MySQL's Monty throws in the towel
Monty Widenius, the main author of the original MySQL database and a founder of the MySQL AB company, has finally left Sun Microsystems following a falling out with Sun over the status of MySQL 5.1. We reported last year that Widenius was unhappy with the release of MySQL and had told Sun that he was planning to leave the company. Now he has finally announced on his blog that he has done that and has established a new business, called Monty Program Ab.
Sun Microsystems bought MySQL for a whopping $1 billion back in February 2008 but the relationship between Sun and Widenius has been rocky since then.
Things came to a head in December last year with the release of MySQL 5.1. Sun was eager to push ahead with the release but Widenius was opposed, saying the code wasn’t ready yet.
Now that he has finally left Sun, Widenius is candid about the reasons he decided to leave Sun, among them saying that he felt Sun wasn’t allowing MySQL development to be as open as he would like:
The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow.
Sun Microsystems said, however, that despite the controversy over the release of MySQL 5.1, its release was a significant success with users.
Comments
4 Responses to “MySQL's Monty throws in the towel”
Comments are closed
February 6th, 2009 @ 12:41 am
This is very bad news for the open source community, In fact I was just going to begin learning MySQL, but when the author of the project says that something is wrong, then it must be true. Looks like I will have to search for another open source alternative database.
February 7th, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
[...] with many today I was certain this was the end of JBOSS, possibly of open source [...]
February 9th, 2009 @ 9:33 am
PostgreSQL benchmarks around complex queries: sub-selects, big joins, etc are almost always significantly better than those of MySQL. I like MySQL, but if you want to do something other than a simple select/update (e.g simple website), then IMHO Postgres is the way forward for you.
(hmm, hope I don’t start a flame war)
February 10th, 2009 @ 6:45 am
@Joshua, I’m also starting to worry about this now.
I’m a big user of MySQL and have been a fan for years. Although I think there is a lot of power still in the community to keep it going, and with the number of systems running MySQL I reckon it should still go for a couple of decades.