MySQL closing some of its doors
MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model — previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.
(Shameless citation from jcole.us)
Hm. When Sun first bought MySQL, most of us thought that was a Good Thing™ — apparently not so much. This seems to be the old story retold; A friendly company with a good track record, doing things mainly open source, gets acquired by a larger company with intentions of monetizing it. Bad Sun. Bad.
Oracle bought Innobase a couple of years ago, effectively taking over ownership of the InnoDB storage engine (the only real engine in MySQL supporting near-ACID capabilities). This had all of us trembling in our shorts, I suppose the somewhat seamless non-evil merger back then had us more calm this time.
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I wonder how long it will be before the LAMP stack will go out of fashion. I remember the days where web development meant mastering PHP and phpMyAdmin. *shudder*.
Seems like my earlier post, Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL, will come in handy.
They’re just introducing new commercial offerings, like they had all along. Nothing to see here, move along. They’re not removing things that are already open source.
Here’s what Marten Mickos had to say on /.:
In 6.0 there will be native backup functionality in the server available for anyone and all (Community, Enterprise) under GPL.
Additionally we will develop high-end add-ons (such as encryption, native storage engine-specific drivers) that we will deliver to customers in the MySQL Enterprise product only. We have not yet decided under what licence we will release those add-ons (GPL, some other FOSS licence, and/or commercial).