Correct me if I'm wrong, but most projects started by some form of organization end up being dead after handing them off to the community. That is, unless they make their code from the ground up to be as most readable and modular as possible.
I remember many projects made by Sun Microsystems that just died when Oracle took over, even if the code is still there.
I wouldn't really call Zulip a counter-example. It wasn't aband^H^H^H^H^H released to the community, it was spun off as a separate company. They offer paid products, have employees, an office in San Francisco, etc.
There are some things worse than death, like what MySQL experienced: being turned into a zombie designed to eat the brains and infect people who used to use it when it was truly free, all in the name of tricking people into switching to Oracle's expensive SQL server.
What? MySQL continues to work just fine. 8.0 (which was admittedly released two years ago) was the biggest release in ages in terms of new features and removal of things that should have been removed decades ago. Then there's MariaDB, which is named differently purely for copyright reasons and could be considered the 'real' MySQL (since its dev team are Monty and friends). I don't think MySQL came out of Sun's disintegration badly at all.
To be more precise: 8.0 finally has proper utf-8 out of the box, support for complex replication topologies (including multi-master), window functions, CTEs, etc.
MySQL has been and continues to be a major success for Oracle, and in 8.0+ and beyond the feature set, correctness, and performance have improved substantially; MySQL continues to evolve and currently is in a good spot. It is even more attractive in modern times thanks to systems like Vitess, which add major features (online schema change, excellent horizontal scaling) that give alternatives a run for their money. What are you even talking about?
>Dead database walking: MySQL's creator on why the future belongs to MariaDB
>MySQL's creator, Michael "Monty" Widenius, is scathing on database's future with Oracle
>It's fair to say that MySQL creator Michael "Monty" Widenius is not a fan of Oracle. When the company announced in April 2009 that it was purchasing Sun, Widenius saw a bleak future ahead for the (still) wildly popular open source database, which Sun had snapped up in 2008.
>The day the Sun purchase was announced, Widenius responded in the tried and true open source fashion — he forked MySQL, launching MariaDB, and took a swathe of MySQL developers with him.
>"Many of the original MySQL core developers, including me, didn't believe that Oracle would be a good owner of MySQL and we wanted to ensure that the MySQL code base would be free forever," Widenius explains.
>Some of the new code by Oracle is surprisingly good, but unfortunately the quality varies and a notable part needs to be rewritten before we can include it in MariaDB
>Widenius and a number of other MySQL developers started a company, Monty Program Ab "to provide a home both for MariaDB — the new MySQL — and for all MySQL core developers".
>"Monty Program Ab is owned by the employees and uses the 'hacking business model' as a way to drive the company," Widenius says.
>Although MySQL is still widely used — Db-engines.com ranks it as the third most popular RDBMS after Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, compared to MariaDB coming in at #35 — Widenius still believes the database has a bleak future under Oracle's stewardship.
>Oracle's treatment of MySQL and its community since its purchase of Sun has proved Widenius' original fears correct, the developer says. Not mincing words, Widenius says that Oracle has made it clear "that they have no love for open source, working with the community, or MySQL in general".
>Widenius cites as examples of Oracle's disregard for open source principles the September 2011 announcement of commercial extensions to MySQL, the bugs database not being public any more, and a lack of test cases for new code in MySQL 5.5 and 5.6.
>Widenius is also scathing of the quality of Oracle's MySQL development efforts. "Some of the new code by Oracle is surprisingly good, but unfortunately the quality varies and a notable part needs to be rewritten before we can include it in MariaDB," he says.
>He also says that security issues are not addressed quickly enough.
>"Instead of fixing bugs, Oracle is removing features," Widenius says.
>"The MySQL documentation was never made open source, even [though] it was promised in the MySQL conference in April 2009," he adds.
>"Flagship features promised for MySQL 6.0 have never been released, even if they were fully developed and ready to be released," he says, referring to online backup for all storage engines and foreign keys for all storage engines.
>"Most of the original MySQL developers have left Oracle. Without people that can understand and explain the code it's almost impossible for Oracle to develop MySQL further even if they wanted to."
>As further evidence of disdain for MySQL users, Widenius cites what he describes as "sharp" increases in licence and support fees, a lack of an open roadmap and no way for the community to participate in the database's development.
>"Why is the price for a MySQL OEM license higher than for Oracle Express?" Widenius asks.
What exactly does these words prove? Monty has been known to shit on Oracle's efforts just because they are from Oracle, regardless of their quality (as do many others, proven by this very discussion). He's the head of a competing fork that they're trying to monetize, I would take his words with a shovel of salt.
The real problems with MySQL are:
- the bugs database is not public (as he's said)
- all development is going behind closed doors; MariaDB is more open to the public
That's it. Quality-wise it's better than MariaDB IMHO. And they pay more attention to low-level stuff that doesn't add too many new features but greatly improves things like reliability (such as rewriting the underlying InnoDB storage format). Although that one did introduce a significant feature (transactional and fully atomic DDL, which MariaDB implemented only partly and recently).
MariaDB has its share of problems. For example, they have exactly the opposite issue of what he's describing: in their first releases they've imported mountains of code from other MySQL forks without much testing (especially from Percona), things like Cassandra and TokuDB that went practically unmaintained for years and are now in the process of being removed. All to toggle as many feature checkboxes as possible ("look at how much shiny new stuff we ship!")
I personally don't use new MariaDB releases until at least their 5th or 6th patchset.
I also don't really understand this question:
> Then explain MariaDB?
Monty didn't want to work under Oracle. He left and started a competitor. What else to explain?
For a time it did seem MariaDB would replace MySQL. But your link is almost 10 years old and since that time MySQL has seen it’s biggest release (iirc ever) in terms of features and bug fixes. Meanwhile MariaDB and it have diverged and aren’t really 1 to 1 replacements as they were in 2014.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but most projects started by some form of organization end up being dead after handing them off to the community. That is, unless they make their code from the ground up to be as most readable and modular as possible.
I remember many projects made by Sun Microsystems that just died when Oracle took over, even if the code is still there.