The future of mysql (The Pr...

The last slide is not very surprising when you followed the latest discussions on more mysql centric sites or blogs. One paradigm of software development ist to "release early, release often". Sun follows this rule and provides us with fresh opensolaris builds that contain many new features. Now comes the interesting point: when the feature is mature the sell it to their "paying customers". MySQL AB seems to do it the other way round: integrate new features and provide them only in the enterprise line. Now your customers will test your hot new code (why comes Microsoft to my mind here?). When the have earned enough money (or whatever) the feature also moves into the community build. Now you have a really huge userbase that is willing to use every feature your product has. They will push your now not so fresh code to it's limits and fill your bug tracker. Enterprise customers are aware of this feature-bug correlation. This is why the stay more conservative about using new features. But now it might be too late: how many bad design conditions will be reworked? It is already in the product and some ignorants will label it as mature. As a result you have a not so well working feature that nobody will use because it doesn't work as expected (your customers also expect speed on large datasets. no excuses allowed in an enterprise world). Customer satisfaction looks different. This is why their competitors have their hot new stuff in their open source products and only sell the matured part as enterprise products. We will see how long the MySQL model will survive against the classic approach which SUN adopted.

In my opinion SUN is doing much better in understand how open source works than MySQL does now. This is the surprising part. I hope for the future of MySQL that SUN will have some influence here.

As a little side note: I expect the ratio enterprise/community users of SUN software is much higher than MySQLs. Regardless they trust the community more.