The Percona announcement for XtraDB last December certainly looks just like any other Big Splash announcement.

Re #12, I’ve recently created a public SVN mirror at http://code.google.com/p/sphinxsearch so the code’s transparent now. Since we converted to SVN it was merely lack of time… and knowledge. Once I learned about the possibility of syncing to Google Code so easily, I pushed our repo there immediately. We still have to provide automatically tested (!) tarballs though.

Peter,

Re #15, you know the whole story, at least I told it once or twice.

Kevin,

Re #17, some companies, and I’ve a grim feeling *many* companies, will NOT actually purchase your product if it’s free, open, reliable, etc. Heard a war story about Sphinx recently. De-facto CTO approached his CEO about buying Sphinx support etc. CEO turned the initiative down with basically “it worked for free for almost a year now; why pay anything”… and that’s not really uncommon. And that’s not the only type of a war story. But that’s another story.

If stability is your main goal, forget 5.4 until it’s generally available and think of it, XtraDB and the Google patches as teasers for what’s to come. Or stick it on a non-critical slave or ten and have fun with it, reporting any bugs you find.

Sure we would appreciate any suggestions and code contributions.

We announced xtrabackup and asked for ideas on very early stage.
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/24/xtrabackup-open-source-alternative-for-innodb-hot-backup-call-for-ideas/

Thanks for a great way to put it. Indeed for Percona it was often “we do what our customer needs” approach with releasing them public. We however gradually moved to gather more people idea and do “community” development too – as soon as we were able to support it. The OurDelta and Open Database Alliance has buliding product as a goal so it is going to be much more public.

There are two things here though – public design and public release. You do not have to involve a lot of public for feature release to release it early. For example with Xtrabackup we did not publicly asked for ideas on how to create it. We just did it and released it in an early stage within idea interception.

Now speaking about consumer products – I think it is a lot about expectations and goals. You can see many Linux distribution development trees available from very early stage. In case of tree it is open for experts to participate but it is not easily downloadable so people who do not understand what this is download it use it and ruin their data.

If we’re speaking about MySQL 5.4 I do not think it would be the problem to create the tree and announce it on the development site – Press guys would not go into building and testing launchpad tree anyway. On the conference 5.4 beta could be announced to press.