Agreed, fuck 'em (not that you were saying that, but I am). My point was I want something like this for projects and bugs I care about in general. I don't care about this bug, but can relate to the cake-maker.

To anyone not yet familiar, Maria is a really exciting fork of MySQL - https://mariadb.org/

Do you have some info about MariaDB adoption rates?

It's recently replaced mysql in redhat builds, so it's definitely on the up.

    > It's recently replaced mysql in redhat builds, so it's definitely on the up.

"Red Hat's Director of Product Marketing, Mark Coggin, told various media outlets that the company has not made any decision or made an announcement about which database technology will be in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7."

-- "Red Hat Says No MariaDB/MySQL Decision Made." The H Online, 18 June 2013 (http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-says-no-Maria...)

And in OpenSuse, Arch and Slakware. Looks like to me the trend is set.

Oracle might not accept bug fixing donations. But it should accept bug fixing patches from an independent developer. And that developer might accept a bug fixing donation.

That's where a service like http://freedomsponsors.org comes in handy ;-)

> MySQL is a competitor to their flagship Oracle DB

Does it really? I mean, sure, they are both RDBMS's, but that's a pretty broad market. Are there really that many use cases where, with the current market, people who are using MySQL would have Oracle as their next choice or vice versa?

I can see an argument that MySQL competes with some of the same products that Oracle DB competes with (but in different market segments than where Oracle DB does), but I don't see them as directly competitive in any significant sense.

To me, that's kind-of like saying the MacBook Air is a competitor to Apple's flagship MacBook Pro. They're two different products, made by the same company, doing pretty much the same thing but designed for different use cases. It's the way I always felt about Oracle vs. MySQL, even back before Oracle owned MySQL, that they are two different RDBMS platforms designed for two different use cases.

These days, that line may be blurred a little bit, and you can see how both paradigms (and more!) can be combined into a single product with PostgreSQL, but I feel like the MacBook analogy really sums up the way I feel about these two systems.

My project is in that position. We have access to an Oracle site license so we use it. However, we're considering move to a "competing" db, probably postgresql or mysql.

I'm not a certified DBA so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems that any non-trivial use of Oracle systems ramp up in cost very quickly. Both in terms of hard cash and time in education/training.

> We have access to an Oracle site license so we use it. However, we're considering move to a "competing" db, probably postgresql or mysql.

Good point; I was considering mostly the situation where there isn't something already on hand, but it makes sense that there would be quite a lot of times where MySQL and Oracle DB are considered alternatives for a new project/application by shops who already have an existing installation of one or the other.

Given there are more engineers working on MySQL now than any time in its history, I think Oracle is pretty committed to it. MySQL is about fast, OracleDB is about enterprise. A great many companies will run MySQL for things like web applications (especially those that need scale) while running the critical internal systems on OracleDB.

I don't think the MBPro/MBAir comparison is quite right. I think it's more like MBAir versus Mac Pro: it is very easy to see a single person having both of them and utilizing both of them extensively.

> Are there really that many use cases where, with the current market, people who are using MySQL would have Oracle as their next choice or vice versa?

RDS users?

Fortunately, lots of people other than Oracle work on the MySQL code. They would be susceptible to bug fixing donations. Hell, you could outright hire a Percona consultant.