How do you solve a problem like MariaDB? Give it $20m ... right, Intel? MariaDB expert SkySQL has taken on $20m in filthy valley lucre to help it build a drop-in replacement database for Oracle's MySQL. The funding was announced on Tuesday and follows our story in September that revealed Google is shifting all of its internal MySQL instances over to the open-source MariaDB system due to political …
Well, it works as advertised. v5.5 is indeed a drop in replacement for MySQL 5.5, there's no porting needed, just install and go. There were some rough patches getting MariaDB v10 working with MySQL 5.6; some if it was probably due to v10 being an alpha-release, but some were clearly intentionally put there by Oracle - for instance MySQL Workbench v6 refuses to run if it detects MariaDB ("Workbench doesn't support this version of MySQL").
" just a couple of weeks ago"
You are aware that MariaDB is coming up for its fifth birthday? We have been using it in production since it appeared (v5.1.44) with openSuSE-11.4 in spring 2011. It has always just worked for us in a LAMP stack.
Moving from a single controlling vendor to a community/foundation supplier for mission critical software is really a no-brainer. We did consider PostgreSQL, but the absolutely trivial migration from MySQL to MariaDB as part of a routine OS upgrade won the day.
It's all going to go Pete Tong as soon as Oracle claims some of the code developments took place under it's stewardship and contain "techniques" developed by Oracle and not directly under Open Source rules.
And don't start on the "but its open source...., GNU, etc. Once the Oracle lawyers set their sights the only winners will be the lawyers.
Take your point (and its probably how it will pan out) but its a flawed strategy as a) open source coders tend to be very fast at swapping out infringing code for alternatives you can't own an interface/call - only implementation (and as oracle found out with java/android) b) it will just further advertise the availability of an alternative swap out project/product. Either way they lose money and reputation (what little is left)
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You can't swap out the code if they don't tell you which bits of code they claim are infringing.
I too wondered how long it would be before MariaDB implementors start to receive letters that begin "we're not saying that you DO need to pay us for a licence, but..."
MySQL is available as GPL.
"Distributors under the GPL also grant a license for any of their patents practiced by the software, to practice those patents in GPL software." - Wikipedia
Good luck to Oracle enforcing anything on the fork. What's out there now as GPL is out there, nothing they can do about it.
What they have is the copyright and thus the ability to license it under other terms, they can also stop releasing their new code under GPL if they want to (which they do with some commercial extensions I believe) and attack MariaDB if they copy re-implement such new features infringing patents, they can also milk non-technical Technical Directors who think a migration to MariaDB is fraught with danger. But overall, Oracle will have difficulty posing a threat to MariaDB.
As I understand it, MariaDB is a drop in replacement for the core features, but also includes some other features exclusive to the enterprise MySQL and a few which aren't present in either MySQL version. So there are some advantages MariaDB has over the open source version of MySQL, but less advantages over the Enterprise one
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