The Register paints a very unflattering picture of Sun Microsystems' alleged mismanagement of its hardware and software assets.
Unfortunately, there's likely a lot of truth to the argument, though it's easy to point fingers from the outside and tell others what to do.
But this is precisely why Sun should be grateful for Oracle's acquisition of its assets: Oracle needn't appease internal or customer lobbies. It just needs to determine what pays the bills, and shutter or sell everything that doesn't.
The one open question for me, however, remains MySQL. Oracle could do much with the technology, but I'm skeptical that it has much incentive in ensuring a long and prosperous future for MySQL.
Regardless, it may not get the chance. As reported by OStatic, MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius has suggested that MySQLers' life under Sun was rocky enough, but Oracle may convince them to bolt:
Sun's acquisition of MySQL did not go smoothly; most of the MySQL leaders (both commercial and project) have left Sun, and the people who are left are sitting with their CV and ready to press send. Oracle, not having the best possible reputation in the open-source space, will have a hard time keeping the remaining MySQL people in the company or even working on the MySQL project.
Given the fracturing we've already seen with MySQL, what with OurDelta, Drizzle, MariaDB, and other variants on the MySQL theme emerging in the past year, I suspect that we may be in for several more forks of the MySQL code base. There's simply too much at stake in the database layer of computing to allow MySQL to be submerged by Oracle's other database priorities.
So here's a thought: could Red Hat fork MySQL, hire some key developers, and effectively assume the mantle of MySQL leadership?
I doubt that it has that ambition, as it would end up hurting its still-strong partnership with Oracle. It is more likely that Red Hat would offer to buy MySQL, if it made a move for MySQL at all, and I doubt that the two could find a mutually agreeable valuation.
Regardless, unless Red Hat could replace MySQL's dependence on InnoDB, it would lack the means to truly create an independent fork of MySQL. By controlling InnoDB, the primary storage engine for MySQL, Oracle effectively controls MySQL, regardless of whether it owns the MySQL code.
I'd like to see MySQL in Red Hat's hands. But Red Hat hasn't shown much near-term desire to get far beyond Linux. We're going to have to wait to see Red Hat become the full-stack competitor to Microsoft that some of us would like to see.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
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.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
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.
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