Thursday, February 16, 2006

What has happened to the Open Source Database Consortium?

These days, everybody's talking about Oracle's attempts to buy MySQL and their previous purchases of Innobase and Sleepycat.

As I already mentioned earlier, I hope that Oracle will never gain influence on how MySQL evolves. MySQL is on its way to become a high end database system and so might - at least in some business areas - be a serious competitor of Oracle. What really turns my stomach upside down is the thought that MySQL could (in some people's minds, hopefully never in reality) become a lower-end alternative of something. MySQL should make it's way independently and never let any proprietary competitor gain any influence in any way.

However, what I would appreciate very much would be more co-operation among the Open Source database producers. A while ago, people from the major Open Source database systems have met to form the Open Source Database Consortium - that was in October 2005.

OK, that's not that long ago, but I hope that the ambitions to co-operate aren't over again. It was told that a website will be created at www.osdbconsortium.org. There's nothing to see except a "Just a web page" note. I haven't heard any news about this since October - I believe, it would be nice if MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird etc. could do some things together. That would certainly be more welcoming than any deal with a proprietary database vendor.

5 comments:

Markus Popp said...

However, I think that it was a good initiative and I would like it if it could be recalled to life again - with all Open Source database producers, who want to participate, involved ;-).

Popa Adrian Marius said...

yes it's a good idea , it should be implemented
First step would be creating an news agregator for open source databases
One good example that i like
http://www.dbrunas.com.ar/

Yes things should be moved forward .
One simple thing to do is to get
rss feeds from open source database planets

Markus Popp said...

I can only agree with that ;-).

Anonymous said...

We have that already:
http://www.planetosdb.org/

The problem is many fold why there has not been a lot of movement:
- time is a factor like Zak mentioned
- mistrust is another one

I shall briefly elaborate on the last point. The trenches are deep. Some projects think its wierd that some of the devs work on closed source derivatives. The other side finds it wierd that the entire source is controlled by a single company. And then there are numerous opinions in between.

Some think software patents are plain wrong (yet still hold a few just to be sure). Some others see things very different.

In short there is still no agreement on any common denominator. There is not even a common enemy anymore. Well maybe Microsoft, but I think that is not a sufficient unificator in the database market (luckily they do not have the same stranglehold here than elsewhere).

So while this all sounds bleak I am still hopeful that this common denominator will eventually become clear as the database market shakeup continues.

Anonymous said...

hmm .. not sure if my previous comment did not pass moderation or if i screwed up when i submitted it ..

the gist was there is already a planet:
http://www.planetosdb.org/

oh and we had issues finding a common ground from the start and it did not seem like people put in a lot of effort to find one since then ..