Removing Oracle Support

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 08/13/2010 08:16 PM, David Marshall wrote:
> it's unwise to make engineering decisions based on whether we approve or disapprove of the people or businesses involved.

	Yeah, I'm actually not too certain about it, myself. I usually don't do
it--in fact, I've advocated against making technical decisions for
emotional reasons, on this very list. I feel pretty strongly about
software patents, and I really personally feel that what Oracle is doing
is harmful to open source adoption and the Internet as a whole. So I
have a hard time wanting to work with them on a product that's very
important to me.

> It is not uncommon for a patent lawsuit to be filed as a means of
forcing cross-licensing.

	True, however it is unusual to file a patent lawsuit against an
open-source project. I think that in the open-source community,
attacking an open-source project via patent law is considered rather
reprehensible.

> 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.

	I suspect that Xiaoou will eventually show up and fix all the bugs that
we've been filing--he usually does. So it probably will still be
possible for us to support Oracle, technically.

> 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?

	Well, anybody could do anything, but MySQL is *presently* owned by
Oracle and MariaDB is not. (And there are numerous technical advantages
to using MariaDB.)

> By making Bugzilla work on Oracle, are you supporting Oracle or your users who, for whatever reason, are using Oracle. 

	Well, both. The more applications that work with Oracle, the better
Oracle does. It wouldn't probably be more harmful to Bugzilla adoption
to cease supporting Oracle than it would be for 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?

	They could, and if this were about 10 years ago, I'd absolutely support
them. I think that since then, however, Microsoft has almost completely
turned around and has been working great with the open-source community
for many years.

	I'm totally open to being talked out of this, by the way. But I just
really need to see that it's important for us to continue supporting
Oracle even though I think they're being generally harmful as an
organization.

	-Max
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