Hi! So this is completely my notes taken from the conference, without my thoughts attached to it. I should definitely post a lot more about this, and how the community can “improve” in time. Just not today. Believe me, sitting in the talk, was highly painful, and I’m wondering where my aspirin stash might be. The slides will be available soon, and lets just consider this a learning experience. It reminded me of the time Eric Raymond came to the Fedora Project’s very first FUDCon in Boston 2005 (probably the only session without available video :P).
What MySQL can learn from PostgreSQL
Joshua Drake
Compared us at OSCON 2007. MySQL lacked technical meat, compared to PostgreSQL. Since 2005, PostgreSQL booth had most visitors besides Mozilla.
MySQL Community is a second class citizen. MySQL AB does not advocate. They promote, they sell.
Does MySQL community advocate? No. PostgreSQL community does. In 2008, there are 7 planned events by community.
MySQL User Conferences? None that he knows of.
– go to a college and educate students
– teach a workshop maybe
There is nothing wrong with corporate conferences, but for a community to be truly sustainable, the community must have its own ecosystem.
What makes a community? Members and Users.
Ubuntu: most popular Linux distribution in 4 years. Rabid, helpful, friendly community members.
PostgreSQL: all walks of technical life drive it.
PostgreSQL Association in the US: drive PostgreSQL in higher education.
Where are the people contributing to MySQL because its MySQL the project?
PostgreSQL has defined community leads. MySQL doesn’t.
The community is the real stock holder in Open Source. To be truly successful, as an open source project (with commercial participation) the commercial participation must be a servant to the community.
In 5 years, there will be no MySQL. Sun won’t allow MySQL to exist. Maybe it will be Sun-MySQL. Why is the community not ensuring there is more groundwork, beyond the corporate entity?
What happens when the corporate culture disappears, now at Sun?
Sun spent $1 billion on something that is only worth $250 million. That money, was goodwill money based on name. You must produce profit of that billion dollars. So in the next 5 years, they must show the shareholders that the billion dollars gave them 25 years.
Changing the model of MySQL must happen for Sun to justify spending the money.
“I’m wondering if there’s an open source model to MySQL”.
MySQL controls all of the committers. Is MySQL an open source project?
Marten Mickos asked him to give this talk. No one is going to throw tomatoes at him.
“I’m not here to bash MySQL” – its just differences that he sees.
People have a tendency to change their goodwill gestures when their coffers are getting thinner. So Sun may make hard decisions to focus on sales.
No co-opetition, that is not sustainable.
Without diversification, the project suffers. Look at the manual, look at the things that have changed. Really? What?
“Enterprise customers get the alpha code, and the community gets it back later after its tested”.
CommandPrompt will be fully 100% open source in under 60 days. EnterpriseDB is the opposite, they’re closing up more and more.
MySQL adds features more quickly than PostgreSQL due to its willingness to add features to stable releases. PostgreSQL only does so in major releases, causing 12-14 months breaks between feature sets. May 2007, no new features, in GA releases
PostgreSQL only adds features based on:
– correctness
– maintainability
– portability
– stability
Attacks someone from Fox Interactive Media. They have issues with PostgreSQL, and they call Sun, but Joshua wants people to communicate to the community. Sponsor someone. Sun doesn’t address your needs. This is the 5TB problem in PostgreSQL.
MySQL is an embarrassment at being the “world’s most popular open source database”. That’s like Microsoft.