Jesus Christ! ... can't you people read? It is not a charity event! If you want to develop commercially then, in the words of Jesse James, "Pay up suka" otherwise release your code and all is well.
We all have very fine DBs in 7.3 and 7.4, if you don't want to play by the rules then stick with them, otherwise be prepared to give a little back, not much, just a little. Personally I can't wait to see what occurs from this collaboration as I believe the effort will yield a very fine product. Some on this list are just as bad as MS but in reverse ... they want premium software for nothing to make money off of but give nothing in return. I have absolutely no problem in telling my company to pay $500 bucks for a commercial license considering the closest thing costs 20 times that. Just my $0.02 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 7:58 PM To: Kaj Arn� Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: SAP DB and MySQL: Short-term plans Kaj, I suppose its silly to bother responding to this, but... > However, had the licensing and business model for SAP DB proven itself > viable, we wouldn't today have any partnership between SAP AG and MySQL > AB. Bear in mind that neither SAP AG nor MySQL AB are charities. > This may be what SAP thinks now, but, it doesn't really seem like SAP was trying to develop a profit-making business model with SAPDB. If they were, I don't think the model was communicated very well even to the participants on this list, except as an Oracle alternative for SAP customers. To say the business model was proved to be non-viable is therefore a bit silly. SAPDB didn't have a business model--it was presented as a free gift to the extra-SAP community. I think it would be more fair to say that SAPDB failed to prove itself viable as an open-source development project prior to the MySQL announcement. However, personally, I believe that the reason for this was precisely the reason MySQL was able to "acquire" SAPDB: The SAP company, while providing superb support and developent for the system with its own resources, I think did not take such a notion seriously--even worked against it. Public CVS was not available till mid 2002, internal developer communication was kept private within SAP, and the lowering of barriers to wider participation by outsiders--obscure source codes, obscure build system, undocumented/"secret" interfaces such as liveCache--was not sustained. I think it was felt that this would interfere with internal development efforts. I think it also fair to say that the community that has formed around SAPDB has so far accepted its role as a consumer of SAPDB as a product of the SAP team, and to that extent, it's reasonable for them to buy the product if they want to use it commercially. It will certainly be difficult, I think, for even an LGPL fork of the client libraries to remain independently viable--I expect it will soon devolve into a reverse-engineering effort, since it will not be legitimate for GPL SAPDB/MySQL code to be used as the specification for new/changed interfaces. I do hope that the community rises to that challenge, however. Matt -- Matt Benjamin The Linux Box 206 South Fifth Ave. Suite 150 Ann Arbor, MI 48104 tel. 734-761-4689 fax. 734-769-8938 cel. 734-216-5309 On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, [ISO-8859-1] Kaj Arn� wrote: > Dear SAP DB community, > > Yesterday 4.6.2003, the five of us core members of the MySQL AB and SAP AG > teams met in Berlin. The topic of our meeting was the integration of SAP > DB and MySQL, with the main emphasis being on the additions to be > implemented in SAP DB to enable it to better work together with MySQL. > > All of us have been following the SAP DB mailing list, although we haven't > so far personally participated in much of the discussions. During the > meeting, we felt the need of issuing a joint statement to complement the > two initial messages by Marina Montag of SAP (28.5.2003) and and Zak > Greant of MySQL (30.5.2003). > snippage > > Best regards, > > Kaj Arn�, Patrik Backman (MySQL AB) > Rudi Munz, J�rgen Primsch, J�rg Hoffmeister (SAP AG) > > _______________________________________________ > sapdb.general mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://listserv.sap.com/mailman/listinfo/sapdb.general > _______________________________________________ sapdb.general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://listserv.sap.com/mailman/listinfo/sapdb.general _______________________________________________ sapdb.general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://listserv.sap.com/mailman/listinfo/sapdb.general
