The Sky is Falling! MySQL charging for features!
There’s quite a bit of buzz on the blogosphere from people I respect a great deal, like Jeremy Cole at Proven Scaling and Vadim at Percona, about MySQL’s new Enterprise backup plans.
The big deal? They’re releasing a Community version that doesn’t have all the same features as the Enterprise version of Online Backup, including compression and encryption. The Community version is open-sourced under GPL, the Enterprise version is not.
Personally, I think this is awesome. Don’t get me wrong – I love open source. We couldn’t have built our business without it, and we love it when we get a chance to contribute back to the community.
But let’s not forget that MySQL is a business. And that business helps the community and improves the software. They have customers (I’m one – we’re a paying MySQL Enterprise Platinum customer), and they have to solve those customers’ problems. This is a virtuous cycle where the community benefits directly as MySQL thrives financially.
Every time a business like us pays MySQL for a service or feature, MySQL can then invest in better software that benefits all. The end result in MySQL’s case is more GPL’d code. In a very real way, without companies like mine, there wouldn’t be a new backup tool at all – let alone the differences this debate is focused on.
Every day, I hear someone saying “Man, I love SmugMug so much! It has [insert features here] which I love! Why isn’t it free?”
The answer? ”It wouldn’t be SmugMug if it was free.” MySQL’s situation is very similar.
I wish more open source projects would make it easier for this cycle to ignite. Some of them, like Red Hat, refuse to even take our money. Talk about stupid. There are *lots* of businesses out there willing to pay for extra services and features, and the community can harness that revenue in amazing ways, including getting more (or better) GPL’d code.
Couple more thoughts:
- I wouldn’t be surprised if future releases add new Enterprise-only features and some existing Enterprise-only features migrate down to Community.
- The Community version is open-sourced, so I’m sure the community will develop their own compression and encryption features.
- This is really no different from Enterprise Monitor, which has been only for Enterprise customers for awhile.
- Lots of other projects do this (and I would argue this benefits those projects and their communities, too)
- I’m 99% sure that this was the plan before Sun acquired MySQL.
Thoughts on Google App Engine
First: Very cool.
Next: I think it’s interesting that Google has basically taken a sniper scope out and aimed it at a specific cloud computing target. App Engine is only for web applications. No batch computing, no cron jobs, no CPU/disk/network access, etc.
I think this is very smart of Google. Rather than attacking Amazon head-on, Google has realized there’s a huge playing field for cloud computing, and are attempting to dominate another portion of it, one where they have a lot of expertise. Very good business move, imho.
Will we use it? I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve long thought that we’ll continue to mix in web services from a variety of providers, and it looks like App Engine can solve a slice of our datacenter need that other providers don’t yet provide.
I’m more than a little concerned, though, by how much vendor lock-in there is with App Engine. At first glance, it doesn’t look like the apps will be portable at all. If I want to switch providers, or add in other providers so I’m not relying solely on Google, I’m outta luck.
I’m hopeful other languages get supported, too. I think Python is great – don’t get me wrong – but we have a lot more experience with other languages, so there’ll be a learning curve.
Finally, I’m dying to find out what pricing for an application of our scale will look like. I can see some immediate, obvious things I’d like to try to do on App Engine, but the beta limits aren’t gonna cut it for us. :(
Will it replace Amazon? It sure doesn’t look like it from where I sit. In fact, I don’t see this as much of a competitor to Amazon Web Services. There’s some overlap in some small area (hosted web apps on EC2), but I doubt that’s the bulk of Amazon’s business. As I said, we’ll likely end up using both (and other providers as they come along, too).
My favorite bit? In theory, Google has solved the data scaling problem. I don’t mean raw binary (blob) storage, which S3, SmugFS, MogileFS, and plenty of other things have solved, but the “database” scaling problem. Every popular web app runs into this problem, and it’s typically solved with a combination of memcached, federation, and replication. But it’s messy. In theory, Google has automated that piece for us. I can’t wait to play with it and see if that’s true.
I also can’t wait to see who else is going to wade into this fray. Sun? Microsoft? Yahoo? IBM?
Bring it on!
Seattle/Redmond dinner update
Sitting in the Virgin America part of the SFO International terminal. Talk about an awesome terminal. Can’t wait to fly Virgin, too – my first time (hah!). I doubt anyone on the plane throws down in DOOM the way I do, so I expect a river of tears in the aisle.
Wish I could be at the Google Campfire tonight, cuz the news is awesome, but Microsoft got to me first, so up to the frigid North I go…. Hope this MS stuff is as good as it sounds.
It turns out the Seattle Photography Group is meeting on Wednesday night. Cool! So I’m going to that. You should come. :)
Then, afterwards, I’m hoping we’ll head out for some food. If you want to get food afterwards, please leave a comment so we have at least a rough head count. Attendance at the SPG isn’t mandatory, but I’m sure you’re welcome to come.
On Tuesday, I already have dinner plans, but wouldn’t mind hanging out with some geeks afterwards. Doubt I’m up for going into Seattle, though, so if you’re in Redmond or Bellevue, holler.
(I’ll try to email everyone who sent emails, commented, and twittered – but if you haven’t heard from me, re-comment because I’m lame)
Freetards ruining the web?
photo by: Kirk Tanner
Hardly.
