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Comment by tentonova | Hacker News Reader

I'm firmly disagree with Monty's duplicity, but I'll try to shed some light on it.

The "big deal" is that only two things provide a revenue stream around MySQL sufficient to support the heavy R&D costs associated with building a database product:

- The name ("MySQL")

- The copyright.

If you own the name, you can sell branded binaries and services. If you own the copyright, you can sell non-GPL licenses to commercial interests. Without these, creating a viable revenue stream is incredibly difficult.

I think this ties into this discussion, as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028638 -- I Love the GPL (Except When it Applies to Me)

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Without these, creating a viable revenue stream is incredibly difficult.

Yes, and Monty knew that when he chose to structure MySQL the product that way. Everything is proceeding exactly as he foresaw and intended.

I agree -- and I think Monty has no business taking umbrage with the bed he's made -- but it's worth exploring why this is the case.

Would it be fair to speculate that he never foresaw the largest proprietary DB vendor eventually buying MySql?

The only thing we can speculate about is what we would have done in his shoes, unless he provides a convincing insight. If it was me, and I cared about a project of mine for the sake of the project and thought it was a vital project (as opposed to one of my tinker toys), I would have open sources the whole thing, no dual license. That way nobody can "steal" it from the community, by buying some company. I would also have tried to give it to someone like the Apache Foundation, so that when I die, my project does not.

On the other hand, if I thought my project was going to be a cash cow, I would have done exactly what Monty did, except the whining after the fact. I think if I buy a car, then sell it to someone and that person sells it later to my arch nemesis for a discount and he plans on wrecking the heck out of it, my screaming about how this is not right is not going to attract many supporters, is it?

When you say "I would have open sourced the whole thing", what you really mean is "I would have BSD-licensed the whole thing". There is no difference between dual-licensed GPL code and straight-up GPL code. In both cases, your rights as an end-user are identical. In neither case can you pick up the codebase after it's sold to Sun and start a new commercial endeavor on it that isn't GPL'd.

What happened to MySQL isn't a consequence of the GPL. It's a consequence of MySQL selling out to Sun. About the worst you can say about the GPL in this situation is that the GPL made MySQL much more attractive to Sun.

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