So basically MySQL AB *have* crippled the community edition. There is no way around this fact as the latest edition has features REMOVED that were in previous editions.
Unless you are wantonly dishonest you should remove all references on your website to this edition being not crippled. Saying that you can still do the same thing by employing other tools is not an way of saying this is not crippled. This edition is crippled by by every accepted definition of the term. What you should have done is kept the base features in the free program and added NEW features to the enterprise edition.
Here are some pages that need to change.
http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/?p=13
http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/?page_id=29
I will be emailing Sun about this (as the new owners) and the blogging community and asking them to look into it. Look at Sun's free, open source editions of Netbeans and OpenOffice (which also have an enterprise editions) and you will see what a "non-crippled, fully-featured free" edition is.
Thank you for considering this post.
Edit: By the way I do not object to your reasons for doing this - I am sure they make sense in the light of lack of resources and the need for revenue - a lot of software companies do this, but what I do object to is the continued brazen insistence that it is not crippled and the employing of weak and weasely explanations to try and convince us that it is not the case that it is crippled when it so clearly is.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2008 01:55PM by Mark Jones.