[debian-mysql] [Summary] Request for release team decision on MySQL and MariaDB

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

On Dienstag, 26. Januar 2016, Steven Chamberlain wrote:
[...other valid points not quoted here…]
> Assuming MariaDB is affected by the same issues, I may not be in a
> technically better situation if I switched to using that.  (Although, it
> seems one of the recent CVEs did not affect MariaDB?).  But I look at
> their public bug dashboard as a model of how open I want development to
> happen, and it makes me _feel_ more comfortable and optimistic in that
> project already.

Steven, thanks for wording this (all of it, also the non quoted parts) much 
better than I care to do. As I said on IRC on #debian-release:

* | h01ger is tempted to reply "tl;dr; - mysql is the db with the NDA from 
oracle, mariadb is the free fork shipped everywhere - without NDAs and without 
a history of screwing free software, so let's EOT here" to the recent mail in 
that thread…

- I know this is somewhat too simplefied, eg I do acknowledge and hope that 
Oracle can do better than "screwing free software", but… *they* need to show 
this *by themselves*. 
Yet when I read this in Robie's mail: "It is not reasonable for S to expect
U[MySQL] to change their policy in order to meet a goal if S refuse to
tell U[MySQL] how success against that goal will be measured." I have little 
hope + motivation to explain this better - CVE is a public database.

So, another summary: there's a software from a company with NDAs (which have 
been applied to the question at hand, no less) and "a history of screwing free 
software" and there's a project to reuse the same codebase (and then build on 
it) to not do that.

Also, I wonder why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB#Prominent_users … ;-)


cheers,
	Holger
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