I'm pretty sure this belongs, if anywhere, on -advocacy, so I've set
Reply-To accordingly. Of course, if you're munging the Reply-To,
that won't work, which is why this little note is here.
On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 10:59:24AM +0100, Claudio Cicali wrote:
> MySQL, as a *product*, it's not free as you argue. Ok. But MySQL as simple
> "software", is free. You can get the whole source and begin "forking" as you
> like. This is enough for me, and for anyone pondering "licensing" problems
> while choosing a dbms for her company.
Are you quite sure about that? Cause I can say for sure that both my
managers and our customers would think long and hard about my
committal if I suggested that we just fork Postgres and try to
sell things with a proprietary DBMS underneath it. I'd also have to
think pretty hard about whether I'd want to use such a product.
Consider the disadvantages, from the point of view of a customer, of
such a proprietary system. They don't know how stable it is. They
have no point of reference about its stability. They don't know how
many bugs might be lurking in there. Most importantly, if you go
bankrupt, they may not be able to get their data out _at all_.
I know, and probably you know too, that all of those limitations are
also problems for something based on Oracle, or MySQL, or Berkeley
DB, or PostgreSQL: the truth is that most users of an application don't
need to care about the guts underlying it. But they _do_ need to be
able to justify their decisions in case something goes wrong. When
something _does_ go wrong, you can bet that the person who made the
decision to buy the proprietary system will be in trouble unless that
proprietary system comes with a long list of satisfied customers.
And the last point is the rub: if you fork MySQL, you can't use the
MySQL name. So you can't talk about your satisfied customers who are
using MySQL, because you've forked.
I'm not pretending that any of this is rational behaviour, but I'd
think that the last 50 (anyway) years of research in sociology and
economics would convince everyone that the myth of the rational
consumer is handy for economic models, but several degrees removed
from a description of actual human behaviour.
Having access to the source is indeed a protection that proprietary
systems don't usually offer, but only in case there is an active
community supporting the product. If not, the source is a liability,
because you have to support it yourself. This is why fostering an
active community is in the interests of PostgreSQL users, and why I
would be somewhat anxious about the GPLd version of MySQL, even if
MySQL AB was not asserting rather broad application of the GPL beyond
its seeming purpose.
A
--
Andrew Sullivan | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
This work was visionary and imaginative, and goes to show that visionary
and imaginative work need not end up well.
--Dennis Ritchie
