Jetlagged from transatlantic travel, I woke up in the middle of the Californian night thinking about what has changed since I arrived at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara on Sunday evening. I was pondering all the questions MySQL users and Sun colleagues were asking at the event, and what the user base was thinking out loud on Twitter yesterday.

What has changed is obviously that Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun.

What further changes we will see as a result of that is a different story. Evidently, I don’t sit in with a crystal ball predicting what will happen next. Nor do I have insight into Oracle’s plans for MySQL, once the deal is closed. Nor am I even in a position to comment upon the acquisition, so I won’t do it.

However, what I do know and what I can say is what has not changed with MySQL:

1. There still is a huge base of MySQL users out there. They have economic interests that are independent of whoever owns MySQL. The users in the MySQL community come in all flavors, ranging from casual users to those who intimately know the inner workings of MySQL and have contributed to the code base.
2. There still is a huge talent pool of MySQL experts in Sun Microsystems, in Support, in Consulting, in Training, in Engineering, in other parts of Sun. They have a strong loyalty towards the MySQL users they have served over many years.
3. MySQL is still licensed under the GPL. The GPL license used to form a safety net for the users not certain about whether MySQL AB would follow the spirit of Open Source. It continued to be so with Sun Microsystems. And the Open Source license continues to provide a safety net for its user base, regardless of the owner of MySQL.
4. MySQL has founders, one in particular, who still haven’t fallen off the face of the planet. Moreover, their passion for MySQL and its users continues.
5. Sun Microsystems still is a separate legal entity, practising what’s known as “business as usual“. This is familiar to MySQLers from the time between Sun’s acquisition of MySQL was announced mid-January 2008 to the closing at the end of February 2008. During the period between announcement and closing, we continue to behave as separate entities, even competing with each other.
6. Part of Business as Usual is a number of product announcements at the MySQL Conference this week. I’m looking forward to these!

While I cannot and will not personally speculate about what happens next, nor about Oracle’s intentions with MySQL, I think our users are looking to what the names most inimately associated with MySQL are saying — even if they no longer work for Sun Microsystems:

• First, Mårten Mickos, MySQL AB’s former CEO and long-time SVP at Sun, has several positive comments in his Forbes interview “Why Oracle Won’t Kill MySQL”.
• Second, Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL AB’s co-founder, also finds many positive things to say in his blog statement “To be (free) or not to be (free)“.

My humble suggestions: Keep using MySQL! Follow the announcements from the MySQL Conference this week! Keep helping each other within the MySQL community!

Go MySQL!

After a few days at home in Munich, I was fortunate enough to fly to the Southern Hemisphere again. This time, I’m in Argentina, planning to visit also Uruguay and Chile.

I plan to meet with many Sun customers and MySQL users, and talk about Open Source. All Libre, some of it even Gratuita. The sign on the right is from Jardin Botánico in Buenos Aires, where I had some time off today. I’m posting some of the more private observations on blogs.arno.fi/isit so as not to spam this list with observations of Jacaranda trees. (Note: At the time of writing, not many of my South American observations are yet live.)

Today is Good News Day. In addition to my note on Ivan Nikitin’s improved health, I have good news for our current and potential code contributors:

We have moved from having used MySQL AB’s own Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to now using the Sun’s Contributor Agreement (SCA), which is shorter and easier.

I’ve been asked about our contributor licensing on several occasions, such as back in July, at MySQL Camp in Bangalore, India, as Parvesh mentioned in his blog.

The MySQL Contributor License Agreement (CLA) was an agreement that we asked patch and feature contributors to sign in order to allow us to use their contributions in MySQL Server, which is licensed both under GPL and under our commercial license. The CLA required that the contributors transfer the copyright of their code to MySQL, while of course retaining a perpetual license to use their code in any way they wanted.

Some of our community members objected to having to transfer the copyright to MySQL. And we took it as our homework to double and triple check whether we really need that strong rights from a legal perspective, when Sun could do with the more light-weight SCA (Sun Contributor Agreement). I’m happy to note that this double-and-triple checking is completed, and we’re going to the simpler and clearer SCA. Moreover, the SCA guarantees that your contribution will always be made available as open source. Not that we ever had the intention of revoking that, but I’m sure the contributors will appreciate this guarantee in the SCA.

