MySQL man pages license change is a bug
bugs.mysql.com
bugs.mysql.com
Also he's in an abandoned fairground for some reason.
Will the tech community ever get past the manufactured controversy and knee-jerk reaction we lambast the mainstream media for?
You heard it here first!
Will HN ever get past all of the whiny meta about what other people are posting or upvoting?
Quick Edit: This is one of the reasons why I love discourse, it encourages metadiscussion in a separate part, and while it doesn't keep it from contaminating, it seriously helps a lot to focus it and guide it.
lsiebert: How does that work on Metafilter?
I'm not sure I agree that these things necessarily needed to be brought up on HN in order for them to be corrected. Just reaching out to FB may have done it. The author did not do this, instead issuing a retraction after the fact. Did anyone contact the MySQL team to see if this was a mistake before lighting the torches and grabbing the pitchforks?
The problem isn't the people here on HN. The problem is the authors of these irresponsible articles; authors who know that the more sensationalist of headline they write, the more likely the community will join their frenzy without question. It's meta on the tech journalist community, not the HN community.
If you run a project that enjoys the wide-scale usership of Facebook or MySQL then grow thick skin cause people are gonna raise flags fast when things look fishy. Because your project really fucking matters to people and mistakes hurt, deal with it.
I'd wager that this helps your product more often than it hurts it.
So no, I wouldn't say it's more likely. Possible, yes, but the question of 'more likely' depends on how quickly you think large companies like Facebook and Oracle are willing to change course based on a very minor PR event. I doubt it would affect their bottom line at all. The more likely event seems to be that it was us that got it wrong, not the other way around.
My sense is this originates from a few perceptions of Larry Ellison and Oracle: (1) Oracle does give a whip about Open Source software. (2) Oracle charges so much for their primary RDBMS technology that it would only be natural for them to undermine MySql as an open source database technology (a view I, personally, share despite evidence to the contrary). (3) As a tech, in a past life, I've had to support Java on the client side for some really poorly written Java apps. Aside from the experience being utterly awful due to this horrible app, I have little trust for a company that installs toolbars alongside critical patches and then defends the practice when called out.
I'm finding my view of Oracle is so negative (maybe I've been supporting Oracle software for way too long?) that I'm not going to be fully convinced this was a bug until the "wrong set of copyright headers" is fixed. That's pretty sad since it makes little sense that Oracle would relicense just the man pages in some sort of conspiracy to squeeze a dime out of its customers.
Either way, it's always a good reminder of my personal favorite variation of Hanlon's razor: Where there are gaps of understanding, people jump to the worst possible conclusion.
Anyone who has sufficient exposure to any large bureaucracy will have examples of the last to share. Which then raises the possibility that (as is happening currently with Bank of America) the possibility of advanced stupidity is used to cover actual malice.
Hanlon's razor is advice about what predictions you should make (or which hypotheses you should advocate, if you like). It says that when you don't know whether something is malice or stupidity, you should never predict/theorize the former.
If it's not literal, then it's argumentative hyperbole and should be interpreted as "usually" or "most often". In this case the truth of the statement is intact and can be a useful guide.
So either you're right and the saying is worthless, or I'm right and the saying retains useful meaning.
No, its not.
As a statement about predictions, its about likelihood. "Never assume malice when incompetence is plausible", even if taken literally, need not be an attempt to establish that it is universally true that when both are plausible, malice is always the correct prediction; it is a sufficient premise that there are no circumstances in which both explanatiosn are plausible where malice is more likely.
It does NOT say "malice is plausible" it says "malice is IMPOSSIBLE, when you CAN attribute an act to stupidity."
And if you watch his presentations about MySQL you can see he fully accepts that he made a mistake with the way MySQL grew and he is rectifying that with MariaDB in which he has invested a significant amount personally
And how has the wrong set of copyright headers ended up on said pages?
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
What does "the wrong set of copyright headers" do in a vicinity of the packaging pipeline and how it came to exist in the first place. It's easy to throw around flashy one-liners. It's a bit more work to actually try and read into the facts presented.
Do not be condescending on Hacker News when someone is responding to your question. It's easy to jump to conclusions. It's a bit more to actually try and understand what happened - that is the point of Hanlon's Razor. This may have been intentional, yes. But it may also have been a bug.
Do not dispense unsolicited advice on the Internets. That wasn't a reply. It was a highbrow remark that was as generic as it was barely applicable. A proper reply was the sibling comment that pointed at two editions.
The nazis did it.
Everyone happy now? :)
Source: Ex-Oracle MySQL engineer.
Here is a link to an older version of the page where the documentation was available: http://web.archive.org/web/20121030130559/http://dev.mysql.c...
See "Documentation Repositories".