[ Thanks to Britta Wuelfing for
this link. ]
“Pictured with the statue of an ostrich with its head
in the sand, Monty Widenius’s blog begins with “Oops, we did it
again…” The statue was a gift to the MySQL 6.0 managers as a
“reward” for their release planning. Widenius describes the version
as not yet “ready to be declared” beta, RC or GA and lists a series
of unresolved bugs as proof. The reason, he says, isn’t the
developers, but management: “…even an excellent team can’t work
if the conditions are not right.” Even release of the 5.1 beta was
too early and not signed off by developers. Because MySQL managers
spread the software to a larger audience prematurely, developers
didn’t have time to get to their actual work. “MySQL developers
have not been able to do any larger changes in the source code
since February 2006,” says Widenius.“His further criticism of the conflicting priorities of
technicians and marketing forces should be familiar to all. It’s
the usual story: software quality takes second place to regularly
spaced release cycles and new functionality takes precedence over
bug fixes. He holds Mårten Mickos, chief of the database
group at Sun Microsystems, responsible for this strategy:
“Mårten’s reasons for this is that he needs something he can
sell and a release marked ‘GA’ [General Availability] is much
easier to sell than a release marked ‘RC’ [Release
Candidate].””