The whole MySQL Community Team and the MySQL Entineering Team hope that this news is greeted warmly by the greater contributor community. I encourage further feedback as to how we can continue to remove barriers to our community and best collaborate and encourage an “Architecture of Participation”.

You can find information about the Sun Contributor Agreement and general
information about the contributor process online at the Contribute section of the MySQL Forge
and take a look at the SCA on Sun’s website.

In addition, as a contributor, you can choose to digitally sign the SCA via the MySQL Forge’s online contribution system.

Do note that those who already have signed the CLA need to submit the SCA form, if they want their future contributions be covered by the SCA.

To be specific: For those contributors who previously signed the MySQL Contributor License Agreement, your contributions will continue to be governed under the CLA. If you wish to instead have your contributions covered under the new Sun Contributor Agreement (recommended) we encourage you to resubmit under the online SCA form and your contributions will then be covered under the SCA.

Thanks to Jay Pipes for driving this CLA-to-SCA process!

Links:

• Contributing to MySQL: http://forge.mysql.com/contribute/index.php
• Sun’s SCA: http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/contributor_agreement.jsp
• Signing the SCA: http://forge.mysql.com/contribute/cla.php?action=add

In 2000, MySQL co-founder David Axmark first told me about having met with Eben Moglen. His descriptions of Eben were always filled with respect and admiration — respect for a person who can keep his integrity and views of how software law should shape the world, and admiration for Eben’s pragmatism and ability to make a difference in the real world.

David Axmark	Michael “Monty” Widenius	Eben Moglen

Over the years since David’s first encounters, Eben and his later estabished Software Freedom Law Center have repeatedly provided MySQL and its founders with insightful advice. As a startup, initially without any VC financing, MySQL hasn’t always been able to compensate proportionately to the value created.

In recognition of the value created for MySQL through SFLC’s advice, especially on how Eben helped defend MySQL as a GPL developer against license breaches, David and Monty have decided to donate 100 000 dollars each to the SFLC. David and Monty hope this token of appreciation can help the SFLC to give legal advice to support some of today’s startups, who build their business on Free Software. They also hope to inspire other Open Source entrepreneurs to support the SFLC.

Note: SFLC provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

Links:

• Software Freedom Law Center: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
• David Axmark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Axmark
• Michael “Monty” Widenius: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael Widenius
• Eben Moglen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen
• MySQL DevZone Interview with David: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/david-axmark.html
• SFLC Services: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/services/
• SFLC Donations: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/donate/
• MySQL Thanks the Free Software Foundation (7 Nov 2002): http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/generate-article.php?id=178
• MySQL Thanks the Software Freedom Law Center (8 May 2007): http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2007/05/08/software-freedom-law-center/

As reported yesterday from CommunityOne:

• MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source,
• so will the MySQL Connectors, and
• so will the main storage engines we ship.

In addition:

• MySQL 6.0’s pending backup functionality will be open source,
• the MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
• the encryption and compression backup features will be open source,

where the last item is a change of direction from what we were considering before.

The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans were made for a company considering an IPO, but made less sense in the context of Sun, a large company with a whole family of complementary open source software and hardware products.

I’d like to shed some light on the big picture, in two different ways — openness, and the business model.

MySQL’s openness manifests itself in three ways:

• MySQL’s code is open.
• MySQL’s APIs are open.
• MySQL’s data formats are open.

These form a foundation around the MySQL Server and its connectors on which we (Sun), our partners, and the community can all freely build upon. And through this openness, we will always provide a means for our users to easily export their data from MySQL.

Then for MySQL’s business model. To financially support MySQL’s free and open source platform, we have a business model which allows both community and commercial add-ons, and we remain committed to it. We believe the model to be useful for both those who spend money to save time, and those who spend time to save money.

As Mårten mentioned yesterday in the CommunityOne panel, expect Sun/MySQL to continue experimenting with the business model, and with what’s offered for the community and what’s offered commercial-only. We won’t always know the right answer from the beginning, but we want MySQL to be the most popular database for both paying and non-paying users.

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

We congratulate the Free Software Foundation on the release of GPLv3 and offer our thanks to the many individuals in the open source community who participated in the process of drafting the license.

