Senior Sun executive talks about criticism surrounding MySQL 5.1

If you can recall, we wrote last week about the very public criticism of version 5.1 of MySQL by founder Michael Widenius. In a blog post, Widenius lamented that MySQL 5.1 should not have received generally available (GA) status due to the many critical bugs that have yet to be fixed.

Earlier this week, Marten Mickos, senior vice president of Sun's database group has gone on the record to say that the criticism by Widenius is part of the "benefits and the painfulness of absolute transparency in open source. Mickos noted that a little debate never hurts, and brought attention to the fact that this release has been downloaded 250,000 times in its first ten days of availability alone. Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB earlier this year.

Software engineers such as Christopher Powers came out in defense of the MySQL management. Powers argued that it is not uncommon for software to ship with unresolved critical problems; however, the pertinent fact should be that these bugs do eventually get fixed at the end of the day.

It seems the reason that Sun pushed MySQL 5.1 out of the door was to boost sales, given the 2,500 jobs that were just cut at Sun. It is obvious that Sun needed the new release to boost sales, and another "release candidate" just won't cut it. What is your opinion?

To read more about this story:
- check out this article at ITworld
- check out this article at Network World

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