> What then? Could it be marketing or the sad results of a avalanche
> effect? Geee, there's a thought.
>
What a wide variety of topics. One big difference for me is that MySQL
used to be open source, but it no longer is. It's an odd hybrid OSS
that barely makes sense to me since they claim to be open source under
the GPL, and while you can contribute code to them (I did so in their
JDBC driver many years ago before switching to Postgresql), they then
own the code (fine!), but if you want to use it in any system that's not
itself open source, you have to pay to get a license. Pay for GPL software?
But they proudly state they are part of LAMP, yet only the "M" charges
to use their software. The real leaders in these open source camps are
Linux and Apache, neither of which have such absurd pseudo-open
licensing terms.
David