It’s good to see overall improvements in GPLv3 over GPLv2, when it comes to compatibility with other Free/Open Source Software licenses, to the compatibility with other legislations than the US legal system, and to strengthened incompatibility with Software Patents. I am also happy if the work of the Committee B ends up contributing to a better adoption of GPLv3. I am in awe as to the patience and skillful diplomacy with which Eben Moglen could tame the group consisting of everything from techies from comparatively small companies (like Trolltech and ourselves) to the seniormost lawyers from the biggest Fortune 500 companies.

MySQL will continue to monitor the industry’s reaction and adoption of the new license, as we decide the best overall course for our community, our company, our users and our customers.

MySQL is indebted to the Software Freedom Law Center for very good advice and insight on how to combine Free Software with a viable business model. SFLC provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

Professor Eben Moglen, SFLC director and FSF legal counsel, has provided us with profound guidance over the years. We have tried to give something back through our work in the GPLv3 Committee B, but our time resources as a small company are limited in comparison to our fellow committee members.

In recognition of Eben’s help and as a token of our appreciation, we’ve made a small donation to support the continued work of the SFLC. We encourage others who build their business on free software to do the same.

Thank you, Eben!

Today, FSF released the third GPLv3 draft on http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd3-guide . It’s great that the entire, complex process now has completed its next milestone, and I can fully understand why the FSF has seen it necessary to proceed at a pace somewhat slower than originally intended.

My thoughts go back well over a year to the Free Software Foundation’s first conference on GPLv3, at the end of January 2006. It was a great meeting, and as a Committee B member and representative of MySQL, I was asked by China Martens of IDG for my input. My reply “I think there was a good balance between different hair and beard lengths” ended up on China’s compilation “2006: The IT year in quotes” as “a colourful description of the cross-section of attendees”.

I wish I had something equivalently colourful to describe the third draft of GPLv3. “A good balance between FSF’s interest to protect software freedom in the name of the end user, and the interests of the industry to develop sustainable business models upon Free Software“? I hope I will feel able to use that for the final GPLv3 one day.

For now, MySQL continues to be actively engaged in the Free Software Foundation’s GPLv3 drafting process, the next step of which is the upcoming 60 days that should end up in a final draft. Our flagship product, the MySQL database server, remains licensed under GPLv2.

Until the new version of GPL is finalised, we won’t be in a position to determine whether GPLv3 is an appropriate license for MySQL products. As I said at the end of last year in my blog, until we get clear and strong indications for the general acceptance of GPLv3 over GPLv2, we feel comfortable with a specific GPLv2 reference in our license. So while we support and care for the GPLv3 process, don’t expect us to be amongst the first GPLv3 movers.

By the way, don’t miss Eben Moglen’s keynote at the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007 in Santa Clara, California! Eben is not only a brilliant mind and shaper of the future, but one of the best public speakers I have ever heard.

MySQL has today refined its licensing scheme from “GPLv2 or later” to “GPLv2 only“, in order to make it an option, not an obligation for the company to move to GPLv3.

Specifically, this means that copyright notice in the MySQL source code files will change from referring to “either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version” to “version 2” only, in the MySQL 5.0 and MySQL 5.1 code bases.

Six years ago in the summer of 2000, when MySQL AB licensed its software under the GPL, our founders David Axmark and Michael Widenius made this choice because the GPL was a license followed and respected by everyone. We have kept to it, because the GPL is the most palatable license, and poses the least friction for our user base.

MySQL has been part of the GPLv3 Committee B advising FSF since the GPLv3 draft was announced in January 2006. For GPLv3, we have seen fantastic improvements and hope for GPLv3 to spread. Even though my activity level as co-chair for Committee B was by far higher in the spring than what it has been in the past few months, MySQL AB continues to work with the FSF for GPLv3 to be the new, widespread license under which Free Software is licensed. However, now, until we get clear and strong indications for the general acceptance of GPLv3 over GPLv2, we feel comfortable with a specific GPLv2 reference in our license.

I have been in contact on the topic with Professor Eben Moglen, General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center. He has emailed me:

I appreciate MySQL’s thoughtful contribution to the GPLv3 drafting process, showing how a business model and an entire company can be built around Free Software. Looking at recent developments and announcements, I believe MySQL will soon be in a position to see the GPLv3 being adopted over GPLv2 by various Free Software projects.