niflheim

I was shown an item of interest to me this morning over at ye olde Xaprb’s blog:

Why MySQL might not benefit from having a mothership

The bit that caught my eye, shortly into the post itself, was:

The conversation went something like “I was talking to so-and-so, and he said, you know, you guys really need Sun/MySQL, because without the mother ship, things will fall apart and your own business will fail.”

While at the User Conference I had a conversation with a colleague o’ his on this very subject, causing me to wonder if the aforementioned “he” is in fact “me”.  Assuming so, that is not at all what I said, so I’ll try again.

My employer has nothing to do with anything I write here, etc.

Everyone Needs the MySQL Mothership

What I actually said was: I believe that a successful commercial enterprise called “MySQL” is necessary in order to create the types of opportunities that exist in the “MySQL Ecosystem” today.

I’m not biased because I’m responsible for running MySQL Support.  I’m “biased” because I was the DBA who made the business decisions to deploy products against MySQL for three different companies, placing not only our businesses but also our customers in the hands of MySQL.

Some of the reasons I made those decisions are no longer true of MySQL (currently, at any rate), but one of the primary reasons I selected MySQL over, say, PostgreSQL was because “MySQL” owned its product.

It was a commercial company producing an open source product.  It was not an open source project.  It was not a company with a South Park-esque business plan (”1. Monetize other people’s work  2. Who cares?   3. Profit”).

The database is not a web server, performing generally simple tasks.  The database is not the kernel, vital but invisible.  The database is not a commodity.

The database is my business and my customers’ business!

I can’t trust that to an open source project, because I need a commercial relationship.  I need accountability, responsibility, reliability.  I expect to be here tomorrow, and I need you to be there with me.

I can’t trust that to an IRC channel, a forum and a mailing list, populated by people who may not know what they are talking about, who may not care about my problems and who just may be elitist jerks preferring to insult me than to help me.

I can’t trust third party generalists.  No matter how much Linux distribution or “open source stack” vendors know about supporting their “thing”, they cannot properly support my database (”my business and my customers’ business”) because they simply cannot know it well enough.

I can’t completely trust third party specialists, however trustworthy they may be, even though I may choose to use their services.  It’s the “Tomorrow” question all over again, because specialists (by definition) don’t do everything.

If MySQL, the commercial company producing an open source product, had not existed then every one of those companies would have been forced to continue deploying against MSSQL and Oracle.

There are certainly businesses without such concerns, or who are unable or unwilling to make those particular business decisions (the .com bubble certainly did not teach anyone anything), but the particular needs I had are very much prevalent among companies actually willing to enter into business relationships with (”pay money to”) a particular vendor.

It’s rather like a developing star system (I’ll refrain from naming the star “Sun”).  If the star has sufficient mass, it will draw more things to it, perhaps at an accelerating pace.

Yes, most things will be drawn into orbit around the star itself.  We may even find that this power it wields is confining or restricting by its very nature.  But, if the star lacks sufficient mass to hold the system together, the entire thing will eventually fly apart.

In such a case the best result may be that some of the pieces form smaller, local systems and drift off to wherever, but those smaller systems will never possess the same “drawing power” as the larger system.

Or: Opportunities will always exist, but the number and nature of those opportunities depend heavily upon the “gravity of the star” organizing the system.

We all need a successful commercial venture named “MySQL” at the heart of the “MySQL solar system” in order to continue enjoying the same types of opportunities, to continue moving into new regions with ever-increasing momentum.

Some folks are happy, even happier, within the context of a “small, local system”.  I just hope that they remember to look beyond themselves and recognize that even if their own lives would be improved by destroying the star, there are millions more that would not.

Perhaps I ask too much.