Submitted by MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16, when its ‘MySQL Network’ support plan was replaced by ‘MySQL Enterprise.’ MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions – Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep ‘found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.’ We were told that ‘Generic Linux’ in MySQL’s list of supported platforms means ‘generic versions of the implementations listed above’; not support for Linux in general.
drop support for the mose widely used linux base out there…. (/<sarcasm) anyways im going to wager a bet that it will still run fine on that flatform, and that support via forums and other online resources will still exhists. i dont know rather that would be enough for the business that this is refering too though.
Edited 2006-12-13 20:16
We see now how reliable is the support of open source software …. so much better than proprietary one.
Its SuSE or Red Hat only, so much freedom from the open source, I don’t feel locked anymore now, thanks.
We see now how reliable is the support of open source software …. so much better than proprietary one.
Its SuSE or Red Hat only, so much freedom from the open source, I don’t feel locked anymore now, thanks.
Oh, please. MySql is not a community driven organization, they are a commercial one.
If supporting every distribution on the planet was profitable for them, do you really think they would have dropped the option? Or do you suppose that organizations shelling out for support licenses for Red Hat and Suse are far more likely to shell out for support licenses for other OSS products?
I’m sure there are commercial organizations deploying Deb on production servers using inhouse/community support and still willing to pay for commercial support on other OSS apps, but I suspect they’re fewer and far between than those paying for enterprise distributions. MySql simply doesn’t feel that market is viable. And I suspect they’re right.
I hardly think the Debian community is going to suffer for this, they will still have access to mySql and the community to fall back on for support. I suspect that’s all most users are concerned with.
Exactly. It will be business as usual for most of the MySQL using world. The only people this impacts are those who for some reason want to have commercial support.
i agree with most of the stuff you have said but i think that we sometimes miss the telltale symptom that these articles reveal about open source software. With so much freedom to vary, modify and redistribute there is considerable fragmentation in diferent implementations of linux solutions. Supporting the other distros has little to do with commercial viability and more to do with the simplicity of supporting the same software on multiple platforms which does not exist in the linux community.( At least, not in a degree that makes support on multiple linux distros easy )
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i don’t care if you mod me down for saying this , but i use linux at home as my primary desktop , i do not have a windows installation at home , i have used it since ’97
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in high performance or business critical systems
kernel-versions, DE versions, X Windows builds ,gcc builds all do matter and do affect performance and configuration of high load systems. Us home users can get away with such crazy diversity but the problems start to emerge as you begin to scale up…
You forgot the > in one of your tags
I, too, manage to get along using Linux:
without Windows
without the 5 percent of features of MS Office that don’t exist in OO.org
without newfangled ribbons (or oak trees!)
without typing command lines
without learning assembly
without being (overly) picky about hardware
without declaring a jihad against users of other operating systems or developers of non-GPL software
So true.
We see now how reliable is the support of open source software …. so much better than proprietary one.
Nope, we now see how reliable are comments from people who don’t check the facts before posting.
There’s nothing about MySQL not working on Debian anymore.
Its SuSE or Red Hat only, so much freedom from the open source, I don’t feel locked anymore now, thanks.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Thanks.
If it’s not supported, it may as well not work. Who would trust it?
Dang, people don’t even read.
I don’t see how these stories even get posted. I doubt if you are paying for support and you call the company they are going to hang up on you. LOL!
First of all they have ALWAYS only provided Limited support for the lower tier Linux versions.
“What is Limited Support (LS)?
A: These are specific operating system and hardware combinations for which MySQL provides only limited support. For this tier, MySQL does not have the target OS/hardware; and MySQL does not build binaries for these combinations; and MySQL does not test on these platforms. The MySQL Support Team will use commercially reasonable efforts to attempt to provide technical support for these platforms, but with the customer’s acknowledgment that there may be scenarios that cannot be resolved due to the above limitations.”
Most of the BSD’s and several other OS’s fall into this.
