[Cc-bizcom] comments from Zack

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Tue Sep 14 13:04:51 EDT 2004


Rob Myers wrote:
> One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is how Open Source made MySQL
> commercially viable. I certainly wouldn't have started selling a new
 > database at the moment when Oracle and Microsoft were consolidating
 > their stranglehold on the market in the late-1990s. Without Open
 > Source, MySQL would not have got the mindshare, exposure and community
 > of users required to make it commercially successful.

In this case there's even a counterfactual: in the mid-90's mSQL (free 
as in beer for most purposes, source available) was popular for low-end 
web apps on unix.  Hughes Consulting of Australia (the mSQL vendor, 
IIRC, I'm offline at the moment) didn't want to open source mSQL, and 
over a very brief time (~1996) saw their share killed by MySQL.  Now 
MySQL is a thriving business.

I like PostgreSQL better, and it appears to have corporate-financed 
development with a non-copyleft (BSD-like) license, but that's another 
story that I don't know much about.

-- 
   Mike Linksvayer
   http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21




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