But the damage is already done - people think MariaDB is some bastion of good intentions and open source software now, because they very rarely look deeper.
What?
There was strong precedent for fearing what may happen with MySQL. Knowledge of what happened to Hudson, OES, OpenOffice, Solaris ... this would concern the stewards of any bit of software that got swallowed up by Oracle.
(Edit: Also I recall some worrying stories coming out from Monty and other key developers.)
What's this 'bullshit licence' that MariaDB has? I thought the source was (L)GPL all the way down?
This is like a scavenger hunt.
I've looked up MariaDB MaxScale ... and found an optional / add-on product that is aimed at Enterprises, seems to require an Enterprise support licence for the Enterprise edition of MariaDB ... and I completely fail to see how any of this demonstrates that the 'MariaDB story is a bit of a fuck you'.
Basically - their formerly GPL proxy for doing HA deployments is suddenly not open source.
They can of course make this decision - it's their code to do with as they wish. But it's quite fucking rich for Monty to claim Oracle will close source MySQL, create a fork and company which then uses that fear to grow in popularity, only to do the very thing he accused oracle of doing: closing an open source product.
Edit:
Also, if you think only "enterprise" customers need database clusters that survive individual node's being offline, you're in for a big shock.
Definitely not the most extraordinary story over the last decade.
And trumped by IBM's famous first $1b spend on 'Linux' just shy of twenty years ago, and their subsequent announcement that they'd recouped that money within a year.
Coincidentally this speaks to your claim:
> This is likely the greatest act of charity the planet has ever known.
These guys aren't in it for the charity. There's doubtless plenty of positive PR spin from contributing to free software -- but don't mistake pragmatism or happenstance for altruism.
And IBM's contribution was, frankly, marketing. It does not compare to the volumes of high quality technology that the companies I mentioned have simply given away for free.
Many on HN and others are perhaps too close to it but I think people will look back upon this extraordinary corporate charity as a decisive event of the century.
I think you're being overly charitable to think these tech corporations had charitable intentions when they contributed resources to tech projects that happened to improve their tech business prospects.
> And IBM's contribution was, frankly, marketing. It does not compare to the volumes of high quality technology that the companies I mentioned have simply given away for free.
Bizarre you didn't mention that up front when you named 'the big five contributors'.
On what do you base your bold claim that IBM's contribution was marketing, and the other corporations weren't?
> Many on HN and others are perhaps too close to it but I think people will look back upon this extraordinary corporate charity as a decisive event of the century.
IBM announced their first billion spend last century.