Ubuntu LTS is one of the only versions outside of RH and Novell enterprise that got higher support then that because Ubuntu went and got certified with them.
All software is like that, really. Have you ever read any disclaimers?
If it’s not supported, it may as well not work. Who would trust it?
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/
Unless MySQL changes its GPL licensing stance, whole thing doesn’t matter. OSS was always very self sufficient in providing patches while Debian might be considered for track record holder in that department.
Maybe you haven’t read other comments, but MySQL is not dropping support for Debian, it just doesn’t provide .debs for it, and even that only temporary (obviously some marketing guy screwed up with not understanding what is on the table).
p.s. All that was known before Duffmans comment. And that was the reason why I answered as I did. He didn’t RTFA before spewing arrogant zealotry non-sense. Well you obviously didn’t either, but at least your comment was holding few breaths of intelligence without any intentional zealotry. And that is why my answer to you is polite.
We see now how reliable is the support of open source software …. so much better than proprietary one.
Very reliable. If the market demands it and MySQL does not offer it, another organization will offer the needed support.
Realize that most enterprise distributions also offer this kind of support for base packages like mysql. And organization like HP will happily offer you support for Debian and MySQL.
Plenty of options for those that truly care. But, Mysql has been very quick to come out and refute these statements as a mischaracterizaton by some sales dude.
All in all, storm in a teapot. Nothing to see here, move along.
Edited 2006-12-13 21:50
Yes, good thing proprietary software companies never drops support unexpectedly.
Oh yeah, and I had a bad burger at McDonalds once, my logical conclusion is that all burgers are bad, be it Burger King, McDonalds or anything else.
Sweeping generalizations are awesome like that.
“We see now how reliable is the support of open source software …. so much better than proprietary one.”
This has nothing to do with FLOSS vs. proprietary software.
Any company may drop the support for a product — be it proprietary or free. And any company is allowed to offer support for a third parties product — be it proprietary or free (free as in “freedom”, not as in “free beer”
). That is why distributors like Novell, Canonical, Red Hat, … can offer support for a lot of code they have never written.
But in the case of FLOSS a third party has the same possibility to support a product like the producer does, including the allowance to change and adept the product — which is not possible with proprietary software in most of the cases.
So, in the general case, support for FLOSS can be as least as good as for proprietary software; the special case depends on the company offering the support, not whether it is FLOSS or not.
I mean seriously, they just got greedy, I say drop ’em. Hopefully one day if you ask a friend “do you use MySQL?” his answer will be something like “use what?”.
I agree. PostgreSQL is more than a worthy replacement for MySQL. In the past, it was a bit slow, but I haven’t had any problems with it for quite some time. It also has more features than MySQL.
Most of my friends would say what anyways
I think they got scared by the Microsoft/Novell deal and all the buzz that it created afterwards…Let’s tell MySQL to buzz off…lol…PostreSQL anyone?
I mean seriously, they just got greedy, I say drop ’em.
No, they got practical. Supporting a large number of distros was evidently becoming too big of a cost, so they decided to cut their losses. But look on the bright side: Now, they can focus all of their energies on making the supported platforms best of breed.
thats what you get with too many slightly different distros. most developers don’t want to deal with it anymore.
I think they’re just talking about Enterprise support.
And being that Red Hat and SuSE are the two dominant platforms in the enterprise, it somewhat makes sense for MySQL to consolidate support on those two. They’re focusing on market demand.
Plus, there probably not enough Debian users willing to pay the MySQL corporation for support on the MySQL database. They’re typically more than happy to just go it alone, without paid support.
I’m sure offering technical support and other services for too many different platforms or Linux distros could get too costly.
That said, if Ubuntu, for instance, really grows in the Enterprise, MySQL would probably be glad to offer support for Ubuntu.
So I really don’t think people should get their briefs/panties in a bunch over this.
With the incredible rise in popularity and seeming omnipresence, I am surprised that Ubuntu isn’t on their list. I would think that a Debian based system would be smart, since so many systems are based on Debian.
