Removing Oracle Support

[mockodin at gmail.com]

I disagree, Bugzilla isn't here to make a political point. Its a tool. I would be greatly disinclined to continue supporting bugzilla or working on the mssql port if this were to occur. As I could see a similar reaction to some of Microsoft's stances. The mssql modules are essentially done, just pending time for me to render new patches. I think the goal should be to accept any functional db ports someone cares to offer up do long as they continue to be supported. Else we become no better than any other proprietary piece of software functioning only within tightly defined environment.
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-----Original Message-----
From: Max Kanat-Alexander <mkanat at bugzilla.org>
Sender: developers-owner at bugzilla.org
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:54:04 
To: <developers at bugzilla.org>
Reply-To: developers at bugzilla.orgSubject: Removing Oracle Support

	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

	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.

	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.

	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.

	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).

	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.

	-Max
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