Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Lots of people writing about Snorkle again today ,Monty Says, help saving MySQL

He gives us different options, a , b or c .. but I , and some others, want an option d

No I don't trust Oracle, it's not like they have been a very good Open Source Citizen, yes they contribute to the kernel and other projects but my feeling says it's only because they have to (Kernel, Xen and others ) not because they Want to (thinking about Unfakable etc) , if they would really want to they probably would work with the CentOS community more etc, and as Monty mentions their InnoDB track record could be better.

But on the other hand I don't think the EU should block the deal because Monty wants his baby back , cheap , as honestly imvho that's what they really want, be able to buy MySQL back for a nice price, either beceause Oracle is being forced by the EU to split up Sun, or eventually the deal doesn't come trough and they can buy MySQL back when Sun really goes belly up (which is what probably happens when option a) is chosen.

According to CNN , Oracle has made some pledges about MySQL earlier today.
My main question there however is about the Opposite of option 5. which is exactly what created the problem.

5. Support not mandatory. Customers will not be required to purchase support services from Oracle as a condition to obtaining a commercial license to MySQL.

Yes we want support, but no we don't want a commercial license with it, we want support on the GPL version, which is a problem lots of Open Source vendors struggle with , some of them
force people wanting to buy support to go for the commercial license. And it is exaclty that upselling that got MySQL in the troubles it has today .

Josh Berkus has a point declaring
Dual Licensing dead, just as I he sees much more future in the Percona like model than in the Dual License model MySQL used to have ..

Dries points to one of the comments on
Lukas Kahwe Smith 's Come On Money er Monty article stating
Monty walks away with several millions in hard cash, while [PHP +] MySQL cheerleaders who bet on "MySQL" franchise only walk away with a cute dolphin T-shirt

Which makes me wonder when I`ll be getting a nice Acquia T-shirt :)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled Dear IBM , I was too late .. I was on holliday last week when people started sending me text messages , such as .. "Game Over MySQL , Long live Ingress" or "No Eclipse for IBM", etc ...

I had ideas regarding the future of certain Sun products at IBM, now the game has changed .. it'ss how they will live on at Oracle :)

Similar Questions arise .. like indeed the future of MySQL, the future of Solaris etc ...

So regarding the future of MySQL , I don't worry at all, on the contrary ..
Oracle tried buying mysql before they already have Innodb .. they didn't kill it .. the MySQL offering is complementary to the Oracle offering, now they can tackle both markets.
And as already mentionned when writing my IBM letter ..

As for MySQL, Jeremey has some good insights.. the fact that different prominent MySQL folks have left Sun will only push the MySQL development model towards more openness.
And towards an even more Redder RedHat alike model, we already have the first CentOS alike rebuilds of MySQL , so a distribution model based on the same kernel with different feature sets or focus indeed might be the future.

Further there's what Monty Said ... hang on ... nobody mentions the fact that some core PostgreSQL people are on Sun's payroll how's that going to turn out ?

A more interresting discussion is the future of Solaris one.. Oracle has always had an eye for Solaris.. one day it is their most important platform, the other day they tell the world Linux is their prime development platform, it often was a matter of who was quoted.

As for Unbreakable Oracle did a smart thing.. they learned that they should build a full operating system themselves but , so why should they want to do that with Solaris ?

LinuxWorld has an article where oracle states their idea about Linux :
"
What we are working to do in the data center ... is to make Linux the default for the data center OS," Screven said in a speech at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco. "We want there to be no question"

They suggest a merger between Solaris and Linux is a potential alternative .. so what do we need to merge .. you'd say ZFS and DTrace ..,but do we really need ZFS ?
There has been a lot of writing already about BTRFS being the next big filesystem, maybe it could make ZFS obsolete, maybe it couldn't ..

I got no clue on what's going to happen with OO.org .. so I`m really going to keep an eye on that one ..

In my opinion the real loser in this deal .. HP .. they don't have a full stack to play with .. They have the hardware, some management and monitoring software soon to be obsolete but no Operating System, no Database, no Appserver, no Apps. So what's their next move going to be ?