That’s a very large userbase to turn away.
“That’s a very large userbase to turn away.”
While Ubuntu may be popular with desktop users, I don’t think it gets a lot of use on enterprise servers, which is the target market for MySQL’s support plan. My own organization has looked at using Ubuntu LTS on servers recently, but without having such basic functionality as kerberos support out of the box, it really wasn’t competitive with Red Hat/CentOS.
Ubuntu is nowhere for serious server usage. It’s all about geek desktops.
well, that sounded a bit more harsh than I intended, I just meant what jimbo said. It wasn’t really an attack – just that Ubuntu has so far mostly been aimed at desktop use, and that’s where it’s used. Adam claims there’s a huge market of Ubuntu users who would pay MySQL AB for commercial support, I suspect that this is not the case.
I know /. comments aren’t always to be trusted, but this reaction sounded quite sensible: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=211584&cid=17228126
According to this post the reaction of the MySQL representitives was:
“It is not yet fully supported which simply means that we do not yet have official
enterprise binaries for this platform. We will continue to provide the same level
of support and we hope to have both Debian and Ubuntu packages in the near future.
I will let you know when we have enterprise .debs, until then you can simply use
the 5.0.30-enterprise generic linux tarball package.”
This sounds a lot more hopeful (but it may be false, it’s an unchecked source).
Edited 2006-12-13 20:55
The Slashdot story has been updated:
Update: 12/13 20:52 GMT by J : MySQL AB’s Director of Architecture (and former Slash programmer) Brian Aker corrects an apparent miscommunication in a blog post: “we are just starting to roll out [Enterprise] binaries… We don’t build binaries for Debian in part because the Debian community does a good job themselves… If you call MySQL and you have support we support you if you are running Debian (the same with Suse, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and others)… someone in Sales was left with the wrong information”
I wouldn’t say that clears the whole thing, but surely doesn’t look as if MySQL were going to restrict support to a handful of distros anymore.
rehdon
Before any more flames are started, people really need to read from the site. They will support Debian as an OS, but they won’t support the .deb installs. You need to download their builds. Big difference.
I can see dropping all the other distros for support, but Debian is different. It’s a huge community, it’s the most community driven and community supported distro. It has lots of popular derivatives that would be supported just because Debian is supported (Umbuntu for one). And is lends to be a counter-balance to the commercial distro offerings from RH and Novell if what you want is a non-commercial distro.
I imagine most Debian users are quite happy installing MySQL with apt-get just as they always have. So I fail to see the problem.
I guess that while Debian may have a huge community, not very many of them pay for MySQL support. And for the few that do it’s not like installing a tar package is hard.
On here:
http://www.mysql.com/support/supportedplatforms/enterprise.html
you can see that Debian (3.0 and 3.1) are supported.
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 isn’t on that list either. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would care that much though. If a company cares about support they should pick a distribution with a history of sending updates to MySQL pacakges through their normal update and patch channels. Don’t most distibutions support the packages within their distribution? I’m more surprised that the site lists any linux distributions at all considering most distributions deliver MySQL. Why download from MySQL directly unless your distribution is really out of date?
I find myself wishing for a MySQL Foundataion/MySQL Corporation setup similar to the Mozillas. It’d be likely that Debian, et al. would continue to be supported by the developers (Foundataion) even if not commercially supported by MySQL AB’s Enterprise support contracts.
For that matter, it’s not easy to tell if that isn’t already the case here. Has MySQL AB stated that they will refuse (or “ignore”) patches for other distros?
There’s a lot of confusion about what’s supported officially or not. To me, the signals have been very obvious for quite some time. Mysql have big ambitions, the products have been a great “success” and now they want to focus on making money. When Larry could then why can’t we seems to be the idea.
A shift to Postgresql is not a big thing, you get a database that performs and scales better and have more possibilities. But eventually that will be commercial as well. I prefer Oracle myself, and XE is free…
huh…there are options, remember? posgres…firebird…