After Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle, there has been a large amount of discussions in the business and developer community on the future of MySQL community involved in its development.
A Community Fork?
Interestingly, MySQL community has been able to create a new Database by a fork from the public branch and has revived the project as MariaDB.
On it’s website, AskMonty.org [founded by Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder and creator of MySQL] states that its aim is,
To provide a community developed, stable, and always Free branch of MySQL that is, on the user level, compatible with the main version. We strive for total interoperability with both our own, and our upstream, communities.
It also states that,
MariaDB is a backward compatible, drop-in replacement branch of the MySQL® Database Server. It includes all major open source storage engines, including the Maria storage engine.
What about cloud?
There is another branch of MySQL survived as Drizzle which aims to focus on Cloud. The Drizzle project states that,
…[It] is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL.
Looking at both of the above, it can be seen that even if the main source of the above two projects are same (MySQL), they are going on different directions as a result of the community turmoil created because of Oracle’s acquisition.
The Future [and the Community Edition]?
Oracle had stated that it will be continuing to serve existing business customers of MySQL of Sun by providing more investments to the development and continuing support for the existing customers, but has not issued any statement related the community editions of the MySQL. It is seen that Oracle plans to retain existing customers of Sun but most probably, not the community. Having a closed source culture and being business minded, Oracle is highly able to transform the existing MySQL customers to Oracle Database solutions by strategically reducing and finally discontinuing support for existing MySQL customers.
Adding with the demise of MySQL [probably within the next couple of years] from almost every xAMP stack, the free and open source community has to reinvent the wheels to continue its race against the well-built closed source commercial software.
This has also been made difficult due to the absenteeism of a centralized management framework for managing the functionality and requirements in most open source software as highlighted in a previous post in this blog [Is Open Source software a classic example of fail for Design by Committee?].
Related Articles and Links :
Zero Lines of Code 
Hmm,
Great article,
Oracle is too dangerous for Open Source Community ….
Actually, Oracle is showing why there is a need for developers to better monetize and centrally manage and organize their software. In that context, Oracle does no harm.
You can read my earlier post on Oracle [Oracle starts to monetize Free Software, is it wrong? ] which explains how Oracle is teaching lessons on monetization and management to the Open Source developers and the community.
Hmm this could backfire on Oracle. If MariaDB and Drizzle gain momentum and have solid developer/community backing then why pay for the Oracle database?
Yes, at first it appears such but we do have to note that database independence is not a real possibility [or reality] in most application development scenarios. Most enterprises choose Oracle over reliability and the amount of investment Oracle puts in its products, not because that Oracle has a huge fan base or a developer community.
Oracle has been in the business for a long time and it’s pretty much assured that they won’t lose the edge that they gained from the acquisition and later discontinuation of Sun/MySQL.
As MariaDB and Drizzle are developed independently without a central project to have a single database product which would serve the cloud and the typical database needs in different versions, for most it becomes a hard choice to move to either one of them.
I wonder if Monty thinks he can do what he did with MySQL all over again.
1. Create widely used open source database system
2. Sell to large vendor for big $$
3. Rant on about how large vendor is mis-managing the product he sold to them
4. Create a fork.
5. Goto 2.
Monty successfully monetized his application, what he did by selling is right in his context and the software business.
As a developer, if you have something you can sell, you should sell. It’s a false assumption to expect every software product to be free when the rest of the world sells [or monetizes] every other product or a service.
For more on this read the previous article on this blog which discusses the ethical concerns of monetizing freely available software, Oracle starts to monetize Free Software, is it wrong?
It doesn’t appear that Monty is able to sell MariaDB again, sadly for most people and the open source community because the Golden era of the Open source and free software is nearing its end.
Here comes CUBRID, an open source database management system highly optimized for web applications (http://cubrid.org).
Cabe recordar que MariaDB no el único fork de MySQL.
Drizzle (http://www.drizzle.org/) deriva del código de MySQL v6.0, pero con un rediseño de la arquitectura, que es de tipo microkernel.
Drizzle es un proyecto 100% software libre, dirigido por su comunidad (no por una persona que ya vendió MySQL). Participa activamente en el GSoC. Para más información, visitad su web o la Wikipedia.