Removing Oracle Support

[David Marshall]

I have added some comments inline.  My opinion is that it's completely valid to drop Oracle for the technical reasons you cite, but that it's unwise to make engineering decisions based on whether we approve or disapprove of the people or businesses involved.

Someone must decide what to do about this, and I assume that's going to be you.  To whatever extent my opinion matters, I fully endorse whatever the decision is.  I'll hope you'll make it based more for technical reasons and less for your regard for Oracle's business practices.

On Aug 13, 2010, at 6:54 PM, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:

> 	As some of you may know, yesterday Oracle demonstrated that they are
> clearly opposed and dangerous to open-source software:
> 
> 	http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-sues-google-for-patent-infringement-2010-08-12
> 

As you stated in your follow-on email, this is your opinion, and while I don't entirely disagree with it, I think you're extrapolating a lot from a legal maneuver.  It is not uncommon for a patent lawsuit to be filed as a means of forcing cross-licensing.  Whether Oracle is or isn't opposed and dangerous to open-source software is debatable, but I wouldn't use legal machinations as evidence one way or another.

> 	Our current Oracle driver is a semi-dangerous hack with many bugs. It
> is maintained by Oracle, Inc. I'm not sure if it will even be possible
> to make it work with trunk, where Search.pm is going to be using a lot
> more sub-selects.



> 
> 	I personally would like to remove Oracle support from Bugzilla.
> However, it's not primarily for the technical reasons stated above, but
> because I simply no longer wish to cooperate with or support Oracle,
> given their business practices. I was thinking that we'd simply remove
> the Oracle driver from trunk (though it would stay in 4.0 and below).
> Users wishing to migrate their Bugzilla DB away from Oracle could still
> use bzdbcopy.pl in Bugzilla 4.0 and below, so they wouldn't be blocked
> from upgrading to a newer Bugzilla.
> 

It's certainly your prerogative to neither support nor cooperate with Oracle.  If Oracle stuff isn't compatible with what's in the trunk and no one is able to get it "trunk-worthy," then it makes sense to drop it from what ships.

> 	Oracle, Inc. is still welcome to maintain an Oracle driver. After all,
> this is open source. When people ask us about Oracle support, we'd be
> happy to point them to a separate, Oracle-maintained driver. (After all,
> it's just two files.) I simply am not interested in continuing to review
> any code related to it, and don't want to ship it with Bugzilla.

That seems like a very reasonable posture.

> 
> 	MySQL is also owned by Oracle. I'd strongly recommend that people use
> MariaDB instead:
> 
> 	http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB
> 
> 	MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL with better performance and
> features, created and maintained by the original author of MySQL, Monty
> Widenius.

How do you know he's not going to sell MariaDB to some equally nasty company and write another impassioned article about MariaDB is now the spawn of evil and how we all ready need to be using Super-Open Database #3?


> 
> 	At some point when distros generally all carry MariaDB, I'd also like
> to update the documentation to recommend MariaDB instead of MySQL
> (although this has a larger technical justification than my desire to
> remove Oracle support from Bugzilla, and is probably something to
> discuss in another thread at another time).


That's sensible too.

> 
> 	Anyhow, I'm interested to hear feedback on this and the general sense
> of the community about it. I'm sorry to the nice people who I've worked
> with at Oracle--this isn't about any individuals, it's about what
> organizations we want to support as a project.
> 

By making Bugzilla work on Oracle, are you supporting Oracle or your users who, for whatever reason, are using Oracle.  Couldn't someone make just as valid an argument that helping people put Bugzilla on Windows are supporting Microsoft, which has exhibited the same sort of behavior that makes you want to drop Oracle?