The Trouble With Open Sores Source

Caution: technical geek-speak ahead

I have three production MySQL servers on our farm here at work, scheduled to dump their contents nightly to a backup server (which in turn gets written to a tape and taken offsite in case of catastrophe). But as it turns out, only two of the three were actually writing their backups, probably because I was using an outdated version of the administrator tools. No problem, I thought, I'll just upgrade to the newer MySQL Workbench and set up the backups from there. Having no experience with the Workbench platform, my first step was to check the internet's manual (a.k.a. Google) for some instructions, where I came up with this piece of helpful advice:

[Workbench] does not have the "Schedule" feature [for backups]. We are hoping for a community plugin to do that.

Translation: We didn't put this critical feature into our product; we're hoping our customers do that for us. That's some fine way to run a business. I can just imagine the cacophonous shriek from the *nix community if Microsoft did something like that. Why is one of the larger corporations in the open-source market (MySQL is owned by Oracle) immune from similar criticism?