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Business Source License: MariaDB has Gone Proprietary

posted by martyb on Sunday August 21 2016, @10:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-a-buck-developing-free-software dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

InfoWorld reports

MariaDB Corp. has announced that release 2.0 of its MaxScale database proxy software is henceforth no longer open source. The organization has made it source-available under a proprietary license that promises each release will eventually become open source once it's out of date.

MaxScale is at the pinnacle of MariaDB Corp.'s monetization strategy--it's the key to deploying MariaDB databases at scale. The thinking seems to be that making it mandatory to pay for a license will extract top dollar from deep-pocketed corporations that might otherwise try to use it free of charge. This seems odd for a company built on MariaDB, which was originally created to liberate MySQL from the clutches of Oracle.

The license in question, the Business Source License, was devised by MySQL creator Michael "Monty" Widenius in 2013. It allows use for evaluation and sets a date when the source code will be placed under the GPL, but it's explicitly proprietary in pursuit of commercial ends.

Monty blogs

Here is a statement from a large software company when I asked them to support MariaDB development with financial support:

As you may remember, we're a fairly traditional and conservative company. A donation from us would require feature work in exchange for the donation. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a feature that I would want developed that we would be willing to pay for this year.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by zip on Monday August 22 2016, @01:26AM

    by zip (702) on Monday August 22 2016, @01:26AM (#391383)

    Pretty sure it was predicted that this would happen again. Monty is the one that screwed MySQL in the first place, only to fork it in the name of open source after Oracle acquired Sun. Now it's the same shit again. Another reason to switch to Postgres for good.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday August 22 2016, @02:52PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 22 2016, @02:52PM (#391654)

    As one of those who completely predicted this, that's why I am completely unwilling to donate time or money to MySql, MariaDb, or anything else Monty does, and like you prefer Postgres as a relational database in nearly all cases. He's shown multiple times that he'll sell out the work of other people for his personal profit.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.