Insubordinate or honest? What should Sun do about Monty?

Matt Asay chimes in on Monty's reaction to MySQL 5.1. Calling it an "insubordinate rant," Asay criticizes Monty Widenius for his post saying that MySQL adopters should be "very cautious" about switching to MySQL 5.1 for a number of reasons, and says that Widenius ought to leave Sun.

As I've said before, dissent is important. It can be damaging, but it's also what makes open source a better model than proprietary development. Without a few canaries in the coal mine, proprietary companies will simply continue business as usual -- which includes subpar releases to meet product schedules. One of the primary reasons people give for switching to open source is quality. Remove that, and you're losing a primary reason for Sun's customers to continue using MySQL over other databases.

I do believe that companies have to have a higher level of tolerance for public criticism, even from employees, when working in the open source community. It's simply unreasonable to expect employees to stick to the company line at all times when working with contributors from other companies.

But there is a fine line between reasonable criticism and attack, and perhaps Widenius has crossed it. It should be OK for an employee to say "I disagree," when a company takes a course of action -- it's another to start poking at specific employees or teams within the company. Enumerating flaws or discussing ways to improve a release process -- privately and publicly -- are a normal part of doing business with open source projects. But poking at specific teams or people within the company, that's another story entirely.