terça-feira, 29 de dezembro de 2009

[INFORMAÇÃO] O que pode acontecer ao MySQL?


A atual situ­a­ção do MySQL vem me pre­o­cu­pando pro­fun­da­mente. Com a aqui­si­ção pela Ora­cle enga­ti­lhada para acon­te­cer, o futuro do MySQL parece incerto e, vamos admi­tir, algo de muito ruim pode acon­te­cer com milha­res de apli­ca­ções pelo mundo inteiro que usam o banco de dados da Sun.

Venho acom­pa­nhando fre­quen­te­mente o desen­vol­vi­mento do Mari­aDB, preparando-me para pos­sí­veis alter­na­ti­vas ao MySQL e, por esse motivo, estou sem­pre de olho no blog do Michael “Monty” Widenius,que criou o MySQL. Ele, agora, pede ajuda, num texto inti­tu­lado “Ajude a sal­var o MySQL” e eu tam­bém peço que o máximo pos­sí­vel de pes­soas dê uma força.

Publico aqui, na ínte­gra, o texto. Peço que me des­cul­pem por não traduzi-lo, mas trata-se de um post bas­tante extenso. Aque­les que não tive­rem muita fami­li­a­ri­dade com o inglês, não desa­ni­mem, leia a ver­são tra­du­zida pelo goo­gle (sei que não é uma boa tra­du­ção, mas é melhor do que nada).

Não dá pra ficar parado, não é? Mande seu e-mail, repro­duza esse texto, encha o saco da sua lista de contatos.



Convém, é claro, esclarecer algumas coisas: Se Monty quisesse, poderia, simplesmente, abandonar o MySQL e investir seus esforços e o de sua equipe no MariaDB (que é o fork melhorado do MySQL). As intenções por trás disso, provavelmente, são financeiras, posto que a compra pela Oracle pode significar o fim do MySQL e, consequentemente, a morte da galinha dos ovos de ouro de Monty. O fork, que é 100% livre e free, não traria nenhum benefício financeiro.
Além disso, há um ano, Monty concordou em vender o MySQL para a Sun, lembram-se? Não é justo reclamar agora, depois do cheque compensado e do dinheiro na conta.
Não sou contra a aquisição do MySQL pela Oracle, na verdade, espero que a Oracle compre, mas gostaria de ter assegurado o desenvolvimento do software, bem como a abertura de todo o código, sem inclusão de “partes fechadas”.




I, Michael “Monty” Wide­nius, the cre­a­tor of MySQL, is asking you urgen­tly to help save MySQL from Oracle’s clut­ches. Without your imme­di­ate help Ora­cle might get to own MySQL any day now. By wri­ting to the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion (EC) you can sup­port this cause and help secure the future deve­lop­ment of the pro­duct MySQL as an Open Source project.

What this text is about:
– Sum­mary of what is hap­pe­ning
– What Ora­cle has not pro­mi­sed
– Ora­cles past beha­vior with Open Source
– Help spread this infor­ma­tion (Jump to ‘What I want to ask you to do’)
– Exam­ple of email to send to the com­mis­sion (Jump to ‘send this to:’)

I have spent the last 27 years cre­a­ting and wor­king on MySQL and I hope, together with my team of MySQL core deve­lo­pers, to work on it for many more years.

Ora­cle is trying to buy Sun, and since Sun bought MySQL last year, Ora­cle would then own MySQL. With your sup­port, there is a good chance that the EC (from which Ora­cle needs appro­val) could pre­vent this from hap­pe­ning or demand Ora­cle to change the terms for MySQL or give other gua­ran­tees to the users. Without your sup­port, it might not. The EC is our last big hope now because the US govern­ment appro­ved the deal while Europe is still wor­ried about the effects.

Ins­tead of just wor­king out this with the EC and agree on appro­pri­ate reme­dies to cor­rect the situ­a­tion, Ora­cle has ins­tead con­tac­ted hun­dreds of their big cus­to­mers and asked them to write to the EC and require uncon­di­ti­o­nal accep­tance of the deal. Accor­ding to what I been told, Ora­cle has pro­mi­sed to the cus­to­mers, among other things, that “they will put more money into MySQL deve­lop­ment than what Sun did” and that “if they would ever aban­don MYSQL, a fork will appear and take care of things”.

Howe­ver just put­ting money into deve­lop­ment is not proof that anything use­ful will ever be deli­ve­red or that MySQL will con­ti­nue to be a com­pe­ti­tive force in the mar­ket as it’s now.

