Sun vs Open Source

As you might know, there’s not a lot of OS database modelling stuff out there, but for MySQL databases, it was easy: we all used DBDesigner. It was open source, did forward and reverse engineering and could do schema and model comparisons. Basically all the functionality that you want but which you can usually only get at a very hefty price point. Now MySQL started to develop a successor to DBDesigner and released the MySQL Workbench. So far, so good you might say, but hold on. Forward and reverse engineering are only available in the commercial edition, and the same goes for some other features. Now Sun does not attempt to hide this: they greyed out the menu items in the Community edition, basically saying that it’s ‘crippleware’. And the best part of it: the current version only runs on Windows and requires the .Net framework 2.0. I guess Jonathan learned a lot from Bill and Steve so the least we can say is that from a Microsoft perspective, the partnership is working out just fine.