I prefer to imagine Larry Ellison wringing his hands saying "Curses! And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids!"<p>Also he's in an abandoned fairground for some reason.
We've seen this twice in two days now. Facebook is blocking Tor except that maybe they're not. MySQL is now under a new license, except it's not. The alarmist headlines not waiting for a response from the newly-damned organization, instead issuing a retraction after everyone has freaked out.<p>Will the tech community ever get past the manufactured controversy and knee-jerk reaction we lambast the mainstream media for?
I found the jump to assume that Oracle decided to stick it to the MySql community telling of the community's trust of Oracle's commitment to MySql as an open source database (and not just from the echo chamber that Hacker News can be sometimes ... I was greeted with this news upon starting work this morning from two different colleagues, neither of which frequent this site).<p>My sense is this originates from a few perceptions of Larry Ellison and Oracle: (1) Oracle does give a whip about Open Source software. (2) Oracle charges so much for their primary RDBMS technology that it would only be natural for them to undermine MySql as an open source database technology (a view I, personally, share despite evidence to the contrary). (3) As a tech, in a past life, I've had to support Java on the client side for some really poorly written Java apps. Aside from the experience being utterly awful due to this horrible app, I have little trust for a company that installs toolbars alongside critical patches and then defends the practice when called out.<p>I'm finding my view of Oracle is so negative (maybe I've been supporting Oracle software for way too long?) that I'm not going to be fully convinced this was a bug until the "wrong set of copyright headers" is fixed. That's pretty sad since it makes little sense that Oracle would relicense just the man pages in some sort of conspiracy to squeeze a dime out of its customers.<p>Either way, it's always a good reminder of my personal favorite variation of Hanlon's razor: Where there are gaps of understanding, people jump to the worst possible conclusion.
saw that coming.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor</a>
More official comment:
<a href="http://insidemysql.com/the-mysql-man-pages-are-available-under-the-gpl/" rel="nofollow">http://insidemysql.com/the-mysql-man-pages-are-available-und...</a>
This is typical Monty. He cries foul how awful $mysql_owner is and how they do such bad things. He is the one that sold MySQL to Sun. If anyone is to blame for the current state of MySQL affairs, it is undoubtedly him.
> <i>started pulling in man pages with the wrong set of copyright headers</i><p>And how has the wrong set of copyright headers ended up on said pages?
No word yet on why the source code for the MySQL documentation is no longer publicly available. Was recently and silently made unavailable. This is much worse than a few man pages.
the only thing any mysql/mariadb news does for me is highlight how the average (and depressingly top voted) hacker news/proggit/slashdot commenter knows fuck all about either of them.