xgrr.de – the whole not the half

Last week MySQL 5.1 was finally anounced. Now the MySQL founder Michael “Monty” Widenius commented on the release. He said that this version is crap. It contains a lot of bugs which can trigger data inconsistencies, system crashes or might be used as an attack vector on the MySQL infrastructure. In MySQL 5.1 a five year old bug is included which made it even to the Wikipedia site for MySQL. His explanation for this disastrous situation was too early change to release candidate status instead of pushing short releases as alpha or beta.

His solution for these problems: Change the development and release model. Let the community drive the development so that quality software is created. He mentioned the models used by PostgreSQL and Drizzle.

Drizzle is a code fork of MySQL and not owned by any company. Knowing the open source world a bit, this could be the answer to a lot of uncertainties which came up when Sun bought MySQL. But this depends on how the Drizzle developers doing their work.

Oh yeah! Colleagues of mine followed a official training on MySQL-Cluster with one of the developer of this part of MySQL. As I joined in too late I wasn’t able to follow the training as well but as I showed my interest in it I received a complete training handbook for MySQL cluster and some martketing stuff. Great.

I couldn’t believe it. In the morning I read the “Heise Newsletter” one of the biggest german sites for technical related news. In two news posts they wrote that Sun Microsystem bought MySQL AB for about a billion dollar. What does this mean for the future of LAMP or Linux? A lot of free software depends on the LAMP stack. Not only the pupular WordPress (this site is running on Wordress) but a lot of different applications OpenSource or not. Sun tries to place its Solaris to directly compete with Linux.