41–50 of 105 posts
Wow. Monty made a cool billion from Sun. Why does he need external investors now? How can MariaDB possibly have blown through that epic fortune?
Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?
Yes, but the Western governments are moving in a similar direction. I'd rather Alibaba sponsor MariaDB than not.
Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?
What would the concrete concern be in this case? Any backdoor would destroy the company brand and be excised immediately in a fork. I suspect they’ll treat it like a piece of critical infrastructure; their political concerns would be at the gfw level, and I just don’t see the likelihood of weaponized attacks. Databases are usually locked down for egress and any outgoing attempts would be rapidly detected.
Only if the backdoor is obvious. I doubt they would introduce a backdoor that reads
`if ($PWD = "supersecretbackdoorpwd") loginAs("root");`
But a subtle buffer overrun resulting in a 0day that's only obvious to the writers - that's much more likely.
Check out the Underhanded C contest for examples of ways exploits can hide in plain sight.
EDIT: I'm not saying that's what going to happen with Alibaba & MariaDb. I'm just saying that "open source" != "free of exploits and backdoors". One of the biggest untruths about open source is that, with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?
Not everything has to be about politics. Sometimes a big company investing in an open source database it already uses is just trying to improve its own infrastructure, not trying to hack your country.
Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?
What would the concrete concern be in this case? Any backdoor would destroy the company brand and be excised immediately in a fork. I suspect they’ll treat it like a piece of critical infrastructure; their political concerns would be at the gfw level, and I just don’t see the likelihood of weaponized attacks. Databases are usually locked down for egress and any outgoing attempts would be rapidly detected.
For context, Alibaba uses their own fork of MySQL which is AliSQL: https://github.com/alibaba/AliSQL
https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/alibaba%E2%80%99s-new-cloud...
A more detailed intro (in Chinese) can be found at http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2017/08/ali-polardb.
Alibaba has developed another DB called OceanBase (open source). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925679
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With Alibaba cloud, infrastructure like databases is their business. Take AWS Aurora and GCP Spanner as examples.
But it's also easier to sell a standard DB people already know vs a custom (see (google) Bigtable vs (amazon) Postgres)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everything has to be about politics. Sometimes a big company investing in an open source database it already uses is just trying to improve its own infrastructure, not trying to hack your country.
That's besides the point. Even if every single employee at Alibaba is well-intentioned (which is close enough to reality to be considered the case), in the end the government of the PRC has the capability to coerce the company to exert influence in a direction we almost certainly wouldn't like. The only question is whether the PRC would consider the trade offs worth it.
It's open source- when that happens, you can fork it and influence it in the direction that you like. I mean if the GCHQ has an active github account[1] - I think the PRC gets a pass to publish open source, let alone Alibaba.
Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?
One can say about Google / Facebook / Amazon investing in startups and non-profits inevitably influence these organizations' directions; that's just the nature of any investments. When you donate money to a cause you support, you indirectly influence how the cause is headed, because you can pull the pledge, and when enough people pull the pledge, then the people running the cause/non-profits will have to do something to the demand of the donators.
China is the biggest creditor of the US national debt, and even before that US was careful with its relationship with China anyway. So we can't say there is a cause and effect, the best is a weak correlation, and even that is a stretch.
[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/alibaba/investments
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the reason nowadays to use MySQL/MariaDB instead of PostgreSQL?
MySQL is faster. There are people that will argue against it but they probably don't understand how the vacuum works. Also if you only read HN yeah you're bias on Postgres vs MySQL. On the end Postgres is "better" but MySQL is already pretty good, it's not like you're comparing a good product to a bad one, both of them are good.