MySQL stops providing Enterprise source 4free
For the past few months I have been providing “Red Hat”-style RPMs of the newest MySQL versions, including the Enterprise-only releases. Unfortunately it looks like that practice is going to come to an end. The developers of MySQL have decided to change the release policy of the Community version and the availability policy of the Enterprise sources.
On the first point, the stable release of MySQL (currently 5.0) will receive “at least 2″ binary releases per year and quarterly source releases. It seems that the intention is to release more frequently only if there is a critical flaw to be fixed. In addition, whenever a new GA is released (like the soon-to-be-released 5.1), there will be monthly binary builds until the product reaches suitable stability levels and is deemed “mature”.
As to the second point, up until now the source code for the Enterprise releases has been posted on the main MySQL FTP server for anyone to download and compile themselves. Unfortunately (for us), they’ve now decided decided to restrict the download of the Enterprise sources to paying Enterprise customers, meaning that there will no longer be a free way to upgrade your MySQL install with the monthly bug-fix releases. For those of you about to start screaming that this is a GPL violation, it’s not. They’re not saying that the project is now closed-source, just that they aren’t going to distribute that source to anyone but paying customers.
If something changes I’ll start building the releases again as I have been. If not, don’t worry, I’ll still build new releases every quarter so you can keep your systems up-to-date without having to worry about changing package structures by using the RPMs available directly from MySQL.
