The one positive of this is it seems to have livened up the open source project (Vinyl Cache). Features that haven't been added for years are now being worked on, whether they step on the toes of the commercial offering or not.

Well I guess the enterprise side of varnish was quite beneficial to him (and the core devs) over that time. If something gives you financial freedom over 10+ years to work on a thing you love, you can't be mad at all of it.

But if FOSS is deeply encoded into your DNA, you become pretty protective once you realize your project may become extinct sometimes in the future.

What a mess... It's sad that the community has to suffer the consequences of a company holding the trademark hostage.

does the mysql/mariadb comparison actually make sense? mysql is not really a downstream distro of mariadb (maaybe even the opposite?) so i thought i understood the situation as presented until that paragraph

I had the same immediate reaction. It's a completely nonsensical comparison that just demonstrates the author is hopelessly confused about the relationship between MySQL and MariaDB.

The way I remember it, was that MySQL was sold, then some time after, MariaDB was created as a fork, and you could switch between them. Then at one point MariaDB diverged sufficiently that you could no longer "effortlessly" (kinda) switch between them, by now they're separate but MariaDB's origin is still MySQL obviously.

The comparison with MySQL/MariaDB is unfortunate, given that since the "split" MariaDB has shown itself to be every bit the corporate owned "FOSS" project while its supporters still harp on about how terrible oracle is for OSS, without actually acknowledging the real history of each respective project and accompanying company.

Given that MariaDB the company is now owned by a private equity firm, I doubt it's going to get better.

To me the biggest "unknown" with Percona is that MariaDB (the company) bought out Codership (the creators of Galera Cluster, which XtraDB Cluster is based on) and it doesn't seem to be OSS any more.

I'm sure for some shops this will drive them to pay for the same feature in MariaDB cluster, but I'm more likely to just transition to MySQL Group Replication.

This is my whole point about MariaDB - they are steadily making their OSS software completely dependent on the company (paid) versions for anything beyond toy scale.

"Vinyl cache" is an interesting name. I wonder what other candidates the maintainers considered? I was secretly hoping they would name it "Veneer Cache" or something similar to "varnish".