MySql definition of free database

Every developer of free software and most of the other developers too know MySql. MySql is the most famous database system. MySql first release was in 1995 and it was developed by MySQL AB, but in 2008 MySQL AB was acquired by Sun. Sun kept the business model so it continued to be free.

MySql is a dual-license software. This mean that you can acquire it choosing one of two licenses. One is free, the GPL. So you can use it for free and you have the source code of it. The other one is a commercial one.  This second license allows you to integrate MySql in a private software and sell it. Remember that GPL don’t allow this.

Why is the most famous?

• Because it is free.
• It is multiplataform.
• There are APIs for most important languages.
• A lot of third-party software have been developed around it.
• There are a lot of documentation.

Also it is used in LAMP systems. LAMP(Linux Apache Mysql Php) is the perfect combination of free technologies for webs. All that technologies are free and they hava a total integration. There are a lot of webs applications, cms, blogs…that are perfectly integrated with LAMP.

I recommend it to everybody.  It’s important to remark that it is a relational database. Also you can use it as a non-relational database, but if you need a better performance with non-relational you must take a look to mongodb and cassandra(developed by facebook), both of them are free.

The current situation of MySql is undefined. Oracle, which develop one of the most important database systems, bought Sun in 2010. So Oracle could stop it support when they want eliminating its competitor. I thought there must be laws to avoid companies to buy their competitor….

Thanks to the license GPL there are forks that will continue the development of this software. If you want to look for it you have tree important forks: Drizzle, MariaDB and Percona Server.