Oh and if you really want to talk figures Larry Augustin has a good take on it ... the idea that Oracle could sell off some parts to Hitachi EMC etc, get MySQL and Sun for Free ... then quietly wait for RedHat .. to get Jboss who knows :)

PS. I already blogged about the impact of the acquistion on the Virtualization area over at Virtualization.com

Tarry has an overview of the commentaries about Oracles latest Virtualisation announcement.

Two things hit my brainwaves, First ,seemingly Larry is claiming that his Xen package is better than
the others since he supports Live Migration and all the others don't. I don't know where he gets the idea.. I have to admit I don't remember which year it was .. but it was somewhere in december that I first starting with Live Migratiion of Xen machines and it was also on a CentOS platform. No fancy gui, no hardcover manuals that had it all documented. But fast and seamlessly working live migration, ready for everybody to use.

Second one is he claming that since Xen was re-engineered by Oracle to be faster than the competition.
The way you read it there is that Oracle took Xen, modified it then started redistributing it.
Is that really what happened ? Are they redistributing the source, or are they violating the GPL ? Coz if they are
redistributing the source everybody just got a faster Xen and if they aren't ..
I don't know but there sure is room for rumour here. Or is this just a bunch of marketing people and IT journalist that are mispresenting the facts. Fact is that one needs to spend lots of time verifying the facts of stories one read on the internet today.

I`m also seeing people crying that Oracle is finally stepping to the open source side.. .. I`m wondering on which planet they have been living.. Oracle has been supporting different Open Source products for ages already and they even are the owners of core components of typical daily used packages, so where do those authors get the idea that Oracle is finally stepping over ?

Tonight I don't have time to go and hunt back the original sources and see who actually said what . Honestly I don't care that much about Unbreakable, Last time I tried caring was when one of my european customers was interested in it, and no one at Oracle.be could help me . It's Like Dell shipping Ubuntu.. not on this part of the world.. and sadly it's also like the OLPC .. Give one Get one only on the other side of the Ocean.

It's all good marketing .. until you actually want to get it .. :(

Just give me the source code .. then I don't have to sit trough presentations from marketing people that can only read from spec sheets for some product , but fail to read the fine print and leave me disappointed again ...

Seklos just posted a story on his Oracle blog on how he installed Oracle 10something in less than an hour.

I found the story hilarious. why . because about a decade ago .. when I was still into database & webdevelopment, Oracle first started shipping Oracle for Linus (somewhere in 99)
Back then some collegue had been struggling for a couple of days already to setup up Oracle on a Windows box and was thinking to just use SQL server.
So I went home found the famous CD with the typo (or did I really get the CD that should have been shipped to Finland ?) in my mailbox and as I had a new Siemens Server sitting in my basement, I installed a fresh RedHat and on a machine I never had seen before (that's the ninetees I`m talking about so no fancy just install it on most common hardware and it will work like we have these days) and then went on installing an Oracle version I had never seen before and guess what .. I completed that task in about just less than an hour.
So when I arrived at the office the next morning with an up and running Oracle on Linux server the crowd didn't believe me untll they fired up their SQLPlus clients and started creating their tablespaces and tables.

So now about 8 years later it still takes an experienced Linux and Oracle guy about an hour to install a basic Oracle ? What have they been doing ?

I bootstrap a fully operational MySQL server from blank disk to replying to queries in about 5 minutes.
Maybe I should move back to Oracle because as a consultant I get paid by the hour and if a similar job takes me about 10 times as long as I`m used to .. can you imagine ..

Now all joking aside .. the problem isn't with Oracle, the problem isn't with RedHat and not all the solutions are with MySQL, the problem is with people with little or no system experience trying to do a job they should grow in to over time, and failing to get proper help or guidance their first time.

Just one final thought.. with Unbreakable I really would have expected Oracle to go one step further not requiring the runInstaller thing anymore but just providing their customers with cleanly packaged software so a yum or apt-get install oracle would actually work.

Because as Luke learned us . If your computer can't install it .. the installation procedure is broken.