It looks like it looks like there are going a lot of discussions about future of MySQL Community Binaries, see for example this post and Kaj’s clarifications.
Obviously now it grew to a lot of speculations and many comments are far from real story. It is also really interesting to watch MySQL try to balance situation of maximizing revenues and minimizing missing off community at the same time. It is moving target and balance may shift in the future one direction or another depending on how things go.
Some of confusion I guess comes from my post where I speak about recent version and so recent binaries which were not available at that point. In many cases “recent” word seems to be omitted and people are just speaking about binaries in general.
As Kaj explains now there will be official MySQL Community binaries, including Windows but they will be rarely released.
For many users running old MySQL binary is not the problem, it is however the problem if you run into the bug, which may already be fixed in newer version but binary with bugfix is not yet available. I guess having bug fixes promptly available is one of the selling points of MySQL Enterprise.
Windows build specially come into the picture as Windows users are not used to building software and most do not even have tools needed to perform the build available. Furthermore there are no vendors which will create binaries for you as happens with Linux.
The good news are – this only applies to Official binaries. I expect there would be unofficial builds popping up, we for example published our build of MySQL 5.0.33 for Linux x86-64. Scott has provided builds both for Linux i386 and Windows. I guess over next few months community will establish trusted sources of MySQL Builds and you will be able to get good builds promptly with new community releases. As long as MySQL Enterprise sources continue to be available I expect people will create builds of these as well, under different name of course.
