Friday, August 21, 2009

PBXT at the OpenSQL Camp hosted by the FrOSCon 2009

Vladimir will be giving a presentation on PBXT at the FrOSCon 2009 in St. Augustin, near Bonn in Germany tomorrow:

PBXT: Technology trends that affect your Database
Room: C120/OpenSQLCamp
Time: 22 Aug 2009, 18:15 - 18:45

The talks is packed with interesting information about how the design of PBXT handles the major technological challenges of the future, including multiple cores, lots of RAM and solid state drives.

If you are in the area, check it out! :)

Thursday, August 20, 2009

What if MySQL dropped the Dual License?

In his blog Does the GPL Matter? In a Word, Yes, Stephen O'Grady makes the significant point that the dual-licensing model has a major drawback:

Sun/MySQL can only include patches and contributions if they fully own the copyright to those changes.

This gives forks like Drizzle, OurDelta, Percona and MariaDB a major advantage over the Sun version: they can include the best patches from all over. And it is clear that the momentum is building.

In a follow-up blog, Stephen asks: "what would the implications be if MySQL, of all projects, were forced to abandon the dual-licensing model it had long championed?"

Thinking about this, there is something that really bothers me:

Let's assume MySQL took on patches without ownership of the copyright, and thereby lost the ability to provide a commercial license to OEM customers.

According to the GPL this would mean that nobody could ever ship a commercial product with MySQL built-in!

To avoid this possibility from being lost to the world forever, surely MySQL would have to abandon the GPL, and maybe change to LGPL or BSD!

Tuesday, August 11, 2009