(insert disclaimer about this being my own ramblings and nothing to do with my employer)

Try and Buy, or Buy and Buy? :: AO

So, the Sybase CEO doesn’t get it.

The Sybase ‘free’ offering is in no way free. It is proprietary software that owns you.

Yes, Stallman was right – you do not own proprietary software, it owns you.

By giving the user the first hit for ‘free’ and placing an arbitrary limit on when they have to start to pay (and only pay you, so they have no real freedom of choice) ties the user in chains. It is not ‘express’, it is a demo – a cinema preview and nothing more.

This is nothing like the free copies of free software. It is merely a proprietary product packaged for a free software platform. Letting people live in a partial freedom. It’s an improvement, but is a gift to your customers (of partial freedom), not the free software community.

John Chen even says something that is totally misleading.

“You download it and develop it and use it…”

DEVELOP? What the? How can I download anything that lets me develop sybase? hrrmm.. they have the source up there? I don’t think so. I’m sure he meant ‘develop on top of it’. In other words, for a database, use it.

The MySQL way of “you can download it, develop it and use it” is just that. Download it, the source, actually hack the database, write a new storage engine, change the parser, the optimiser – hey, even go make it something that isn’t SQL (for example Fred’s Query Language or something). Or, if you’re just going to use it for your web site, just do that. You have the freedom.

MySQL AB (the company) makes money of being the most knowledgeable and well qualified group to provide knowledge, support, training and development of the MySQL database. We don’t hold our users hostage – they are free (all the freedoms granted to them under the GPL) to go support themselves, or get somebody else to, or even to go and develop the database themselves.

So, here’s to not holding your users hostage!

(this isn’t an attack on Sybase being a good database or not – i have never used it, i don’t think – and don’t really have an interest to. It’s an attack on proprietry software, and especially proprietary software throwing around the term ‘open source’ to try and look good. Proprietary software is what it is, and people should know what that is.)