Founder of MySQL: Return to open source under Sun's Guidance

Nearly half a year after Sun's acquisition, what impact does Sun have on the open-source world? The founder of MySQL stood up to answer questions.

When Sun acquired MySQL, an open-source database vendor, for $1 billion at the beginning of this year, the entire MySQL Community was waiting to see how the new owners would affect their communities. At this year's o'reilly open source event (OSCON), Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL AB, and Brian Aker, the technical director of MySQL, gave everyone a question.

"When we were acquired, my first reaction was to thank God we didn't have to go public ." MySQL was already on the road to market before it was acquired, while Widenius believes that in the long run this is not conducive to the development of MySQL, because listing means seeking benefits for shareholders, this will inevitably undermine the company's initial philosophy. Although Sun, the parent company of MySQL, is currently a public company, MySQL says that Sun's subsidiary does not take responsibility for direct pressure from market shareholders.

In the initial stage, Sun's approach to open-source software development and attitude towards MySQL also caused internal tension. "Our perseverance and spirit in implementing open source has brought Sun a revolution," said Aker. We are surprised to see how Sun uses our Open Source ideas to reflect on how Sun treats open source ."

Under the guidance of CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun has steadily brought all of its software, including the Java programming language and Solaris operating system, into an open source world over the past few years. While MySQL helps Sun better understand the extensive development model of the open-source community, it actually contributes a lot to the development of MySQL itself.

Widenius said: "Over the past four years, MySQL has always been driven by management rather than development. Sun has helped us return to more areas of community attention, which we have failed over the past four years ." Widenius pointed out that over the past few years, MySQL has become increasingly slow in responding to the demand from the community, and the overall development efficiency is also worse than before. Recently, MySQ 5.1 was released two and a half years later. Widenius believes that Sun is ensuring that this situation changes.

The comments by Widenius are in stark contrast to the uproar caused by worries earlier this year that Sun would terminate some of MySQL's open source code. At this OSCON event, Aker announced a plan to develop a MySQL Branch database. The plan is named Drizzle, which aims to provide a streamlined and optimized MySQL database by removing some of the functionality that is vulnerable to system faults from the Database Core. In fact, Sun also expressed support for the new plan. Acker said Sun's management expressed understanding and general support when he informed Sun's management about the plan. Sun gives MySQL developers enough time and opportunity to choose their development path and do what they want to do.

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