On 9/24/2014 4:14 PM, Leyne, Sean wrote:
> Finally, to compare the Firebird project against MySQL is not fair --
> MySQL/Percona is able to leverage the significant licensing revenue
> which their ownership of the GPL code provides (no commercial product
> will ship without a non-GPL license for MySQL -- which has a retail
> price of $2000 / server / year). {Remember GPL is 'infectious' so any
> software which interfaces with it, must itself be released as GPL}
> That revenue stream provides a lot of flexibility for hiring devel
> related resources.
Actually not. Percona and Sky are GPL forks -- neither owns the code
and neither can issue commercial licenses.
I haven't looked at the license pricing for some time, but a bundled
commercial license used to be next to free, and not a major source of
revenue. MySQL made its money from the "enterprise" version (identical
to the "community" version plus some management software). The hook was
that you couldn't buy support from MySQL without an enterprise license.
MySQL support was absolutely excellent; people were will to pay big
bucks to get it. And helping things was the fact that MySQL replication
was so delicate that nobody in their right mind would run it without
access to expert hand holding when things started to blow up. Percona
was an alternate (and cheaper) source of expertise before the Oracle
acquisition. Sky/MariaDB is a post-Oracle fork with a lot of former
MySQL managers and developers (MySQL generally had excellent
management. Developers, less so.).
Firebird could learn a great deal by studying MySQL/Percona/Sky/MariaDB
economics. There is a great deal of money to be had by a) treating
users as valued assets and b) providing top notch support. Note: MySQL
was never a success because of product excellence. They won because
their customers loved them. And because Marten ran the company and
successfully sidelined Monty, but that's a different story.
Many MySQL customers would be better off with Firebird, but they love
MySQL and would almost never consider an alternative.
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