Just announced at the MySQL Partner meeting as part of the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA:

MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model — previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.

As I’ve discussed before, the size of the user base for MySQL Enterprise is much smaller than for MySQL Community. That means these critical features will be tested by only a few of their customers. So, in effect, they will be giving their paying customers real, true, untested code. How is this supposed to work? In addition, this means that they are changing their internal development model, splitting the relationship between the two trees, and overall going even further down the path of getting the RHEL/Fedora model backwards.

What do you think about this? Leave a comment, I’m really curious as to everyone’s feeling on this.

UPDATE: Marten Mickos has just acknowledge that I understood the slide quite correctly, and they will indeed develop new features in MySQL Enterprise (in 6.0), without making them available in MySQL Community. Hmm!