In this post I will talk about release management with MySQL as example. Release management has to do with what to put in a release, how often to do a release, how to long to support a release and how to number or name the releases. The early years Today software is almost exclusively delivered over the internet, but this didn’t use to be the case. Software used to be delivered in a box that you had to buy at a physical store. These were often shrink wrapped and forced you to agree with the EULA by opening the box. The box then contained floppies, CD’s, DVD’s or any other suitable medium. There were multiple reasons why physical media were used, even when the internet arrived. One of the main limitations was bandwidth, this is also why FreeBSD, Linux, etc were sold on physical media. And one of the other reasons was that online payment wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today. Then there were also ways of copy protection that relied on physical media and/or dongles. For operating systems...