Given the environment, you probably already know that there's a great talk called 'Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos' at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc</a> .<p>The reason why it's relevant here is that this is not the first time that Oracle has closed-sourced an open-source project bought up from Sun. Oracle seems almost paraconsistent towards open-source in a very interesting way: they seem to view the GPL as a good way to get other companies to help them out without cheating (e.g. OpenJDK), but if they're going to do most of the development in-house <i>anyway</i> it seems they're much more willing to close the source (OpenSolaris, now apparently MySQL).<p>Could anyone comment on whether there's a larger pattern that I'm missing there? And are there other open-source technologies which were obtained from the Sun buyout which are also in danger which we should know about?
If they hold all the copyright on the documentation, they're free to do as they please. It was always expected that Oracle would kill the project.<p>MariaDB is a fork of MySQL started by the founder of MySQL after the Oracle acquisition. This is good news for them because it gives people more reason to use the fork.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB</a>
I used to work for Oracle. Something I heard several times around different parts of the company was that Larry believed that open source was a good way to build products, not businesses. He was more than happy to take advantage of open source, but not willing to contribute to it.
Oracle's attitude toward open source was one of many reasons I left, and one of the reasons I gave for why I was leaving.
So who holds the copyright on these man pages? Did MySQL get copyright assignments from all contributers before Oracle bought them? If not, how do they have the authority to relicense the content?
Oracle is killing MySQL. On purpose. This has been going on for a while, and they're not doing it because they're stupid, it's in their best interests.<p>Thankfully Maria is such a nice clean replacement.
Is this even legal? they released the previous documentation under GPL v2 which has a clause stating any modified versions have to be released under the same license. This new documentation is clearly just a modification of the previous documentation. It would be interesting if it came of they did not have the right to do this. If even even one line of the documentation was written by someone else and they did not get a transfer of copyright they could get sued for doing this.
According to mysql bug 69512 [1] this particular issue was the result of a build process error and was not intentional.<p>[1]: <a href="http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512" rel="nofollow">http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512</a>
And just in case they hadn't made their point, section 38 from the pastebin is particularly friendly:<p>"This documentation is NOT distributed under a GPL license."
I have been really thinking about switching my DBs from MySQL to MariaDB. Wondering if someone could help me out with a few questions..<p>Is it a really a drop-in replacement? Any gotchas I need to be aware off? How does MariaDB compare with MySQL performance and memory wise? Did anyone face any issues with replication?<p>Thank you in advance.
I'm already using LibreOffice. Is there a fork of VirtualBox that I should be aware of too? If I actually used any databases, I'd be switching MySQL for MariaDB right now.
I wouldn't grab the torches and pitchforks unless/until it's clear they're relicensing to a non-free license. The GPL is written to apply to code; it doesn't make much sense to apply it to documentation.
Has Oracle has eroded credibility for being a good steward for any open source technology at this point?
My question is how long before @Mitchellh leads an effort to fork VirtualBox to allow Vagrant to have a reliable future?
It was a bug. Corrected. <a href="http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512" rel="nofollow">http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512</a>
Switch to MariaDB but don't even think you will remove MySQL experience from your CV. As most of the CV is processed automatically you could lost few point simple because lazy HR people don't care about what's happening in the IT world.
Hmm, so there's a bunch of hosted MySQL providers. How long before they become MariaDB hosted providers?<p>Oracle, your engineers know exactly what will happen. Why don't you?
I am <i>more</i> interested in using MySQL for my next project now.<p>I know that this is not a popular opinion, but I disagree with the philosophy behind the GPL. While I think that sharing is fine (and for that there are the BSD and MIT licenses, among many others), I believe that it is very often better for both developers (and users) if users pay for the software they use. (And yes, I have heard the pro-GPL argument about how you can charge for support, but I know that's bogus in practice.)<p>I am <i>not</i> saying the GPL should be outlawed or anything like that. I'm just saying that it's not a moral ideal (the actual moral ideal is <i>you</i> making a sustainable living off of the code <i>you</i> write), and it's practically speaking a bad idea in many cases.