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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I've always used Postgres, but don't think the copyright assignment thing is that big a problem. The FSF does that, and it seems to work out ok.

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I think there is a big difference between the two.

The FSF uses copyright assignment to ensure that open source code is not legally encumbered.

MySQL uses the copyright assignment so they can sell code contributed by open source developers in their commercial platform without compensating the authors.

Yeah, that's a good point. Well, like I said, I am firmly in the Postgres camp in any case. I've never enjoyed discovering things about Mysql like the fact that even InnoDB doesn't allow you to modify the DB transactionally.

Wait... what?

Looks like InnoDB supports transactions, no? http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-transaction-mo...

http://adam.blog.heroku.com/past/2008/9/3/ddl_transactions/

"MySQL doesn’t support DDL transactions;"

Meaning you can't change the schema transactionally. InnoDB handles data transactions ok, but I hadn't realized that it doesn't handle schema changes. It seems like I'm always discovering some little nasty about Mysql when I am forced to use it.

That's not really true. They both do it so that they have the ability to relicense the code to their ends and defend any legal challenges against the code-base as a whole. If MySQL just wanted to be able to use the contributed code they could simply require that it be under a less restrictive license (BSD, MIT, etc.)

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