Brian wrote recently Where did all of the MySQL Developers Go? , while over in Drizzle land they have been accepted for the Google Summer of code along with many other open source projects. MySQL from my observation a noticeable absentee.
Historically, the lack of opportunity to enable community contributions and see them implemented in say under 5 years, has really hurt MySQL in recent times. There is plenty of history here so that’s not worth repeating. The current landscape of patches, forks and custom MySQL binaries for storage engine provider has provided a boom of innovation that sadly is now lost from the core MySQL product.
In Drizzle, community contribution is actively sought and a good portion of committed code is not from the core Drizzle developers (wherever they work). As a Drizzle GSoC project contributor last year Padraig for example this year is helping to mentor. The Drizzle project contribution philisophy, GSoC and other activities such as the Drizzle Developer Day all enable the next generation of developers to be part of ongoing project developement.
Oracle, what are you going to do to foster an active community and new long term developers for MySQL?
