maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Colin Charles <colin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Bruce,

> On 17 Sep 2015, at 09:13, Bruce Carlson <bruce.carlson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> I am involved with and contribute to a number of open source communities around the world but this is the only time I’ve been asked to sign up with a “Google” account.
> 

I may be confused but you do not need a Google account. The portal clearly says here: https://mariadb.com/user/register?destination=my_portal

Use your Google or LinkedIn account (for convenience)
OR
Fill in the details below

There you are asked for a username, email address, password, your first/last name, company, location (country), a cell phone number and the number of database servers. This is not so Google can re-target ads, but so that it can tie in with our internal marketing system. Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew you downloaded a binary every day, so we could get one of our sales people to say via email, “hey, you’ve gotten access to this download like 8 times. Do you need some services around it? How can we help you make your deployment better?”

As Jan emailed you earlier — the source is still there. Its 100% LGPL. You can make binaries and distribute it yourself. All we’re asking for the binaries at the moment that we QA, test, and provide as a download, is that you give us some personal details so we have a database of our users and we know what they download. In another thread you say,

	"I would even be glad to pay a fee for the convenience of downloading a pre built  MSI when installing on windows machines and I am reasonably happy with the occasional donations to open source I've been able to extract from my clients. (Although, I admit, we could all possibly do more in the area of digging up donations and raising funds is a constant issue for all open source organisations).”

Obviously I have no idea if you’ve ever made a payment to MariaDB Corporation, but I’m sure you realise we do not run on donations. We have over 80 employees worldwide, have released many servers from MariaDB 5.1/5.2/5.3/5.5/10.0/Galera 5.5/Galera 10/5.5 TokuDB and also have Connectors for C/Java/ODBC. All in, we have over 100 server releases, and numerous connector releases. All this development takes time and money to create.

I still remember the first post you made to maria-developers about you upgrading to MariaDB back in 2012: https://lists.launchpad.net/maria-developers/msg04605.html — I have no idea if in March 2012 you paid SkySQL (now MariaDB Corporation). If you did, I highly recommend telling your sales contact that as a customer, you abhor providing personal information to download a binary. I know you didn’t like paying Oracle thousands and not getting support. You’ve been getting quite a lot of support on the mailing lists since then.

I hope this helps (i.e. you can use a non-Google account to actually get a free account) you in some way. And I look forward to your continued use of MariaDB Server and the Connectors

Kind Regards,
Colin Charles

P/S: If you do not like a search engine with ads or don’t like this idea of “retargeting ads”, I suggest you try looking at DuckDuckGo — http://duckduckgo.com/ — the browser that cares for your privacy.
--
Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist, MariaDB Corporation
blog: http://bytebot.net/blog/ | t: +1-347-903-3201 | Skype: colincharles | Twitter: @bytebot

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