> What this confirms is that Monty is one unhappy camper, no
> longer allowed to control the destiny of "his" project and
> kicking out against those who do.

Sun claims that it has nothing to do with it and the management of
MySQL is quite independent. Is that sign of some small revolution
there? It would be interesting to see the share distribution before
MySQL was sold to Sun. This information should be available somewhere,
but would require some time to discover.

Another thought: The decision to release 5.1 RC happened at the same
time when MySQL bought Netfrastructure (Jim left to MySQL in February,
Monty writes about feature-freeze since February 2006). That were also
the times shortly after Oracle took over the InnoDB and MySQL
management was looking for an appropriate response on that threat. So,
it truly looks like a package of pure management decisions (get RC out
of the doors, buy Netfrastructure, etc), which at the end led to the
situation where a company with investment of less than 100 Mio. was
sold for 1 Bln. Not bad, I'd say.

Anyway, I'm quite interested to see how things evolve over time (e.g.
Monty leaving to Firebird, similar to Jim going to MySQL :))

Roman

PS. Interesting is that we have had our first RC published in May
2006, and it took us 5 RCs and 15 months to get to GA. Was it an
"premature-RC"-influenza in 2006 floating around? :)