MySQL – Say It Ain't SCO

I have to admit I was quite surprised to hear that MySQL signed a deal (any deal) with SCO. Surely it wasn't true. …and if it was true, it was probably along the lines of SCO buying a support contract and then touting it as a partnership to get PR (which would seem like an odd thing to do, until you consider some of SCO's PR moves). Then a saw the press release on the MySQL site. They must not be proud of that release, because it's not even listed on the press release index page, even though it's dated “3 September 2005”. Now, I understand that MySQL AB is a business that wants (ne, needs) to make money. But I can't imagine that the negative will generated by this deal will not far outweigh any short term monetary gain. While SCO does indeed have some entrenched install niches, it's a dying product. A quick look at SCO's number easily confirm this. As a company that depends on Open Source to survive, partnering with a company that declared the GPL unconstitutional seems like an odd move. Here's a comment from an MySQL AB employee (who made it clear that this was his and not MySQL AB's opinion: “First our users are our users no matter what platform they are on. This isn't about SCO, this is about the users of that platform who deserve to be able to get support. There are still a lot of SCO servers sitting out there and the users deserve to be treated like any other users. They didn't pick SCO's battle and many of them have legacy applications that can not be easily ported or easily rewritten. The choice of a vendor is not always an option.”
While I'm glad to see that they try to have their customers needs in mind, I don't think partnering with SCO is in anybodies best interest (an argument could indeed be made for MySQL simply resuming shipping for the SCO platform I guess). We'll have to see how this one plays out, but I can't imagine it will be good for MySQL AB. If anyone sees any official comments, let me know.
–jeremy
MySQL, SCO, Open Source, GPL