You can watch the video of my linux.conf.au 2014 talk here: http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2014/Wednesday/28-Past_Present_and_future_of_MySQL_and_variants_-_Stewart_Smith.mp4
But let’s talk about things in blog form rather than video form :)
Back in 1979, there was UNIREG. A text UI to records (rows) in a database (err, table). The reason I mention UNIREG is that it had FoRMs which as you may have guessed by my capitalization there is where the FRM file comes from.
In 1986, UNIREG came to UNIX. That’s right kids, the 80×24 VT100 interface to ISAM (Index Sequential Access Method – basically rows are written in insert order and indexes point to them) came to UNIX. There was no generic query language, just FoRMs and reports. In fact, to this day, that 80×24 text interface is stored in the FRM file by MySQL and never ever used (I’ve written about this before).
Then there was this mSQL thing around the 1990s, which was a small SQL server (with source) but not FOSS. Originally, Monty W plugged in his ISAM engine but it wasn’t quite the right fit… so in 1995, we had MySQL 1.0 and MySQL AB was founded.
Fast forward a bit and in 1996 we had MySQL 3.19 and development continued. It managed to gain features, performance, ports to different operating systems and CPU architectures and, of course, stability.
It wasn’t until the year 2000 that MySQL adopted the GPL. This turned out to be a huge step in the right direction for increased adoption. At the time, this was a huge risk for the company, essentially risking all the revenue of the company on making the software more free.
This was the birth of the dual licensing business model. You see, the client library (libmysql) was also GPL, which meant it was easy to use if your application was also GPL, but if you were going to distribute your application and it wasn’t under a GPL compatible license (there was also a FOSS exception so that things like PHP could use it) then you needed a license.
Revenue from licensing was to be significant throughout the entire history of MySQL AB.
(We’ll continue this in part 2 tomorrow)
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Hello, I’m a @dblmkt working as a MySQL administrator.
Personally I translated your posts into Japanese since your posts about MySQL history are interesting. See the website link.
If you don’t like that, please let me know.
Thank you for the great posts!
Awesome! As long as there’s links back here and proper attribution, translations are great!
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