Firebird News

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To attack Firebird, Oracle would have to buy rights from many individuals.

Another difference is that Firebird operates under a single open source license. MySQL is dual licensed GPL and commercial, as is InnoDB. Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB doesn’t affect MySQL’s GPL business, but does put Oracle in the position to set terms for the commercial side of MySQL’s use of InnoDB.

If Oracle were to buy the rights to all code created by Roman Rokytskyy, JayBird would still be available under a license that allows its use with Firebird in all situations that are currently allowed.

Yet another difference is that Firebird’s code base is integral – MySQL has a more modular approach, using backend plug-ins. That lead to serious specialization. Many people on the Firebird project are familiar with most aspects of the code – the loss of one individual would not leave large sections of Firebird indecipherable.

If Oracle were to buy Roman’s code and hire Roman, others would pick up the existing code for Jaybird and continue to maintain and enhance it. Oracle would be under no obligation to share changes it made to Jaybird in the future – that obligation falls on subsequent contributors but not on the original contributor, but we would continue with a fork.

Basically, Oracle’s buying InnoDB and SleepyCat is a problem for MySQL – to the extent that it is a problem – because of their dual GPL / commercial license. EnterpriseDB and the other commercializations of PostgreSQL exist because of the very open license that PostgreSQL uses – there is no obligation to publish changes to the code, so they can produces “better” versions using their own “secret ingredients.”

Firebird’s license is between those two. We can’t make money selling commercial licenses, but we can’t be attacked by a third party restricting our right to make commercial use of code they acquire. We require that anyone who distributes changes to the code publish the changes, so no one can create a special secret “turboFirebird.”

There’s a risk that someone will decide that all our developers are wonderfully talented people and hire them away, but every software development organization faces that risk, and Firebird has a good record of bringing on and integrating new developers.

Hope this is moderately clear ….

Best,

Ann

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Market researcher Evans reported early in 2005 that MySQL was used by 40% of developers, immediately followed by Firebird with 39%. The acquisition means that the Firebird architecture will be the most popular on the planet with a very large margin.

A lot of work will probably need to go into getting MySQL and the technology behind Netfrastructure to work together. A lot of testing will also be needed since, due to the low number of deployments of Netfrastructure, its finesses remain largely unproven.

It will be interesting to see how MySQL clients will react to this move and the eventual downgrade of InnoDB support. Will they wait until MySQL completes the Netfrastructure port, or will they choose to move to Firebird directly?

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My decision to join MySQL has almost nothing to do with Firebird and everything to do with Netfrastructure. The Netfrastructure platform represents what I feel about contemporary computing hardware and future application requirements, and has been the center of my technical heart and soul for six year. Some aspects of Netfrastructure technology have already been contributed to the Vulcan project, but Firebird and Netfrastructure are architecturally incompatible. An attempt to integrate the technologies would be unlikely to meet the goals of either project.

MySQL and Firebird have never seen each other as competitors and I doubt this will change in the future. The projects have different open source philosophies, different technologies, different customer bases, and different sweet spots. The ideas behind the two projects are, happily, public and available to all. If MySQL and Firebird compete, it is only competition in offering the best possible support to their respective customers.

I am pleased to have had the opportunity to finish the Vulcan project. The combination of Vulcan SMP and architecture combined the rich feature set of Firebird 2 will make a solid release and a superb platform for future development.

I wish the Firebird project all the best in years to come. And if you need an opinion, please feel free to call.

Site editor note: Is this your first contact with Firebird? I invite you to read the “Get to know Firebird in 2 minutes” paper and find out why Firebird is so special!

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