MySQL quietly let slip that it would no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball, not quite a year after the company announced a split between its paid and free versions.

You might know that beginning with MySQL 5.1.24, support for the NDBCLUSTER storage engine was removed from the standard MySQL server binaries built by MySQL. Therefore, here I'm using MySQL Cluster edition instead of MySQL Community edition.

One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding.

MySQL use declining, PostgreSQL and MariaDB use rising and no majority support for any of the possible outcomes of the current European Commission investigation into Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems; these are some of the results of a survey, carried out by the 451 Group, of open source users show which shows they are split over the future of MySQL.

According to a post on the MySQL blog site last night, by MySQL's Vice President for Community Kaj Arno, Sun Microsystems plans to purchase MySQL AB, the commercial firm selling enterprise database products built atop the ubiquitous open source database which represents the M in the LAMP open source software stack.

MySQL AB has made it harder for developers to use the enterprise edition of its database software for free, sparking a debate about whether the company has strayed from its obligation to its open-source community.

When Amazon decided to offer MySQL via Amazon RDS, they did so without purchasing MySQL support from Sun. I've confirmed that Microsoft Azure is supporting MySQL on Azure without paying Sun for a MySQL Enterprise subscription

For Sun Microsystems, the acquisition of open-source database vendor MySQL is a positive step, giving Sun its own database and a growing, loyal community of open-source users and developers to add to its portfolio. So what's the upside or downside for the MySQL community itself?

Continuing its efforts to advance customer adoption of Linux, HP today announced the contribution of its Tru64 UNIX Advanced File System (AdvFS) source code to the open source community.