As I alre­ady blog­ged before, a fork is not enough to keep MySQL alive for all future, if Ora­cle, as the copy­right hol­der of MySQL, would at any point decide that they should kill MySQL or make parts of MySQL clo­sed source.

Ora­cle claims that it would take good care of MySQL but let’s face the facts: Unlike ten years ago, when MySQL was mos­tly just used for the web, it has become very func­ti­o­nal, sca­la­ble and cre­di­ble. Now it’s used in many of the world’s lar­gest com­pa­nies and they use it for an incre­a­sing num­ber of pur­po­ses. This not only sca­res but actu­ally hurts Ora­cle every day. Ora­cle have to lower pri­ces all the time to com­pete with MySQL when com­pa­nies start new pro­jects. Some com­pa­nies even migrate exis­ting pro­jects from Ora­cle to MySQL to save money. Of course Ora­cle has a lot more fea­tu­res, but MySQL can alre­ady do a lot of things for which Ora­cle is often used and helps peo­ple save a lot of money. Over time MySQL can do to Ora­cle what the ori­gi­nally belit­tled Linux did to com­mer­cial Unix (roughly speaking).

So I just don’t buy it that Ora­cle will be a good home for MySQL. A weak MySQL is worth about one bil­lion dol­lars per year to Ora­cle, maybe more. A strong MySQL could never gene­rate enough income for Ora­cle that they would want to can­ni­ba­lize their real cash cow. I don’t think any com­pany has ever done anything like that. That’s why the EC is skep­tic and for­ma­li­zed its objec­ti­ons about a month ago.

Richard Stall­man agrees that it’s very impor­tant which com­pany owns MySQL, that Ora­cle should not be allowed to buy it under pre­sent terms and that it can’t just be taken care of by a com­mu­nity of volun­te­ers. http://keionline.org/ec-mysql

Ora­cle has NOT pro­mi­sed (as far as I know and cer­tainly not in a legally bin­ding manner):

- To keep (all of) MySQL under an open source license
– Not to add clo­sed source parts, modu­les or requi­red tools.
– To not raise MySQL license or MySQL sup­port pri­ces
– To rele­ase new MySQL ver­si­ons in a regu­lar and timely man­ner.
– To con­ti­nue with dual licen­sing and always pro­vide affor­da­ble com­mer­cial licen­ses to MySQL to those who needs them (to sto­rage ven­dors and appli­ca­tion ven­dors) or pro­vide MySQL under a more per­mis­sive license
– To deve­lop MySQL as an Open Source pro­ject
– To acti­vely work with the com­mu­nity
– Apply sub­mit­ted pat­ches in a timely man­ner
– To not dis­cri­mi­nate pat­ches that make MySQL com­pete more with Ora­cles other pro­ducts
– To ensure that MySQL is impro­ved also in man­ners that make it com­pete even more with Ora­cles’ main offering.

From loo­king at how Ora­cle han­dled the InnoDB acqui­si­tion, I don’t have high hopes that Ora­cle will do the above right if not requi­red to do so:

For InnoDB:
– Bug fixes where done (but this was done under a con­trac­tual obli­ga­tion)
– New fea­tu­res, like com­pres­sion that was announ­ced before acqui­si­tion, took 3 years to imple­ment
– No time tables or insight into deve­lop­ment
– The com­mu­nity where not allowed to par­ti­ci­pate in deve­lop­ment
– Pat­ches from users (like Goo­gle) that would have incre­a­sed per­for­mance was not implemented/released until after Ora­cle announ­ced it was acqui­ring Sun.
– Ora­cle star­ted wor­king on InnoDB+, a bet­ter ‘clo­sed source’ ver­sion of InnoDB
– In the end Sun had to fork InnoDB, just to be able to improve performance.

It’s true that deve­lop­ment did con­ti­nue, but this was more to be able to con­ti­nue using InnoDB as a pres­sure on MySQL Ab.

Note that Oracle’s deve­lop­ment on the Linux ker­nel is not com­pa­ra­ble with MySQL, because:
– Ora­cle is using Linux as the main plat­form for their pri­mary data­base pro­duct (and thus a bet­ter Linux makes Ora­cles plat­form bet­ter)
– The GPL code in the ker­nel is not affec­ting what is run­ning on top on it (because of an excep­tion in Linux).

Because we don’t have access to a data­base of MySQL cus­to­mers and users the only way we can get the word out is to use the MySQL and Open Source com­mu­nity. I would never have resor­ted to this if Ora­cle would not have bro­ken the esta­blished rules in anti­com­pe­ti­tive mer­ger cases and try to influ­ence the EC by acti­vely mobi­li­sing the customers.

