Hard work that goes unnoticed ....

I took a moment today and updated one of my Linux distributions.  In this distribution I happen to have Percona 5.6 installed as the MySQL Database. I have mentioned before how you can set up your choice of MySQL via a Yum repository.

My point here is though, how do we ever thank these people for all the work they do?

Many of these repositories are run by companies and these people get paid for what they do. Yet, through survey's and general observation/questions of the Linux (including Debian/Ubuntu) community, a majority of people will not upgrade until it is available in their distribution. I happen to be  one who wants to stay on top of security and bug fixes, so I have the yum repository update from the source as often as possible.

My point is,  a lot of work goes into packaging of these files for distribution and for the most part it looks like a pretty thankless job. I recall the older (not old but older) days of tar and gzip, when you had to dig and find the dependencies yourself. -- ./configure..  nope need something else go download and install that then try again.....

I just upgraded 25 different packages in a few moments, which would have taken some time before. While Yum and Apt Get are far from new, and I sound like an old timer here, I just thought it might be nice to say thanks, to all of the people who work behind the scenes to make all of our Linux experiences, let alone the related MySQL installs, easier and smoother.

I will point out that Oracle does have 5.6 packages now available.

• http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/MySQL56/

I recall that my previous post mentioned how it had not been. 

A strategy from the community

We have seen the news about MariaDB replacing MySQL in Fedora , SUSE and Red Hat.

While Oracle would not be happy about such news, the open source community supports the focus on a "more" open source solution to be implemented into Linux.

The interesting thing that we all might over look is that, the decision or strategy to move to MariaDB from MySQL was likely not just made by the upper management in Red Hat. This is much more likely to be a movement from the open source community that Red Hat evaluated and they listened.

Consider this, take a look back at Jackie Yeaney's (@jackieyeaney) post about the "Democratizing the Corporate Strategy Process at Red Hat" (posted Nov 10th, 2011) and learn how Red Hat works. "We utilized existing networks in the open source community to "keep our minds open" and socialize ideas outside of Red Hat."  The community wanted openness and a result was a move to MariaDB by Red Hat, is is related to the open strategy at Red Hat, in my humble opinion it is likely yes.

 Jim Whitehurst (@JWhitehurst) appears to embrace the open source community not just because of the financial gains it rewards the company but also because how it revolutionized how they work, make strategic decisions and take input from others: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." 

Take a moment to relate that last statement to MySQL.  If you follow MySQL then you are well aware that Oracle closed (or have a less open version now) the bugs.mysql.com site. While Oracle has their own corporate reasoning for that, the open source community follows "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."  

As MariaDB grows and become more imbedded into the Linux distros as the default DB the related bug tracking will be open and it will be interesting to see how the bugs split across Maria and MySQL in the long run.

So now.. the interesting aspect is while MySQL had enterprise and community versions owned by Oracle the move still happened because of MariaDB.  Oracle also owns Java and the related OpenJDK. While I am just asking this as an outsider looking in... If a Java/OpenJDK  was branched out into another software package that was not owned by Oracle, would we soon see an replacement for Java/OpenJDK in Red Hat as well ?  Again I am an outsider to the Java world, so I just ask that because of the similarities it represents with MySQL.