Spotted this story this morning over at the Blog Herald where Matt Craven posted about a story in Computer World where MySQL; which is now owned by Sun Microsystems, is going to begin limiting some features to only the paying customers

Open-source darling MySQL is facing a new uprising within its customer base over plans disclosed this week to reserve some key upcoming features, and their source code, for paying users of its namesake database.

Officials at Sun Microsystems Inc., which acquired MySQL in February, confirmed that new online backup capabilities now under development will be offered only to MySQL Enterprise customers — not to the much larger number of users of the free MySQL Community edition

I can just hear the rolling thunder as it gathers steam across the the open source gimme everything for free landscape. Already the comments to the story on Computer World are coming out strongly against Sun for doing this and how their support for the open source movement is only one of show.

Here’s a clue - Sun is a publicly traded company which means it has shareholders who want something back for their investments and this isn’t counting all the people working for a paycheck who like to keep getting those nice paychecks. The fact that Sun has said that portions of future releases of MySQL might only be available for paying enterprise customers is just fine. Now we can see how it really stacks up against competitors in the field on a slightly more equal footing; and yes I realize that they have had a support client base for years so don’t bother throwing that one into any arguments against Sun wanting to make some money.

Conversation Tags: MySQL, Sun Microsystems, databases