactoring. It is, rather, a database being built expressly for scale out clouds running Map/Reduce like architectures at immense scale.
This may well be true, but it could prove a bit of a set-back (if short-term) to MySQL, or rather to Sun Microsystems, and arguably makes the company's job harder to monetize MySQL, which, in turn, means that fewer development resources will likely make their way into MySQL and Drizzle.
O'Grady points out that Sun supports Drizzle with funding and so it must see a commercial opportunity in it. Let's hope so because "community" is not going to turn Drizzle into an enterprise grade product. Self-interested corporations will do that, as Puppet's Luke Kanies recently wrote.
Former MySQLer Arjen Lentz's OurDelta, on the other hand, seems to me to offer similar promise without being a fork of MySQL. Rather than replace MySQL, OurDelta "produces enhanced builds for MySQL, with OurDelta and third-party patches, for common production platforms." As Lentz told me over IM:
... Read moreDrizzle is going where Brian (Aker) & Co. reckon the future will lie. It's an experiment and exploration, as Brian has written/talked about.
OurDelta deals with the needs of the MySQL production users today.
In most companies, there are prohibitions against creating competitive, derivative works of the company's intellectual property. At MySQL (now Sun), well, things may be a little different.
As announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has launched Drizzle, an optimized and trimmed-down version of the popular open-source MySQL database.
In other words, MySQL has forked itself. "The right to fork" is, of course, a cardinal right of open source.
But forking is usually driven by rival factions on a project (e.g., the Adempiere developers forking Compiere). In MySQL's case, its own employees created the fork, a fork that has the blessing of Sun's senior management, according to MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius.
Personally, I find it a bit odd. If the fork was needed, why not work within the company to offer it as a separate product? But then, for those who have worked with passionate open-source developers like MySQL employs, sometimes the best policy is simply to step back and let the magic happen, even if it initially appears not to be in the company's interests. Perhaps this could end up being a supported database for Sun?
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