Back in late 2006, MySQL AB decided to split (or “fork” for the more common open source term) their source code and release structure into two parts: “Community” and “Enterprise”. This has caused quite a lot of stirring in the MySQL market, and a lot of confusion about what exactly the difference is and how the release structure works. It’s actually not easy to really explain the new structure, and I won’t try here. The key point for the purposes of this discussion, is that MySQL is effectively no longer providing builds (binaries) of their community releases, and they don’t provide enterprise builds at all to the public. They are providing source releases of community, but fairly infrequently.

This is a big problem, because it means that there is no realistic way for the average developer or MySQL user to get regular builds (and ones that quickly address bugs) without paying MySQL for a support contract. Most of Proven Scaling‘s customers do not have support contracts with MySQL AB, and have been quite unhappy about the change, and personally I’ve lost a reasonable way to get new features pushed out to the public without excessive delays (up to 6 months to the next community release, and years for enterprise).

Back when MySQL originally polled me on this issue and told me of their plans, I told them that they would just force the community to repair the “damage” in the ecosystem, by providing the builds themselves. I even warned that the one doing the repairing could possibly be myself and Proven Scaling…

So, to get to the point…

This week, at the MySQL Conference and Expo, Solid Information Technology and Proven Scaling have announced a collaborative project to address the needs of the community for frequent releases with interesting features, bug fixes, and new patches: DorsalSource. Immediately, we have begun providing over 40 binaries of MySQL community and enterprise forks on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. We plan to add many additional platforms and variations of the builds, in addition to many more features to build a real developer community around MySQL.

We will continue the development of DorsalSource, adding many great new features—we have a ton of ideas, it’s just a matter of implementing them and getting them out there for users to use. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for how to improve the site, or really anything at all, please feel free to contact me directly or leave a comment here.