Hi Mark
On 17/03/2009, at 10:29 PM, Mark Leith wrote:
On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 1:37 PM, MARK CALLAGHAN
<[email protected]> wrote:
Am I correct in summarizing this by stating that MySQL has a fast
version of this in code I can't review and problems with it are
described in a problem report I cannot read?
Yay for open source, eh?
So we are not allowed paying customers, with custom NRE work, if we
are open source? :)
Mark, that is a flawed lament.
Of course you're allowed paying customers, and you don't have to open
everything, that's a valid choice - however:
a) if you "ARE open source" as you state, then how is that defined
if not by the things that you do being open source? Is it SOME stuff
being OSS? If so, then where the boundary when one can say whether
someone "is" open source or not? Is it some percentage?
b) it being closed does not actually help code quality for even your
paying customers. (see below)
c) does the customer object to it becoming open now? They just
wanted it done on their timeline, I'm pretty sure they'd be fine with
it being open. So who is actually benefiting from it still being
closed? Nobody. Unless you also charge others for the same closed
patch???? That wouldn't be NRE really, that's a whole different realm
of keeping new developments closed for some time for economic
advantage; kinda like Aladdin Ghostscript where only the previous
version becomes OSS. However, we all know that that's not really a
resounding success in terms of a) people appreciating Aladdin and b)
bugs getting found and fixed for everybody.
The current 5.0 custom branch was/is based on Solaris event ports
only (http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/
event_completion.html), so wasn't really applicable for the main
stream server (because it only supported one platform). That's why
we looked at doing it with libevent in 6.0 - so the NRE work helped
to drive the new feature in the later release which is more
applicable to everybody..
Yes, it has some issues. Yes, Support (and others) are pushing for
fixes to much of that as well - 6.0 is still Alpha, so hopefully we
should see some good headway before GA.
Yay for closed source NRE work pushing Open Source development too! ;)
The best ever example of externally-paid development in MySQL was
replication.
However, it was immediately put into the public codebase (there were
no closed bits of code at that time) and it did wonders for a) the
code quality at the time, many more bugs were caught quicker and b)
driving overall adoption of MySQL, i.e. more people using it.
In fact, replication has been a key factor in MySQL's success, I think
we can all agree on that.
While the pool-of-threads is not exactly the same in nature, it's
actually pretty similar in some respects. It can resolve some
important issues.
But in any case, it being open would help bugs getting found and
fixed, and this helps everybody including your paying customer.
Making it open enhances the value proposition for the paying client.
This is a proven advantage of NRE going straight into the OSS codebase.
Cheers,
Arjen.
--
Arjen Lentz, Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
Affordable Training and ProActive Support for MySQL & related
technologies
My blog is at http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com
OurDelta: free enhanced builds for MySQL @ http://ourdelta.org
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