David Atkinson

7 April 2016

We now offer free community editions of our MySQL tools

In the open source world, there’s an increasing trend to offer personal or community editions of paid-for tools. There’s a damn good reason too. Many charities and educational institutions as well as individual users turn to open source software in an effort to lower costs.

The flipside is, while there’s no upfront cost, there is an ongoing maintenance cost. Which is where those paid-for tools come into the picture. Developed independently, they typically resolve niggling issues with the open source software and allow users to save time, make complicated tasks simple, and take shortcuts. (All of which sounds typically Redgate.)

Even though they work in an open source environment, these tools are often closed source, proprietary tools with an associated cost. True to the principles behind open source, however, many include free editions for personal or non-commercial use.

Now Redgate’s MySQL tools are joining them.

From today, MySQL Compare and MySQL Data Compare will have a free community edition alongside a paid-for enterprise edition. So individual users, charities, and educational institutions can enjoy all the advantages of the tools without the cost.

We’re joining companies like Microsoft which, in late 2014, open sourced its .NET software framework and released a free community edition of its integrated development environment, Visual Studio.

We’re also joining 3T, which has been offering a non-commercial edition of MongoChef, its multi-platform data browser and editor for MongoDB, from day one.

We’ll be getting the same benefits too. More users will adopt our tools and become familiar with them, we’ll get more feedback to develop them further, and if users move to SQL Server or Oracle, they’ll find some familiar tools waiting for them.

So if you want to enjoy the advantages of our MySQL tools and you’re a personal or non-commercial user, you can now do so, at no cost.