On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Axel Schwenke <axel@askmonty.org> wrote:
But to put things in context, in MySQL 5.0 series the situation was the opposite: The bugs were public but the publicly released and GPL licensed bug fixes would be up to 6 months delayd in favor of paying customers getting them instantly. In some ways, the current situation is still better than back then.
This is a very weird statement. Oracle does not release GPL versions more often than MySQL AB did. In fact Oracle does not make any promise to ever produce GPL bugfix releases. It's completely at their discretion.
See "Community Server" releases in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/news-5-0-x.html MySQL AB had a commitment to do a Community release every six months, it happened that they failed on that commitment and the gaps were longer. Since MySQL 5.1 they started releasing Community and Enterprise releases in sync, every month. This had nothing to do with Oracle, it was still under Sun watch. It's perhaps not so relevant to this discussion, though, just some historical perspective.
For projects like Debian that build their own binaries and are not dependent on complete releases (but rather a stream of patches) the current situation with Oracle is clearly a step back.
When 5.1 went GA, we had both the bugs and the fixes, so I agree. henrik -- henrik.ingo@avoinelama.fi +358-40-8211286 skype: henrik.ingo irc: hingo www.openlife.cc My LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=9522559