[dundee] Oracle buys Sun

[Rick Moynihan]

2009/4/21 Sean McRobbie <lug at seany.us>:
> Yeah. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing though.
>
> I seriously fear for MySQL now...
>

I'm not convinced there is a serious threat to MySQL...  Firstly
Oracle's core products are in the high end database market, so having
an offering in the lower end database market arguably makes sense from
a business perspective, as it gives them opportunities to up-sell.
They also already own the INNODB, transactional storage backend to
many MySQL installations, which they acquired in 2005.

Secondly MySQL is GPL licensed, so if Oracle kill MySQL there will
inevitably be a fork to support and develop the millions of existing
installations.  The IP surrounding fork development would, from
Oracle's perspective be muddied as the copyright on subsequent source
code would no longer be controlled by them.  Meaning that they
wouldn't be able to accept community contributions, and would
effectively effectively have squandered a billion $ asset, and led to
a potential long term competition from the fork moving up the
value/feature chain.  This isn't something any company could justify
to its stock holders.

Now that's not to say that Oracle will be good shepherds for the
project, and they will likely try to stunt MySQL's future development
in terms of features etc... However even here, they'll still have to
keep MySQL competitive in the low end in order to maintain community,
and have potential to up-sell.

This is what's great about FLOSS...  If you, as a user have an
investment or dependency on a project such as MySQL, then where with
proprietary software a company might just kill a competing product on
an acquisition, leaving you up sh*t creek without a paddle, with FLOSS
the users are far less likely to be stranded.

I'd be interested if anyone could cite any examples where large FLOSS
projects have been "successfully killed" upon acquisition, leaving no
desirable path for their users...  I certainly can't think of any off
the top of myhead...  but hey, look on the bright side if MySQL's the
first, then it'll be a great loss... but at least Stallman will know
what to do with GPL-4! ;-)

Personally I'm far more worried about the potential for Oracle to
screw with Netbeans, or abuse the Java platform by having more
influence over the Java Community Process...  This said, there's a
chance that the power shift might be a good thing...


R.