It seems appropriate that Sweden, the original home of MySQL, should be part of the ancient Norse territories, for the MySQL open/closed code story is threatening to turn into a saga as long and as complex as Njal's.

To recap. First, came the news that MySQL was preparing to release some backup code as closed source:

Officials at Sun Microsystems, which acquired MySQL in February, confirmed that new online backup capabilities now under development will be offered only to MySQL Enterprise customers -- not to the much larger number of users of the free MySQL Community edition.

Then came the explanation from MySQL's boss, Marten Mickos:

we are contemplating a number of scenarios. And one is that it would be closed source and nobody other than us could see the source code; another is that we give the customers the source code if they like to see it, which we certainly can do; the third one is that it is GPL, we just don't ship it to other than paying customers. So there's a number of alternatives.

So what can we learn from this twisted tale?