mysql pulls a redhat
Posted by Ian Holsman
Kaj Arnös announced today the create of 2 separate mysql products.
a ‘enterprise’ and a ‘community’ one.
this is exactly what redhat did a couple of years ago with it’s creation of ‘fedora’.
the thing i’m not sure I like is the following
Community users get new features at no-cost to them — funded by paying customersthat says guinea pig to me.
don’t get me wrong.. I’m not complaining .. MySQL has provided a excellent data source for many a year for next to nothing for most people, and I am grateful.
I’m more interested in how they can push more people into their enterprise product, when the community one is pretty damn good. The way redhat did it was to introduce lots of change into fedora. New versions with new features were constantly being introduced in a 3-6 month time window.. much too fast for a ‘enterprise’ to digest… and hence more corporates went to RHEL and sales increased.
but the risk of MySQL’s strategy also lies in what a percentage of redhat users did when they introduced the schism. They switched off redhat.
It will be interesting to see how many new users postgres gets from this, and if this will change what the alpha-geek uses for their development. (for example most of django’s core developers use postgres).
and a side note to the web design team of mysql.com.. I couldn’t find the link to download the mysql .. the ‘community’ tab felt more like a forum/support area so I didn’t bother, and the ‘products’ tab doesn’t really mention it either. The right hand side looked to me like a advertisement and my eyes didn’t read a word there.