Hank Williams over at Silicon Alley Insider has a guest post up about how VCs are ruining the online tech economy by fueling free services, wrecking it for small and/or premium services. Matthew Ingram has a response out that resonates much more closely with how I feel.
First of all, SmugMug is living proof that you can make it as a premium service. Second, I think you’d be hard pressed to name a market where there isn’t stratification. Cars, airlines, music players, shoes – you name it, there are premium brands and there are commodity brands. On the web, commodity = free. That’s just how the game is played.
There are a lot of reasons why it makes sense for us not to be free, but perhaps my favorite is: We’re forced to hone our business. If we do don’t do it right, we don’t eat. Doing it right becomes priority #1 rather than growth.
There are quite a few reasons I love that there are *lots* of free sites with deep pockets in our space, too:
- Free training. Lots of our customers go chew up customer service dollars somewhere else first, learning the basics of how to upload, share, etc, before coming to us. By the time they get to us, they know the ropes and getting up to speed is easy.
- They’ve seen how bad it is elsewhere. By comparison, our product looks amazing. The ‘Wow factor’ is huge.
- Coattails marketing. We don’t have to spend a lot of money raising awareness of the photo sharing concept – other, bigger companies are doing it for us.
- Keeps us on our toes. As if our customers weren’t enough to keep us nimble, big deep-pocketed competitors surround us on all sides. Try slowing down and we die.
There is one big nasty downside, though, that really gets me. Every time a free site dies (and they’re dropping like flies), some of those burned customers get gunshy. Sure, we pick up lots of refugees, but there are some people who just get turned off by all photo sharing sites. They lost their priceless photos, afterall. That sucks. 
With the market downturn, that last point really scares me. If we really do have another bubble burst in the web space (and I predict we will), free photo sharing sites are going to be devastated.
I just hope they don’t burn an entire generation.
UPDATE: I found our problem! We don’t have a FreeTardis! I’m gonna get one.
Geek Dinner in Redmond, WA on April 9th?
photo by: Shay Stephens
I’ll be up in Redmond (first time!) for business next week (sorry sweetie!), and have no plans Wednesday evening, the 9th. Anyone wanna get some food, play some games, or just hang out?
Post in the comments.
Nasty Bug: Safari doesn't cache stuff.
photo by: Simon Barnes
I swear I’m not making this up.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I found it. Safari is one of our favorite browsers, and we love their work on standards compliance and speed, particularly JavaScript, but this particular bug is really driving us crazy. I’ve logged it with Apple (#5786274), and a fix is promised, but in case you’re getting hit with this and are as baffled as I was, here are the details:
- If your computer has less than 1GB of RAM, Safari fails to cache items larger than 104,857 bytes.
- If your computer has more than 1GB of RAM, Safari failes to cache items larger than 209,715 bytes.
- JPEGs, at least, are temporarily cached in RAM. Whew. But upon browser restart, you’ll see they didn’t make it to the disk cache, so you have to get them again.
- Other objects, like SWFs or videos, though, don’t even make it to the RAM cache, let alone disk. Load the same SWF back-to-back, and you’ve just transfered the bytes twice. Ugh.
Very easy to reproduce yourself from the comfort of your own home, so go for it. Just fire up HTTP Scoop or Wireshark or tail your server’s HTTP logs and start hitting stuff. Marvel at the # of excess bytes transferred across the wire that you didn’t need.
Here are a couple of test URLs so you can see for yourself:
As a self-professed Apple fanboy, I can’t wait for a fix. In the meantime, we’ve had to jump through all sorts of hoops to ‘dumb down’ some of our most exciting new features.
UPDATE: Yes, I’ve tried with every Cache-Control and Expires header known to man. No, it doesn’t make a difference. Try it yourself.
My conference schedule for the rest of 2008
A few of you have been asking when/where I’ll be this year, conference-wise. Since Audrey was born, I’ve tried to keep my travel and speaking gigs to a bare minimum so I could help with my three kids and keep my wife sane. If you’d like me to speak or otherwise help out your conference this year, being local (Silicon Valley) is almost your only bet, I’m afraid.
That being said, there are a few things that are ‘must attend’ for me, and a few local California shows, too. I’m sorry if I had to turn down your conference this year, but please ask again in future years – especially those of you with foreign events. 
Here’s what’s on my calendar so far:
- MySQL User’s Conference – A must-attend for me. Helps that it’s local, too.
- D6 – A must-attend for me. Best business conference there is, imho.
- foo camp – Must-attend *if* I’m lucky enough to get an invite. No hard feelings if I don’t.
- Velocity – New conference around operations & scalability (finally!). Local, too.
- Web2Open – Speaking on a business hacks session. Local, too.
I wish I could go to OSCON this year, and wish I could have gone to ETech, too, but I just can’t & couldn’t.
And while I have your attention, I’d just like the mourn the death of the Web 2.0 Summit for me. I’ve enjoyed going all the previous years, but I just really didn’t get anything out of it last year. It’s turned into a massively popular event, but one that’s mobbed with VCs and bankers – almost no startups or entrepreneurs to be found. I have nothing against VCs or bankers, but that’s just not why I attended. So I think I’ll pass this year. Might come up to the city to hang out or get lunch, though, so ping me if you’re in town then.
If you are an entrepreneur with a hot startup, I suspect TechCrunch50 is going to be the place to be this year, btw. Get your demos ready!
UPDATE: Jesse just posted a 20% discount code in the comments: vel08js Thanks Jesse!
