"one common community developed branch, MariaDB"

So does this mean Drizzle's dead? What about that search thing El Reg was mentioning the other day? Seems to me MySQL's becoming more and more of a mess under it's own steam and doesn't need a Sun or Oracle buyout for it to disappear up it's own forked changesets.

Mine's the one with bigger than 64K row size, thanks. NO NOT THE MS ACCESS ONE ANY BUT THE ACCESS ONE!

That was before I heard of "MariaDB"

Is that the geek version of getting your GF's name tattooed on your arm?

Paris, because I'd like to do a GRANT ALL ON ParisDB

How do multiple MySQL providers mesh with MySQL's strange licensing? MySQL is technically GPL, but unlike other GPL apps, they consider whatever MySQL scripts you write to be MySQL extensions, and thus subject to the same license. Except for PHP or paid commercial licenses. Or something like that.

So it is somewhat as if all programs written in Python had to be GPL unless money was sent to the Python foundation.

How will a second company providing an alternative database that is based on MySQL code cope with that? If MySQL's ad lib interpretation of the GPL stands, MariaDB may be only used for GPL projects, or up to two commercial licenses may come into play.

For the life of me, I cannot understand how this dizzying distortion of the accepted rules has been accepted for years. The world should have moved to PostgreSQL long ago.

Maria?

I think there may be a stronger case if they had a stronger name. Although much jested about, at least Ubuntu releases such as "Junky Jackalope","Burpy Badger" or "Hardon Heron" can be jested about.

MariaDB? - WTF?

LAMP (Linux, Apache, Maria, PHP)

Whatever else is happening, the current tech press game of "guess what's on Larry's mind" is at least giving MySQL some publicity outside of the tech arena. One of our PHBs suprised me when he said he had read some article in a bizz rag about Oracle and MySQL, and asked me if we used it. The whole Sun affair has at least elevated MySQL to a point where non-techies may pay it some attention.

As for the idea that it would be bad for Larry to support an external Alliance, I disagree. It would only conflict if he really does have plans to dumb-down MySQL to save Oracle revenues, which would leave Larry in conflict with the Alliance. But, by offloading a lot of the development costs to the Alliance, he gets in turn a lot of goodwill and also a lot of developer lock-in, with partners virtually commiting themselve to MySQL to the cost of other open alternatives. To go up against an open Alliance would be risky - remember the failure of Oracle Enterprise Linux?

Since becoming part of Sun, MySQL now has a much better release cycle and more achievable goals - Monty is just sour that Sun didn't give into him, our of all the MySQL Branches, I think Drizzle will likely be the most successful as it has a clear goal.

That MySQL is GPL, open source, and that forks are possible.

So, Oracle, either you are actively developing it, or somebody else will.

Perhaps this will help the developers at Oracle to "sleep" better, perhaps it will help MySQL users too, to know that there is a limit to what Oracle can dictate.

Maria, yes, sounds funny, but then again, what about Oracle, DB2, SQL, Postgress and so on.

As for Monty, as far as I know, he is today, a very independent guy, money wise.