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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

It's Apache 2.0 licensed, so anyone can "exit" the project from anywhere. "exit" is just a fancy name for fork here — even a proprietary/closed fork — and the usual layer 9 considerations apply, e.g. do they take users & devs with them or not. Or the domain, if there is one.

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Yeah, but who owns the name? That's what this is about.

Let's say I fork Firefox. I can do that because it's open. I can't call my thing Firefox though (that's that's trademark owned by Mozilla).

It turns out, the brand name is actually the thing that matters, not the code. He who owns the name owns the users.

In terms of the code, he who owns the contributers owns the code. But it takes a LOT of work to switch people from one brand to another, even if the new brand is the old developers.

Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior.

Evidently during the donation process CNCF requires them to give them the trademarks so they own it.

That’s true. The problem here was that Synadia never fully transferred the trademark, seemingly in bad faith. When Synadia told the CNCF that it needed to transfer NATS back, they claimed that the CNCF didn’t own the trademark and therefore didn’t own the project.

> Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior.

On the other hand, wikivoyage is more well known than wikitravel. LibreOffice is more well known than OpenOffice.

Ultimately though i think this is reasonable. If you go your own separate way you use a new name. If you give your project's name to someone else, that is your own stupid fault.

Far to break it to you but OOo install base still dwarfs Libre Office. Nearly all on Windows.

Are you saying wikitravel has been forked to wikivoyage and that wikivoyage is the new one? I was looking through wikitravel a few weeks ago and felt sad

Yes. Wikivoyage is actively being edited (although a lot of it is from wikitravel ~10 years ago)

Great to know, next time I go somewhere I'll be sure to remember that and use/contribute to wikivoyage. Found some mildly interesting reading about it on reddit [1]

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/318v09/wikitravel_v...

Yes, the creator of wikitravel sold it to a company called internet brands who ran it into the ground. Later it was forked (with the original creator's blessing afaik) into wikivoyage, which is run by wikimedia (same people who run wikipedia)

I solved this in my open source project by owning the name personally. The code is dual MIT/GPL licensed - I don’t/can’t fully control that (by design), but I unilaterally control the registered trademark. I feel this is a reasonable compromise between the reality of the legal and practical issues with trademarks, and the spirit of open source, even though you’re right, there’s a ton of power in owning the name itself. I’ve thought about writing up some permissive license/rules for trademark usage, which would allow me to relinquish some legal control there, while still ensuring good stewardship of the trademark. But it’s definitely a thin line to balance on.

Except you didn't solve it, because you owning the trademark personally is the problem that's being complained about

Nothing can solve some people choosing to complain when someone else who owns a decision makes a decision they don’t like.

> I’ve thought about writing up some permissive license/rules for trademark usage

See the 'wordpress' situation for a case study ...

That just means a different set of people can get stuck having to rename, i.e. whatever group doesn't include you. How confident are you that (assuming your project thrives) you'll be around in 10 years and have the project's best interests at heart?

Even the nicest and best people can change for the worse. One of the reasons to go for some foundation-like entity owning the name is that you can equalize out across multiple people in a meritocratic, democratic, demarchist, or whatever else process.

And even if you're incredibly sure you won't become a bad person: what happens if life hits you hard? A relative becomes disabled and you need money to care for them? Will you sell the trademark?

> Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior.

If it were ... but it isn't, quite to the contrary.

However look at Openoffice, where libreoffice clearly won.

https://db-engines.com/en/ranking

https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_definition

I wouldn’t trust the data there very much.

The calculation explained on the page wouldn't rank MariaDB properly. Debian's MySQL is MariaDB but many people are calling it MySQL so it increases the ranking of MySQL. Job offers with MySQL sometimes talk about MariaDB.

Whether that would be enough to rank MariaDB higher, I can't say.

I always thought of MySQL as the specification and MariaDB as an implementation?

No, that's not correct. MariaDB is a "hard fork" of MySQL, and they've both grown in different directions. MariaDB used to cherry-pick code from MySQL 5.x, but hasn't been "drop in" compatible for quite a long time, especially since MySQL 8.0 which came out 7 years ago.

Even just looking at table design and schema management functionality, here's my increasingly-long rundown of subtle differences in features and syntax: https://www.skeema.io/blog/2023/05/10/mysql-vs-mariadb-schem...

Been suggesting to a non-technical OpenOffice-using writer friend to at least give LibreOffice a try but it ain't happening. The name is a lot stickier than the actual product or people behind it.

They didn’t suggest StarOffice?

Large tech companies (especially in the US) seem to strongly favor MySQL over MariaDB. For example, when these companies discuss MySQL, they're literally using Oracle MySQL or a patch-set on top of it such as Percona Server -- Meta/Facebook, GitHub, Shopify, Uber, Square, Pinterest, Twilio, Etsy, and many others that have done conference talks about upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0.

AWS Aurora for MySQL is based on Oracle MySQL, without a MariaDB variant. Vitess only supports MySQL and not MariaDB. Between these two facts, you can ascertain a lot of companies are using MySQL under the hood.

Even in terms of "regular" managed DB hosted, only AWS RDS actively offers both MySQL and MariaDB variants; Azure had both but has chosen to drop their MariaDB product and focus only on MySQL. Google CloudSQL offers MySQL and has never supported MariaDB.

This is not to say MariaDB is bad! Quite the contrary. Just responding to the common incorrect HN refrain that Oracle MySQL is dead.

As for which product is "superior", in my experience they both have unique strengths and features that the other lacks. MariaDB has especially been adding some great FOSS features lately. MySQL is focusing more on enterprise/non-FOSS in the last couple years, but prior to that they added a ton of unique stuff to MySQL 8 as FOSS.

> Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior.

That's a sample size of one.

FRRouting forked from Quagga. Quagga is completely, utterly and unquestionably dead. So, with a sample size of two it's 50/50. What now?

Jenkins forked from Hudson at the same time as MariaDB forked from MySQL (and for the same reason). Yet, Hudson has been so thoroughly replaced that even developers who used it for years have probably forgotten about it.

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