Proposed F19 Feature: Replace MySQL with MariaDB

[Andrew Rist]

On 1/23/2013 6:05 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-01-23 at 17:49 -0800, Andrew Rist wrote:
>> but the database choice for Fedora should only focus on the merits and
>> the quality of the MySQL code
> You may have read the mission statement, but you appear to have entirely
> missed the four foundations:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations
>
> of which 'Freedom' and 'Friends' are notably the first. The concerns
> I've seen raised around MySQL are not related to the 'merits and the
> quality of the...code' but to the freedom of the development community,
> a topic that was noticeably absent from your mail.
Thanks to all for the comments.   Norvald and I offered to help package 
and provide technical information to inform Fedora's choices.   This 
hopefully covers "Friends", or friendly intent.   As for "Features" and 
"First"  MySQL 5.6 is simply better, more performant and more stable, 
and we think the community will not be happy with an older and less 
stable fork of the code.   MariaDB is also going to continue to diverge, 
which is good reason to continue to provide both MySQL and MariaDB so 
your users can make the choice of which to use.

When it comes to "Freedom"....many companies working, contributing, and 
supporting open source codebases have information disclosure policies 
very similar to MySQL [1]. The code is still GPL and out there for 
everyone to check out [2]. Our commercial efforts around MySQL are the 
thing that allows us to staff up with hundreds of engineers writing all 
of this code, and this in turn translates directly to the new features 
and stability of the community edition.

Andrew

[1] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20120108120323/http://www.redhat.com/about/news/blog/commitment-to-open/ 

[2] http://labs.mysql.com/