In December I covered the topic The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating (which was also a response to Giuseppe Maxia's take on the same topic). Since half a year has now passed, I was wondering if I should follow up with an update. (Drizzle having a GA release would be the major news in such an update.)

But I see that Peter Zaitsev covered this topic in the opening keynote of their Percona Live conference. Since I agree with Peter's view on this topic, I just recommend you watch the talk on Percona.TV. He also uses the same categorizations of the forks, and includes "community patches" as its separate slide.

On one slide Peter goes into the topic of running an open source business, saying that he knows people who even believe it isn't possible. I couldn't help wondering if people in the audience realize the understated humor in that sentence, when it is said by the CEO of the company that has grown to be the leading alternative vendor of MySQL support services and now going into its sixth year in business.

One sentence summarizes well how one should think about open source and commercial services. On the one hand it is great that one can choose to use open source software for free. On the other hand, says Peter:

"As a group, we get what we pay for."

A topic Peter doesn't cover - since Percona is one of the forks discussed he is being diplomatic here - is to induce some kind of ranking amongst the forks. I briefly covered some popularity statistics after the MySQL Conference.