Steve — If you look at Selena’s post, she seems to say that lack of a mothership has hampered the ability of Postgres to spread.

[...]

“I see development happening inside the company and outside the company. [...] Percona, RedHat and Debian have released binaries for MySQL, with the former company actually making significant changes. The Monty Program offers non-recurring engineering of MySQL (ie, bugfixes, patches, features).”

I think it’s great what percona and google and Monty Program AB are doing, and they deserve all the credit for their skill and insight in the problems and solutions re. MySQL.

However, with all due respect, improving upon an existing product is IMO quite a different ballgame than maintaining an entire server + tools.

In my opinion, the value of the percona and google patches consist to a large extent by their potential of improving the MySQL mainline. By definition, these improvements are shaped by the direction taken by the mainline. This type of development is different from maintaining and leading the development of the server (and tools!) on the mid- and long term.

I am not saying that these companies aren’t capable of maintaining the entire server (and tools) – I’m just saying that they currently aren’t doing it. They might start doing that when the company backing is gone. Then again, they may not.

You say that “…[third party development] …has already started happening”, implyiing this will continue or even expand. But I think the value of the investment in doing this could take quite a blow when there is no company taking care of marketing and proliferating the main product on the scale that is currently manifest. Without a clear mainline, it becomes more expensive to invest in a particular branch or flavor of mysql.

For storage engine development, the prospects are perhaps a bit better. I can imagine XtraDB and Maria (and other sotrage engines for that matter) being used as datastores in their own respect, without MySQL. However, today, their value is still very much defined by their ability to be integrated inside MySQL.

Because the company backing is instrumental in marketing the product and creating a climate that makes it easy for developers (documentation, tools) to work with MySQL, there is more of it around, and thus more platforms to land these storage engines in.

Perhaps I am too reserved, and perhaps these companies will be able to converge and maintain a strong mainline MySQL in the absence of company backing. But all I’m saying is, its a bit too soon to assume that this actually will happen.

kind regards,

Roland

Without it, there would be no Users Conference, no commercial partnerships (many grew thanks to these partnerships), no adoption by many of the biggest commercial companies around (their lawyers won’t allow them), etc.

Without it, there would be more community contributions, most likely more modular code (maybe better plug architecture for more than just storage engines) and faster evolution (Postgress has evolved faster over the last few years).

My conclusion, MySQL is what it is today because of MySQL AB/Inc. Without it, it wouldn’t have ceased to exist (and it won’t die if it has no mothership today), but it wouldn’t be what it is today either. It would be better or worse? I don’t know, my crystal ball is being serviced right now.

“You doubt that the ecosystem can take over all the work that the company has done, yet you say there is more opportunity because the company exists.”

The number and nature of opportunities that exist in the ecosystem today are a result of the fact of “the company” existing in the first place, and the work that “the company” performs. It’s a combination of (many) factors.

The opportunities available to “MySQL sans official corporate owner” would be reduced in number and nature simply due to the lack of the organizing “force” of an official corporate owner.

The work performed by “the company” is such that the ecosystem cannot really absorb it, meaning among other things that the product itself becomes immediately less attractive, also reducing the number and nature of opportunities available.

Et cetera.

I said that there are folks outside the company that are fulfilling the *roles* of development, training, support, etc. I did not say whether they surpassed the level of work the company does, or fell extremely short of the level of work the company does. I could — for example, there’s much more support externally, and much less development externally.

However, I was merely stating that there are already frameworks in place for handling the *functions* — I said nothing about the *capacity*. Why? Because I wasn’t making a value judgment.

All I’m saying is that a company behind MySQL isn’t necessary. If there is a company, it will continue to provide development, opportunities, etc. If there isn’t a company, though, there will still be a lot of good MySQL work being done out there.

So….If the company didn’t exist, the ecosystem wouldn’t be able to take over all the work that the company is currently doing. This means that if the company didn’t exist there would be a lot of shoes to fill, and yet somehow there’s MORE opportunity because of the company?

There is no doubt that more people in the MySQL ecosystem have created more opportunities. The company/ies behind MySQL have, too — whether they’re Pythian, The Monty Program, MySQL AB or Sun.

(As for whether or not the ecosystem can take over the work the company is doing — I believe it can, but not immediately. Developers and engineers leave the company, but most don’t leave the ecosystem!)

Davi — it is logically sound. If you have a project that has decentralized engineering, it depends on contributions from outside the core of the developers. Problems come about if outside contributions are difficult to merge back in. In a decentralized environment, these issues are worked on sooner than in a centralized development environment.

I didn’t say that centralization *created* the difficulties, just that it’s possible to go longer without fixing it, because if you have most of your development centralized, it’s not as critical to be able to accept external contributions.