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12.06.13

Drifting Away From Copyleft in Databases

Posted in Database, Free/Libre Software at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Databases which are Free/Open Source software (FOSS) are becoming less liberal/freedom-respecting while deceiving labels hide it

PostgreSQL, which is the principal challenger to Oracle in the enterprise, was never copyleft. Copyleft would need to be something like the GPL, which MySQL became famous and hugely popular for (the de facto database for almost every FOSS CMS). Right now, under Oracle's FOSS-hostile management, MySQL’s FOSS identity is at risk and it can ultimately destroy the project [1,2]. Some large companies already move to MariaDB. Apart from those two databases there are some Microsoft partners [3] pretending to embrace ‘open’ databases and some ‘mixed’ or ‘semi’ FOSS database providers [4]. Facebook, the Microsoft-backed surveillance company, claims to be using ‘open’ databases [5-9] and InfiniSQL, yet another contender, does not even call itself Open Source, just “open-source” [10-12]. There has been a real problem in recent years because in the area of databases many companies pretend to be FOSS but are definitely not. This dilutes the “Open Source” brand and confuses many people. It’s a very limiting and restricting trend. The “Big Data” hype has a lot to do with it. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’ MySQL users open up on Open Source

    Four out of five developers plan to migrate if MySQL becomes closed source

  2. MySQL needs to retain open source roots to keep developer base, survey shows
  3. Netflix unlocks the potential of AWS through open source

    Netflix has made available as open source many of its internally developed infrastructure management products. These include facilities for automatically scaling a service’s hardware footprint and resources, as well as software for monitoring and maintaining the resiliency of all the supporting infrastructure.

  4. Is NoSQL ready for enterprise primetime?

    There is lots of interest in NoSQL these days — at the very least from venture capital firms that are throwing money at the potential leaders in the market like MongoDB, Couchbase and DataStax.

  5. RocksDB – Facebook’s Database Now Open Source
  6. Facebook goes open source with its embedded data store
  7. Facebook releases open source code for RocksDB flash database
  8. Facebook goes open source with its workhorse embedded data store

    Continuing its practice of sharing internally developed software, Facebook has released as open source RocksDB, the embedded data store the company developed to serve content to its 1.2 billion users.

  9. Facebook’s latest open source effort: a flash-powered database called RocksDB
  10. New open-source database InfiniSQL aims for high performance at scale

    Some investors love backing ideas that could be the next big thing. Consider, for example, the rise of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, which some market as something that scales easier than traditional relational (SQL) databases.

  11. The “infinitely” scalable InfiniSQL database
  12. An open source, infinitely scalable Relational Database Management System (RDBMS)

    InfiniSQL is a massively scalable relational database system (RDBMS), composed entirely from scratch (not built upon some other technology). There is reproducible benchmark data described on InfiniSQL’s blog proving that it can perform over 500,000 complex, multi-node transactions per second with over 100,000 simultaneous transactions—all on only 12 small server nodes.

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