It was suggested by Monty that the posts I've made about MariaDB are for publicity. This simply isn't true. I would have much preferred a different outcome in my interactions with MariaDB. I figured that they would end up giving me a hard time, and I'd be stubborn and we'd both hate each other for as long as I could keep from leaving. A quick separation actually seems much better in such context. Regardless, I would have preferred to speak amicably to the MariaDB Corporation about switching the license back, or at least moving to the new license at the time of the notification of the community, ie as the LAST checkin in the 2.0 branch. I would suggest they re-release 2.0 as GPL and move 2.1 to the BSL to allow the market to decide if they want to move to 2.1, or even take up 2.0, if they aren't guaranteed important (especially security!) fixes in the older branch.
If the MariaDB Corporation should choose to stick with the BSL for 2.0, there should be some well document end-of-life policy for each version. For example, important bug fixes for crashes, memory leaks, security issues, etc, will be made in the GPL version for the lifetime of one newer BSL version. In this case, MariaDB would continue to be a good steward of open source by maintaining the products they have released, especially for security problems, while still getting revenue from customers who buy a license in order to get the either the latest or greatest, or to use the product at uh, "maximum scale". [I couldn't resist]I would also amend the license to say that if the MariaDB corporation dissolves or is bought by another entity, the license immediately reverts to GPL.
Tags:bsl, fsf , gpl , mariadb , maxscale , mysql , publicity