This is very cri­ti­cal to this AS SOON AS POSSIBLE as EC, depen­ding on what Ora­cle is doing, needs to make a deci­sion either on Mon­day (2009–12-14) or within two weeks. Beca­sue of the strict dea­dline, every email counts!

What I want to ask you to do (until 2009-12-19):

- Forward this email to everyone that you know is using MySQL or Open Source/free soft­ware and to all email list where you know there are peo­ple pre­sent that use or care about MySQL and open source (ple­ase check first that this email hasn’t been sent there before)
– Alter­na­ti­vely send emails with infor­ma­tion about this and tell them to read http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html
– Add links on your web site to http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html with the text “We are using MySQL, help save it”, for the dura­tion of the next two week.
– Blog about this (feel free to include this text or just link to my blog)
– Call by phone (don’t con­tact by email, this is urgent) your boss or VP and ask him to read this email and send a let­ter to the EC com­mis­sion ASAP!
– If you don’t have anyone to con­tact above, send an email to the EC!

As we want the EC to get a cor­rect pic­ture of the situ­a­tion, we want you to first fill in the upper part and then cho­ose one of the pro­po­sed texts belowe that best mat­ches your view of the situ­a­tion. Feel free to sup­ply your own text and addi­ti­o­nal infor­ma­tion if you think this will help the EC to reach a bet­ter unders­tan­ding of how MySQL is used.

Send this to: comp-merger-registry@ec.europa.eu

If you have extra time to help, fill in the fol­lowing, if not, just skip to the main text.

Name:
Title:
Com­pany:
Size of com­pany:
How many MySQL ins­tal­la­ti­ons:
Total data sto­red in MySQL (megabyte):
For what type of appli­ca­ti­ons is MySQL used:
Should this email be kept con­fi­den­tial by EC: Yes/No

Copy or use one of the below texts as a base for your answer:

a)
I don’t trust that Ora­cle will take good care of MySQL and MySQL should be dives­ted to another com­pany or foun­da­tion that have everything to gain by deve­lo­ping and pro­mo­ting MySQL. One should also in the future be able to com­bine MySQL with clo­sed source appli­ca­tion (either by excep­ti­ons, a more per­mis­sive license or be able to dual license MySQL under favou­ra­ble terms)

b)

I think that Ora­cle could be a good steward of MySQL, but I would need EC to have legally bin­ding gua­ran­tees from Ora­cle that:
– All of MySQL will con­ti­nue to be fully Open Source/free soft­ware in the future (no clo­sed source modu­les)
– That deve­lop­ment will be done in com­mu­nity fri­en­dly way.
– The manual should be rele­a­sed under a per­mis­sive license (so that one can fork it, the same way one can fork the ser­ver)
– That MySQL should be rele­a­sed under a more per­mis­sive license to ensure that forks can truly com­pete with Ora­cle if Ora­cle is not a good steward after all.
Alter­na­ti­vely:
– One should be able to always buy low pri­ced com­mer­cial licen­ses for MySQL.

There should also be mecha­nism so that if Ora­cle is not doing what is expec­ted of it, forks should be able to com­pete with Oracle

c)
I trust Ora­cle and I sug­gest that EC will approve the deal unconditionally.

——————–

Let us prove to Ora­cle and EC that the Open Source com­mu­nity is a true force and we take good care of our citi­zens and we pre­fer to work with com­pa­nies that does the same!

The future of MySQL is in your hands!

Thanks for the help!
Michael Wide­nius
Cre­a­tor of MySQL


por: Henrique (LonelySpooky)

em: LonelySpooky's Blog

Nenhum comentário:

O Curso

O Curso Superior de Tecnologia em Análise e Desenvolvimento de Sistemas das Faculdades Integradas Simonsen - FIS, é um curso presencial, reconhecido pela Portaria 1.003 de 12.07.1993 (D.O.U. 13.07.1993), com carga horária mínima de 2.334 horas, que poderão ser cumpridas em no mínimo 03 anos (06 semestres letivos) e foi recentemente aditado pela Portaria nº 281, 29 de setembro de 2009, publicada no D.O.U nº 188, de 01 de outubro de 2009, Seção 1, página 19.
Os graduados nos Cursos Superiores de Tecnologia denominam-se tecnólogos, são profissionais de nível superior com formação para a produção, inovação científico-tecnológica e para a gestão de processos de produção de bens e serviços.

Faculdades Integradas Simonsen