JOHN C. DVORAK

jOhN C. DvOrAk

Whither MySQL, Whither LAMP?

The sale of Sun Microsystems to Oracle, along with the various GNU-GPL license changes going on in this world, brings up an interesting issue regarding the future of the LAMP platform. Will it live or die?

LAMP refers to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP—the core development platform for open-source development projects used on the Web. This includes dedicated Web sites, blogging software, content management, online retailing, and even search-engine back ends.

Sun recently bought MySQL, which should be the first of the big four to fall by the wayside when Oracle gets hold of it. The guys who developed it in the first place have gone their separate ways with variations called “forks,” which will soon compete with each other for attention.

And in the meantime, the licensing arrangements for many of these products are gravitating away from the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is so onerous that if you build a system around a GPL software bundle and want to sell the product, you will lose ownership of the code and it becomes public domain by rule. Until now, what everyone has done is distribute products with a requirement that hosts or buyers obtain the LAMP components on their own so as not to contaminate the application program with the onerous GPL.

The situation is so bad with the GNU GPL that large law firms now have to be contracted so a company doesn’t “screw up” and accidentally touch some of the wrong open-source software and instantly lose its intellectual property rights. There are already a slew of lawsuits over this. Companies have even cropped up that develop what are termed “shims” to isolate one piece of code from another. This whole process is now officially ludicrous.

The scene makes selling a commercial and completely integrated and optimized buy-and-run system impossible if any GNU GPL software is involved. And because you have no control over the bundle, you end up

One whopping killer of an RDBMS has emerged from this BSD pack: PostgrSQL.

with all these weird problems on the server side as one system or another is constantly being upgraded and screwing up the other cogs in the LAMP wheel.

Moving Toward BSD

The solution to this dilemma within the open-source community is to ditch the GPL and use the license model adopted by BSD, which allows the vendor to develop something that incorporates open-source code without losing his or her license and ownership. Even Microsoft uses parts of the BSD Unix without worrying. Apple’s entire OS kernel is based on software developed under this arrangement.

The open-source community has been coughing and sputtering under the GNU GPL because one guy, Richard Stallman, believes all software should be free, and he dominates the conversation regarding licensing. Even the open-source developers are beginning to realize that none of this is in their best interests, and they are moving toward BSD as the model. That said, one whopping killer of an RDBMS has emerged from this BSD pack: PostgrSQL.

This product has a number of interesting qualities. First, it seems as if any number of MySQL implementations, such as those employed by WordPress, can easily be migrated to PostgrSQL. The maximum table size is 32TB, and a single record can be an entire gigabyte. This thing has been in development for 15 years and may be the best of breed. When you read the history of this product and check the heritage you’ll realize that this will be the successor to MySQL and a serious threat to Oracle.

In fact you’ll find that the Oracle-program compatible RDBMS called EnterpriseDB is based on PostgrSQL, and that IBM’s recent announcement that it has Oracle compatibility stems from EnterpriseDB compatibility code. It’s all very interesting to watch.

Oracle must have known that this sort of attack would happen eventually, and it makes me rethink why Oracle bought Sun. Some think it was for the Java expertise, but that can be had without buying the whole company and might have been available at a bankruptcy auction or by raiding employees. I’m beginning to think it may actually be for the hardware, the servers. By incorporating the hardware, Oracle can build a totally proprietary DB server that is a standalone solution to integration problems. Once you are locked into the box itself, the company can steer you away from cloners in tricky ways.

We must assume that the “M” in LAMP is doomed and the next iteration will be LAPP. But all the other elements are at risk, too. The LAMP might be turned off completely within the next few years.

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